So, you’ve recently launched your online store, you’re getting rave reviews from bloggers, and are giddy watching the number of unique visitors grow. Life is good until you realize that the majority of those customers have abandoned cart issues. They are not completing that final necessary transaction which happens to be your livelihood. In fact, nearly 69% of all e-commerce visitors abandon their shopping cart.
What if you could cash in on 5%-15% of those sales? Let’s take a look at a few numbers to put it into perspective:
With an abandoned cart recovery rate of only 6%, or 40 additional orders, that’s a 12.5% increase in sales per month.
Sounds pretty good, right? Here are the top 10 ways to bring abandoned cart rates down and recover lost revenue:
1. Automatically send abandoned cart email #1.
There are tons of reasons why someone abandons their cart…the doorbell rings, the teapot whistles, or perhaps complete sticker shock sets in when they see that the shipping costs are more than the product price! Their intentions to buy may have been spot on, but the timing was off.
With platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify, you can set up emails to automatically remind them of what they have forgotten (but make sure to do it quickly). A sizable 42% of e-commerce site purchases are made within the first hour on the site.
The next spike in conversions happens almost exactly 24 hours after their initial visit…the perfect time to send the second email.
2. Use attention-grabbing subject lines.
According to the Radicati Group, consumers receive close to 90 emails from businesses per day. That number doesn’t include personal or work emails so an attention-grabbing subject line is a must.
Here are four tactics to help you write awesome subject lines and increase your recovery rate:
- Troubleshoot. Try this: Oops…Was there a problem checking out?
- Make it personal. Try this: We’re holding Kate Spade’s Clorinda Sandals just for you – or – Hi Tahlia, you deserve these shoes!
- Call to Action. Try this: Get Kate Spade’s Clorinda Sandals Now!
- Use Humor. Take note from ModCloth’s unique example: Warning: Unattended items in your bag may be eaten by gnomes.
3. Be helpful and friendly (not pushy).
Check out this example from ModCloth:
ModCloth greets their customers with “Hi Modlover,” and has a pop quiz to engage them about what they left behind. Next, they give customers “a hint” and lead them to the product images with a simple arrow. Their copy is not overly pushy, just helpful and fun.
4. Show an image of the forgotten product.
Chances are your customer may have been searching several sites for “striped dress” and thrown in the towel at 11:35pm in order to get enough zzz’s for the night. Their favorites from your ecommerce store may still be sitting in their cart, so show them what they planned to purchase.
In ModCloth’s example above, an image of the two forgotten products is shown because the brain can process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. A quick visual shows them what they were already dreaming about and leads to higher conversion rates.
5. Make your call to action loud and clear.
Send your customers their preserved cart with a clear call to action. Use either a permalink like Amazon, or a button that says “Go to Your Shopping Bag” or “Proceed to Checkout.”
Make sure to use a pop of color and place buttons in a prominent location (don’t make them hunt for it!). This will help them complete the transaction easily and you’ll get those customers back.
6. Apply an automatic discount for email #2.
Check out this example from World Market:
Chances are, most customers abandon their cart because the final price was more than expected.
Cost Plus World Market set out to combat this issue by enticing customers with a 10% off discount that they can use online or in the store. This small incentive may be all they need to complete the purchase. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce make this easy to do with their automatic discount to an abandoned checkout email.
7. Make it time sensitive.
Another way to increase sales is to add a time limit to the discount and/or product. Create a sense of urgency and limit your discount to a certain amount of days or even hours. Here’s a good example from Levi’s:
Not only did Levi’s put a time limit on this offer, they added the discount to it as well.
8. To send or not to send the third email?
Most of our research on sending a third email has had very little return. Getting results will depend on your target audience and the price point of your products.
For the third email, you could consider sending a simple 1-2 question survey as to why they didn’t purchase from you. This will help you gain valuable feedback and start to identify trends with what is or isn’t working for your customers.
Whether you decided to send the third email or not, make sure to test the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to see what works best for your audience.
9. Test and refine.
The only way to truly understand what makes your customers tick is to A/B test your ideas. Check out Optimizely to test your specific campaign elements and remove subjectivity from the equation.
Other tips for successful A/B testing include:
- Test long enough to see accurate results: The tortoise may come from behind to beat the hare, so don’t pull your test until enough people have actually entered the race.
- Test a strong hypothesis: A 360-degree product image will be more engaging for customers than a static image, and therefore, will drive more sales.
- Pay attention to external factors: Current events, holidays, even the weather can have an effect on the success of your campaign.
- Keep testing: Only one out of eight A/B tests will drive significant change, so keep at it and you will see results.
10. Get Started.
HOW WE TRIPLED ECOMMERCE REVENUE IN 18 MONTHS
By capitalizing on conversion-centric email marketing, social media, online giveaways, and abandoned cart emails, we significantly increased brand loyalty, awareness, and most importantly—eCommerce sales.
There are several ways to get started on the road to abandoned cart recovery. Check out these helpful tools and you’ll be on your way:
- The Abandoned Cart Saver: For BigCommerce users, customize emails and combine them easily with coupon codes to seal the deal.
- Abandoned Aid: For Shopify users, this app is easy to set up and gives you real-time order analysis technology right out of the gate.
- Abandoned Cart Lite: This easy-to-use plugin for WooCommerce users includes images of products left behind and allows users to recover their cart in a single click.
As you can see, there are several simple ways to use abandoned cart emails to convert potential buyers into loyal customers and increase sales (quickly!).
Too busy to take this on right now? Check it off your list and contact us at Red Rokk. We’ll take care of it for you!
What other great tips have you used to recover abandoned carts and increase online sales?
