Over 77% of shoppers abandon cart while shopping online. Shoppers abandon cart for a number of reasons. They could be just browsing, price comparing, surprise charges at checkout, or forgot to complete their purchase. As a store owner, it’s your responsibility to help minimize the number of abandoned carts and to recover as many as possible. An abandoned cart doesn’t signal the end of the customer-store relationship. Even if a customer doesn’t provide you with their email address, you can still reach out to them to recover their cart through retargeting ads or push notifications.
Abandoned Cart Example: Daily Steals works to recover abandoned carts with email marketing. Their subject reads ‘We saved your cart for you’ which serves as a gentle reminder that you abandoned your cart. The language they use makes it seem like they’ve done you, the customer, a favor by ‘saving’ your cart. When a customer opens their email up, there’s a strong red block with white text that reads ‘There’s something in your cart’ in all caps capturing strong attention. There’s a picture of the product to help remind you of what it was you abandoned. In the same strong red, there’s a call to action button that reads ‘Return to Checkout’.
Tips to Lower Your Abandoned Cart Rate:
You need to know why your customer abandoned. If you don’t offer free shipping, are your shipping costs too high? If so, you might need to change your product pricing to add free shipping or lower your shipping rate. Do people from the same country always abandon? Or maybe you had higher than usual cart abandonments for a couple days and need to fix your settings. For example, if you remove an abandoned cart recovery app from your store it can prevent customers from checking out. It was one of the most expensive mistakes we’ve ever made. So be sure to change your settings if you remove an app.
Avoid including hidden costs in your checkout. For example, if a customer sees a price as $29.99, they’ll be disappointed to find out that it ends up costing more with tax and shipping costs added. This works for promotions too. Sometimes brands will have a promotion telling everyone that they offer free shipping today only. However, when a customer checks out they realize that the free shipping offer excludes their country or region. Issues like this can result in cart abandonment.
When sending abandoned cart emails, keep the focus on the abandoned cart recovery. Have one clear call-to-action(CTA) to complete their purchase. Avoid having links to social media buttons or attention grabbing colors on anything other than the CTA.
Always have abandoned cart campaigns running. Whether it’s a retargeting ad that you constantly pay to recover your add to carts or an automated abandoned cart email customers get sent out soon after abandonment, you need to make sure that the campaigns don’t stop. It may cost money to have these campaigns run but they can also be profitable.
If you’re sending out abandoned cart emails, constantly split test to improve the conversion. From my personal experience, Facebook retargeting ads work best on my store. However, if you’re starting out and don’t have enough room in your budget to invest in even more Facebook ads, then you need to invest your time. The time investment will be on creating an abandoned cart email that works. It’s not easy. I’ve created a few highly profitable email campaigns but always struggled at converting abandoned carts via email.
That said, if you do have the budget, invest in Facebook retargeting ads. They’re able to convert customers who don’t even fill out their email on the checkout page. That means you’re able to reach even more people with your retargeting campaigns. Be sure to check out our retargeting section.
Offer a small first-time customer discount. I usually start with a 10% discount. However, the highest I’ll go is 15%. Don’t offer the 15% discount to every customer. Offer it only to customers with certain shopping cart values. For example, if a customer has $75 in their cart and your average order value on your store is around $30, you might offer a 15% discount because they’ve spent more than the average user. Keep in mind that offering discounts can cause customers to expect them every time. Use them sparingly.
If running a Facebook retargeting ad, you’ll want the picture to be of the product. But remember to also include a product picture in your emails as well so customers can remember how much they love the look of the product or at minimum trigger the memory of why they wanted to buy it.
On your last abandoned cart email to your customer, use scarcity and urgency. Let the customer know that there are only a few items left. You might even use a countdown timer in your email to let them know when your discount code offer expires. Avoid giving the same discount code to everyone because then it won’t expire. If you have a unique generated discount code per customer, the customer will see that their offer did expire. Then, they’ll know they need to act fast in the future.
Personalize the experience. From showing the exact product they’ve abandoned to using their name in an email, customers are more likely to respond favorably with personalization. Telling a customer they’ve abandoned a product without showing it doesn’t drive the same level of urgency. Using a customer’s’ name shows that the email or ad is personalized specifically to that person.
Abandoned Cart Tools:
Kit can be used as an abandoned cart recovery app through its retargeting function. When a customer adds an item to their cart and abandons, using the Shoelace app within Kit allows you to reach customers even if they haven’t given you their email. The app is able to recover more abandoned carts than the average abandoned cart email.
Recart is the only app that allows you to send retargeting campaigns via Facebook Messenger. However, you can also use the app to retarget with push notifications.
Abandoned Cart Reminder sends customers an abandoned cart recovery message when your store’s browser tab isn’t active. It helps encourage customers to go back to the page to complete their purchase.
PushOwl is a push notifications app that can help with abandoned cart recovery. Customers need to agree to push notifications when the pop-up appears on their first visit. Then, if the customer abandons their cart, they’ll receive push notifications to complete their purchase. No email address needed!
Abandoned Cart Resources:
How to Recover Abandoned Carts Easily details what an abandoned cart is, why you should recover them and how to recover abandoned carts. It also talks about the steps you can take to lower your abandoned cart rate.
11 Smart Tactics to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment shows you how you can find where the issue that’s causing cart abandonment. It also mentions the importance of limiting surprises at checkout, offering free shipping and other great abandoned cart tactics.