Seven Important Steps To Overcome Cart Abandonment

$18 Billion. That’s the estimated total revenue lost by online retailers to shopping cart abandonment every year.

As a digital retailer, you obviously need to do something, but what?

1. Start Measuring With Analytics

Cart abandonment is a severe plague which affects all businesses that rely on converting website visitors into buyers. Understanding its quantitative opportunity is the most important step in trying to reduce its frequency.

Start measuring the data by setting up your Google Analytics account. Alternatively, you can use a service like Paditrack to create charts that visualise your analytics data. Google Analytics can help you understand the current trends. You can also employ a specialised solution designed for your ecommerce platform to measure transactional data, like how much revenue is being left in the cart or which items are being dropped most frequently.

Those who abandon your cart are an important group of potential customers as well. They are providing a signal of buying that is far greater than any average site browser would. The cart abandoners engaged with your checkout page to some degree and showed you the items they were interested in purchasing. This is powerful knowledge. Start measuring the number of drop offs from checkout to receipt, and use your average order value to determine the revenue opportunity.

2. Email

Instead of thinking about shopping cart abandonment as a disaster for your online business, you need to change your perspective. Think of it as an opportunity to improve the experience that customers have when shopping with you and use the insight to understand what attracts your customers.

The most effective way to re-engage with prospective customers who abandon your cart is by sending them an introductory email. These campaigns are referred to as cart abandonment emails, abandoned cart emails, cart reminders, or cart follow ups.

3. Timing & Frequency

When should you send an email after a customer has abandoned a cart on your site? Recent study from MIT has revealed a significantly lower engagement rate for outreach that occurs more than one hour after the first-touch. The data indicates that your chances of re-engaging a lead drop by as much as ten times if you follow up more than an hour after your first interaction with them.

Frequency or the number of follow-up emails you send depends on the strength of your offer. If you’re delivering a simple reminder, sending one email at the most is recommended. Beyond that, you’re not providing any additional value to the customer and will negatively impact your brand by not respecting their inbox.

4. The Offers

A more favourable approach is to develop an offer that is truly unique and designed specifically to engage cart abandoners. Once you start gathering qualitative feedback about what’s causing people to abandon in the first place, you’ll quickly start to see trends that can be used to craft a compelling offer.

Using strong, unique offers to re-engage cart abandoners is good for the simple reason: these customers are exhibiting the highest levels of buying intent you could ask for. Many times, they should need a bit of attention to convert.

However, you don’t want to “teach” your customers to abandon on purpose just to obtain a discount. It’s important to set a suppression window of 30-60 days for customers who have abandoned in the past or who have converted as a result of a previous abandonment campaign. Setting these covers gives you confidence that your follow up is delivered only to those customers who abandoned with non-purposeful intent. This gives you freedom to get creative with your offer.

There are three elements in a solid offer:

1. Exclusivity
2. Scarcity
3. Urgency

5. Mobile

According to internal analytics, 49% of the remarketing emails are opened on a mobile device, mostly in Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Apple iPad. Two years ago, that number was 26%. The data suggests that almost half of all emails are opened on mobile.

There has been a fundamental shift in how people consume their email and it’s rapidly moving away from larger screens. You can anticipate this in three ways:

• Pay close attention to your mobile experience, specifically how your emails render on mobile devices.
• User sessions should regenerate cross device. It’s highly likely that customers are consuming your cart abandonment emails on a device different than the one they originally abandoned on.
• Your cart/checkout process must be useable on a mobile device. Users probably won’t convert on mobile, but the experience shouldn’t be a negative one.

6. Specialisation

Not all abandoned carts are created equal. For most retailers, there are four segments to consider when delivering email to cart abandoners. Take a look at each group with care and create a specialised campaign:

• Most valuable customers. This category consists of customers who order most frequently and have higher average order values when compared to your entire base of customers.
• High value orders. These are particularly high value orders when compared to your normal average order value.
• Carts containing specific brands/product categories. Many times you’ll have more room in terms of margin on specific brands or product categories. This is an opportunity to make a more aggressive offer if there is room from a margin perspective.
• Low value orders. For low value orders,you can offer a “threshold” discount. To bring up average order value, you could consider offering free shipping or a small promotion if the customer returns and completes an order that is over a certain amount.

Now you have delivered the right offers, to the customers, at the right time. The last step is the one you don’t hear about very often.

7. Humour

Cart abandonment emails are the perfect opportunity to make your customers laugh. After all, emailing someone about abandoning an imaginary cart is already a pretty comical idea. By putting funny lines into the copy and photography used in your abandonment campaign, you are not only humanising your brand, but you also building a strong connection with customers that they will remember.

Ann Handley of MarketingProfs summarised this approach perfectly:

“Humour is effective in marketing because it humanises and surprises. You can play it straight and write a blog post that clearly and emphatically states how your computer router can handle up to 6.4 terabits of data. Alternatively, you can get the point across and create something relatable, charming and (of course!) shareable.”