When a customer abandons a shopping cart on your ecommerce store, you can do a number of marketing actions that remind your customer of the product they ended up not buying. You can retarget them by having your ads displayed when they search on Google next, or in their social media feeds. You need to add some code from Google and Facebook to your site to enable this automatic retargeting. If you have their email address, you can send them reminder mails in an automated series of mails. Another direct way to reach way to customers who have abandoned carts, even without having their mail addresses, is to enable notifications to their mobiles and desktops. Most importantly, you can also get your messaging across when there is a hint that the customer might abandon the cart or might have moved on to other browser tabs. Let us first take a look at the data on cart abandonment.
The big number in terms of percentages of people who abandon carts is estimated at 60 to 70 percent. One of the focus areas to avoid cart abandonment is to ensure that your products have all details presented to the customer including multiple photos. This will make your customers feel fully confident about the product they are buying as they have all information on it. Reviews on the site and in social media are a good way of helping your customers make their decision to buy your products, as is data on how many people have purchased the product.
Why are carts abandoned
BigCommerce has worked out the numbers with regard to why people abandon carts. About 25 percent of those who abandon carts do so when they see the total price. Other reasons included not wanting to create an account, a long checkout process, not wanting to provide credit card information etc. If you are able to redress these issues and win back the customer’s decision to buy, you have a good pipeline of sales. For, BigComerce says that over 40 percent of those who abandon carts do so for one of these reasons while the remaining 60 percent never had the intent to buy.
The BigCommerce data is sourced from the Baymard Institute. According to data from the Institute, an ideal checkout form must have seven to eight fields. A crucial aspect is pointed out by MonsterInsights with regard to reducing the navigation from shop to cart which is to keep the cart visible on every page as the customer goes about adding products to cart.
Step 1 - Make your move before the customer moves away
As the first step, identify the moments when you can send the reminder. The first point of action is even before the customer has moved away from the page. These are when the customers moves the mouse to ‘close’ the tab or when the mouse moves away from the active area of the page i.e., towards the search bar in the browser window. There are popups that get activated when exit-intent is detected. Omniconvert’s exit popup has features such as presentation of the popup only to certain customers and not all customers such as those form a location or only to new customers. With mobiles, wherein mouse tracking is not possible, Omniconvert provides triggering on scroll, on click or delayed after a few seconds. You can conduct split tests and personalization experiments on Omniconvert.
OptinMonster has popup-personalization features such as addressing your customer by referencing the referral source that brought the customer to your site. Customers can also be provided choices with regard to what they might be interested in so as to make the popup more personalized towards the range of interests of your customers. With regard to giving customers who might be in a bit of a hurry, OptinMonster suggests to offer an offer for a limited time so that they are motivated to return later and buy the product.
Moving on to mails sent after abandonment, Prestashop says the faster the better and recommends the mail to be sent 20 minutes after abandonment. In formulating your email response to win back the customer, Bigcommerce recommends to focus on one product among the products in the abandoned cart. Go for the product which has the highest rating by other customers and focus on it in the email. It is recommended to focus on that product in the mail rather than focus on your brand.
Oberlo picks up from the point that BigCommerce made, of focusing the mail just on one product. Oberlo says that you should avoid having any links to social media too in the mail as the focus must entirely be on the cart and the product. Oberlo recommends not to have any bright colors anywhere else in the mail body than on the message about the cart. You need to have a picture of the product in the mail. Freshrelevance says the email subject lines must be clear and perfectly describing what the mail is about and also that you need to ensure that the receiver and make out easily who the mail is from. These two optimizations will ensure that your mails have a high percentage of open rates. Check out the process to set up an automated email series with MailChimp.
Step 2 - After creating the mail template, make variations and put them through split testing to arrive at the best possible Call-To-Action.
This is pretty self expanatory. Once you’ve stablished the Operating procedures and steps to start churning emails, make sure you’re testing several variation of it to make sure you’re sending the right message
Step 3 - Keep discounts as a rare offering
and not a regular offering on your cart abandonment mails. Oberlo says that you need to compare the cart with your Average Order Value and offer discounts to carts that are much higher in value than your AOV. A 10 to 15 percent discount is what Oberlo recommends.
Step 4 - Impart a sense of time
For the offer you have given, in the last (third) mail you send on day 2, with the first mail being sent right after abandonment and the second one being sent after 24 hours. Oberlo suggests using a countdown timer in the third mail so that there is a clear picture of how long the offer can be claimed and the cart retrieved. In order to send discount codes that expire, you need to generate unique codes for each customer as opposed to sending the same code to everyone.
Step 5 - Retarget
If the customer has not provided their email before abandoning the cart, then you can retarget them with Facebook and Google. Recart is an App that sends messages on Facebook Messenger as is Abandoned Cart Messenger by Booster Apps.
Few more Parting Tips
Now, let us take a look at some steps that you can take to prevent cart abandonment in the first place, building up from the list of reasons for abandonment that we saw in the data presented by BigCommerce. These are the foundational elements of having an ecommerce store that is easy to use and one which is secure too.
Deploy Trust Badges in your Checkout page so that your customers go through the process without any worries on their mind.
- Do not make the opening of an account a high priority and surely not up front even before the customer has begun selecting a product. Push the request to open an account as a very diplomatic request and not as a compulsory one and have the option to continue making the purchase as a guest without having to open an account. Shopify says that you need to give a reason/advantage for your customers to open an account such as being able to track order or getting exclusive discounts.
When customers are in the process of adding items to their cart, show them how much they are saving so that they will not develop any last-minute second thoughts.
Do not provide misleading pricing or shipping costs and if possible, deliver free shipping. Other dont’s include not having a satisfactory return policy while a compulsory Do is to have all popular payment gateways.
Few other Apps we Recommend you to check out
Mageworx for Magento provides you with detailed data on sent mails and cart recoveries such as the time a cart was abandoned and when it was recovered and the status of all sent mails. You can set rules for customer groups
Abandoned Cart Tracking plugin for WooCommerce provides data on Abandoned Products List, Guest users who have abandoned and logged in users who have abandoned.
Abandoned Cart Reminder by SpurIT for Shopify works by getting the idle tab of your store to blink so as to bring your customer back to your store from other browsing that they may have moved on to.
PushOwl Web Push Notifications for Shopify is an automated tool which adds product images to each notification. Other automation features of the app include ‘back in stock’ and ‘price drop.’
