This guest post comes from Arun Sivashankaran, Chief Optimizer at FunnelEnvy, a conversion optimization, A/B testing and analytics consulting service provider.
It is a continuation of last week’s post, 8 Ways to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates, and it focuses on recovering abandoned carts.
Even when customers leave online shopping carts, it’s in your best interests to recover and convert these shoppers. Implementing an abandoned cart recovery program makes a dramatic difference in your bottom line.
So what steps can you take to encourage customers to complete the order process even after they’ve left it?
1. Make it easy to save their cart or wishlist for later
Most customers don’t purchase the first time they visit a website, and many abandoned-cart shoppers intend to purchase the product eventually.
You can encourage them to return to the checkout process by allowing them to save their cart or wishlist. Occasional emails reminding them of their saved items help them remember the products they wanted and make you seem like a friendly, helpful, trustworthy resource they want to buy from.
2. Enable retargeting to get their attention again
The more often a consumer sees your brand messages, the more likely they are to buy from you. When you enable retargeting, pay special attention to recency – how soon after abandoning your cart the shopper sees your ads – and frequency – how often they see your marketing. Too much is annoying, but not often or recent enough and they’ll forget their interest in your product. Constantly test and measure to find the ideal mix of recency and frequency.
3. Craft a strong abandonment recovery email marketing campaign
Email is one of the best ways to recover abandoned shopping carts. While you’ll definitely need to test to determine what makes a recovery campaign successful, such as if you should use one email or a sequence of them, here are some tips to keep in mind for all recovery email marketing:
- Send the first email within 24 hours of cart abandonment
- Include product info, like images, ratings, and a link to return to the cart
- Offer personal interaction with a phone number or live chat
- Consider sweetening the deal with a discount or bonus
- Remind customers of your guarantee, shipping/return policies, loyalty benefits and other customer satisfaction perks
Don’t take my word for it!
The above are suggestions, but every ecommerce site, customer and market is different. You need to test these elements and any other ideas you have to understand what works for you, and how to get the biggest return on your investment.
Tests and measurements are critical to find out what’s working, what’s not, and how your latest tweaks compare to older versions. Always be testing. That’s the best way to increase conversions, reduce abandonment rates, and ultimately give your customers exactly what they’re looking for.
Keystone
While shopping cart abandonment costs your business much needed money, learning how to recover abandoned carts can help you drive revenue to increase your bottom line.
There’s still time to drive more Q4 revenue!
Download this guide to read our 5 conversion rate optimization pro tips.
