An abandoned cart is a recurring nightmare for e-commerce businesses - one of the biggest leaks in their sales and marketing funnel is shoppers who add products to their cart, but then abandon them at checkout.
This is especially hard to swallow because businesses spend a lot of money to attract customers, gain their attention and bring them to their carts.
This is not news though, more than 70% of shoppers will abandon carts at checkout. Cart abandonment becomes an important component of marketing and sales strategies for e-commerce.
This article covers everything you need to know about abandoned carts, recovery strategies, and creating your cart abandonment plan.
Table of contents
- What is an abandoned cart?
- Why do shoppers abandon their carts?
- Recovery strategies for shopping cart abandonment
- Can emails salvage abandoned shopping carts?
- Plan an abandoned cart email strategy for your e-commerce business
- Create an abandoned cart workflow with Mailmodo
What is an abandoned cart?
E-commerce is abuzz with visitors. Some lurk, some browse, some show interest and some fulfill purchases. Apps and web platforms that offer products and services have shopping carts built into their interface into which users can add items and take desired actions of completing purchases.
But many items that enter the shopping cart and never make it through to the transaction stage, this is labeled ‘abandoned cart’. Typically, the shopping cart abandonment rate that most online retailers face is somewhere between the range of 60-80%, and even a highly optimized process of checkout faces shopping cart abandonment of up to 20%.
Why do shoppers abandon their carts?
There are a host of reasons why users tend to abandon shopping carts, ranging from trusting the e-commerce provider to simply becoming distracted. It is important to know the way to close your sales, here are some top reasons.
Trustworthiness: Many users are afraid of providing financial information and credit card details online on websites that don’t look secure enough. To create trust, ensure your online presence contains a secure checkout page, enough information about a return/refund/cancellation policy, grievance redressal mechanisms, and links to social media channels to create a more friendly and human presence for your business.
Shipping and other hidden costs: Oftentimes, users are discouraged from taking their purchase forward on discovering hidden costs such as shipping and taxes over and above the total cost price of their purchase. To avoid this situation, many e-commerce retailers offer coupons and discounts on the checkout page itself to keep users engaged.
Complex interface: Online shoppers have a very short attention span - this means platforms need to up their interface game and make the entire process of navigation through to the cart extremely easy for users. Complex sites make it difficult for users to retain attention, and they tend to discard their shopping carts and leave.
Recovery strategies for shopping cart abandonment
If you’re keen on optimizing the shopping cart experience to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate, you need to deal with ways of recovering users. Cart recovery targets users such as those that have:
Abandoned their shopping carts
Left the website
Registered on the website
Have the app but don’t use it
To grab consumer attention long after it’s gone is a tough task, but can be achieved through two significant modes of cart recovery.
Email marketing: Most users typically enter their email and contact details on registering to a website, before browsing or purchasing items. This ensures that the businesses receive their email addresses, and they get added to your database. This creates a potential opportunity to bring a cart abandoner back by sending focused and hyper-personalized emails directly to their inbox.
Retargeting: Targeting users via ads is a great way to grab the attention of those consumers who haven’t left their emails in your database.
Can emails salvage abandoned shopping carts?
Abandoned cart emails are one of the tenets of e-commerce. They act as reminders or follow-ups to users that have left their shopping carts midway without purchasing products. Abandoned cart emails when done right directly facilitate an increase in overall business profitability and ROI of marketing expenditure. However, the challenge lies in being distinguishable in a customer’s inbox.
Customers are impressionable - so you’ve got to make the right impressions. Using email marketing is an excellent way to send abandoned shopping cart emails. You could consider including the following in your emails.
Hyper personalization
To ensure open rates, most marketers personalize their abandoned cart emails. A great way to do this is to share images of the products the user has left behind in their cart, including the description, price, and any other relevant information. Another way to further personalize the email, make it more dynamic and close the loop, is to embed purchase buttons within the email body itself so that the customer does not need to visit the app or web platform to complete the checkout process.
Influence via ratings
Ratings and reviews go a long way in helping customers determine whether they should go ahead with the checkout process. To target users, send emails that comprise customer ratings, reviews, and success stories associated with the products that are lying dormant in the user’s abandoned shopping cart. You’ll be surprised at how many users open these emails, and take desired actions.
Focus on individual products
Your abandoned cart emails need not contain information on the myriad products left behind - you can even highlight an individual product and list out its benefits to help the user understand how the product can add value.
It’s raining offers
Another approach to entice users would be by sharing information regarding a product’s price drop, associated promos, or offers. This way, customers could be inclined towards returning to their abandoned carts and feeling excited about saving money.
Plan an abandoned cart email strategy for your e-commerce business
It’s easy to get creative with emails and connect with people to enable them to convert their abandoned carts into purchases that help businesses increase their sales targets. When planning an abandoned cart email strategy, keep in mind the following.
Strong subject lines
One of the only ways to ensure high open rates is to have a strong subject line. If your subject line isn’t powerful, your creative abandoned cart email effort will be futile. To ensure engagement and sales potential, make sure that your subject line is direct, personalized, and concise. Many marketers use tactics such as creating an urgent tone in their subject line to create a sense of excitement or using emojis to add a friendly touch.
Social media proof
Most users want to deal with businesses that have a friendly appearance and can be cross-checked. Social media channels are the best place to increase user engagement, give potential leads and customers a chance to check out products and product use, and give users a sense of security offered. Include links to social media channels in your emails.
Timing is everything
Creating an abandoned cart email journey is key. Say, it’s been over five days that a user has abandoned their shopping cart, what’s the point in sending an email long after the user has forgotten about their cart, or made the purchase elsewhere? To avoid delays in sharing emails, create email journeys for abandoned carts.
Create an abandoned cart workflow with Mailmodo
Mailmodo helps businesses trigger automated emails through workflows that track user behavior and send out emails depending on a user’s behavior and journey.
Try Mailmodo today by creating personalized emails to target shopping cart abandoners, in your journey to boost sales, retain customers, and generate revenue.
