Have you ever been online shopping, filled a cart with products, typed in all your information and then decided that you didn’t want to spare the extra shipping costs or just left the checkout process for some reason? If so, you’re one of 70% of shoppers who regularly abandon their carts. We’re only human, our minds change frequently, and it’s hard to spend money — especially if we feel like we don’t need to. So, it makes sense that abandoned carts are common. Unfortunately for businesses, abandoned carts mean that people aren’t buying their products. Luckily, you can use abandoned cart campaigns to increase your sales. Here’s how.
Utilizing an abandoned cart campaign is one of the many approaches used for targeting customers on their sales funnel journey. This sales / marketing strategy focuses on drawing your customer back to eCommerce’s ultimate goal: to purchase a product; the process of calling back potential clients is called remarketing.
Abandoned Cart Remarketing
Abandoned cart remarketing is exactly what it sounds like. You are re-marketing to the customer after they abandon their cart, usually in the form of a follow-up email campaign. This is what it tends to look like:
- Your customer is shopping on your website and fills up their cart.
- At some point during their shopping experience, before they leave your site, they enter their email.
- The customer gets to checkout, but for one reason or another, doesn’t complete the purchase and leaves the site.
- After a predetermined time period of your choice, the cart is deemed inactive or abandoned in your system.
- This triggers a communication, in the form of an email, to the shopper, reminding them of their cart.
- Hopefully, this communication prompts them to return and make the purchase.
Easy enough, right? The most important part of this that you need to remember is: you must get their email before they leave the website or this strategy does not work. Think about how and when to strategically ask the shopper for their information. You don’t want to randomly interrupt their shopping process, but you can’t do it too late either.
Here’s some tips to retrieve email addresses:
- Pop-up offering a discount in exchange for a newsletter sign-up
- Create a free account with an email
- Online chat with form prior to chatting that asks for name and email
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Formulate An AutomationAbandoned Cart Campaign Strategies
The strategies for your campaign are dependent on your business and target audience. Review your other campaign analytics to figure out what works best for you. For example, if your customers tend to respond to the second email you send them during your regular campaigns, opt to send two follow-up emails.
Another creative strategy for your abandoned cart campaigns is to include some sort of promotion in the follow-up email. There are a variety of reasons that shoppers leave their carts unpurchased. The number one reason why users abandon their cart is that the extra costs are too high. Other reasons include deciding that they don’t need the items or perhaps they simply cannot find their credit card. So, remove this barrier for them through a free shipping promo in your follow-up email.
Knowing the reasons why your customers abandon their carts will help you properly craft your campaigns. If you’re not checking this data, implement a tool like Google Analytics so you can really get to know how your customers use your site.
And there you have it! Test out different campaigns and strategies to see what works best for you and your company. Once you figure it out, you’ll be on your way to generating revenue from your abandoned cart campaigns instead of leaving them, well, abandoned.
