28 Feb
Many would-be shoppers abandoned their carts for a variety of reasons. Many people are just browsing and comparing costs for different products. Some are put off by unexpectedly high shipping fees, and others run into technical problems or don’t trust the site they’re using with their payment details.
Almost 3 out of 4 shoppers abandon their cart before reaching the checkout (the exact rate for cart abandonment at the time of writing this article is 69.57%). However, abandoned carts aren’t necessarily lost sales. They are, in fact, potential sales.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is all about connecting with people who have already interacted with your Shopify website. In this case, we’re talking about connecting with those that have left items in their cart.
As part of a remarketing campaign, you can send a range of abandoned cart reminders to would-be shoppers, with an added incentive (like a special discount, free shipping or a free gift) to tempt them back to your store.
Abandoned cart reminders should be creative, catchy, and sent at a time when your would-be shopper is likely to take action. Use an omnichannel marketing approach for the best results.
What is omnichannel?
Omnichannel, is a lead nurturing and user engagement approach in which a company gives access to their products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices.
Instead of only offering support on its desktop website, for example, a company would offer support through Facebook Messenger, live chat, email, and phone. Adopting an omni-channel approach in your marketing, sales, and service strategies has plenty of benefits. The advantages include:
1. Greater reach
With an omni-channel retail, marketing, or service strategy in place, you’ll be reaching your customers where they are. They no longer have to search and search to find you. No matter where they are, your team or your products are only a click, an email, a direct message, or a phone call away.
2. Increased profits
If and when your prospects are ready to buy, they’ll find it much easier to make a purchase if they can find your product on multiple platforms and channels. Offering a multi-channel retail experience also ensures it’s easier for them to purchase from you again or renew their subscriptions, securing recurring revenue.
3. Boosted customer satisfaction
Your customers will be happier in the long term if they feel they have several methods to reach your customer service and sales teams. Or if they can purchase your product easily regardless of their device or preferred platform. Customer satisfaction is the key to reducing customer churn and keeping them returning to you for their needs.
What is shopping cart abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment is when a potential customer starts a check out process for an online order but drops out of the process before completing the purchase. Any item that enters the shopping cart but never makes it through the transaction is considered to be “abandoned” by the shopper. Shopping cart abandonment is an important aspect of the online shopping process to which retailers pay careful attention.
Shopping cart abandonment rate is calculated by dividing the total number of completed transactions by the total number of transactions that were initiated. This rate will identify what percentage of a site’s users signal purchase intent by adding an item to the cart, but don’t complete the purchase.
The shopping cart abandonment rate is an important metric for ecommerce sites to keep track of because a high abandonment rate could signal a poor user experience or broken sales funnel. Reducing shopping cart abandonment leads directly to more sales and revenue, so optimizing the checkout flow is a core area of focus for many online retailers.
Abandoned carts through omnichannel marketing
A single channel approach is where you’d communicate with your subscribers via one channel only. So, in this case of abandoned cart issues, you might decide to send your would-be shoppers an email, reminding them to complete their purchase.
While emails are a great way of communicating, they’re not always that effective as a stand-alone marketing activity. Email open rates are around 20%, which means that 80% of emails get ignored. With that said, abandoned cart emails do fare better than regular email campaigns (here are some handy tips on what you could include).
The thing about abandoned cart reminders is that they must be sent at the right time when your products are fresh in your subscriber’s mind, for the best results. Using email alone for abandoned cart alerts isn’t advisable because those people that do open and read them might do so later when they have more time (seeing as marketing emails aren’t known for being all that short — when was the last time you received one with just a couple of lines?).
Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, uses several marketing channels (for example, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and web push notifications) to help you create a seamless customer experience and meet your customers wherever they are.
By using an omnichannel approach, you can tempt shoppers back to your store not just with an incentive sent to their email inbox, but also directly to their phone as a text, through a web browser push notification on their desktop, and with an additional reminder through Messenger.
With omnichannel marketing, your customer analytics and marketing channels are integrated. This means you can begin to understand your customer’s spending behavior and learn how they respond and interact with your communications.
There are Shopify apps available to help you bring back customers to your store through omnichannel marketing. One notable app is Firepush, an all-in-one omnichannel marketing solution for Shopify stores. Through this app, you can send promotional messages to your subscribers automatically, across all channels.
1. SMS marketing
Text messages receive an incredible open rate of 98%, making SMS one of the most successful marketing channels around right now! Many people are willing to interact with text messages because a) they’re short, b) they usually get noticed thanks to some sort of “ping” and c) they’re instantly visible on a phone. It’s practically second nature to click on a text and scan it.
The average conversion rate for sending abandoned cart reminders by SMS is 0.87%, while general SMS promotional campaigns receive a 0.27% average conversion rate, according to data from Firepush.
2. Facebook Messenger
This is another very effective marketing channel. More and more businesses are leveraging Messenger because it’s a social platform used by 1.3 billion people every single month. This is where a large proportion of your customers are hanging out — not just on their mobile devices, but also via their desktop too.
Tobi is an app for Shopify stores that gives you completely free Messenger notifications, so it’s well worth a look. Especially since Firepush data reports that the average conversion rate for abandoned cart reminders sent through Messenger is just over 2%.
3. Web push notifications
Web browser push notifications are short, easily digestible messages that are delivered through a subscriber’s browser, straight to their desktop or mobile device. The notifications, when clicked on, will send the subscriber to another URL — your store.
Web push notifications can help to boost conversions, by as much as 1.7%. You can send all sorts of marketing messages, such as abandoned cart reminders, welcome greetings, special offers, delivery updates, price drop alerts and more.
Omnichannel marketing is best for reducing abandoned carts
Omnichannel marketing helps you cast your net wider and expands your reach. It gets your store and products firmly on your subscribers’ radars. You can leverage omnichannel marketing to help win back would-be shoppers to your Shopify store using a range of abandoned cart alerts across all marketing channels.
As with all marketing activities, you should undertake evaluation every so often to check how your abandoned cart reminders are performing and which channels your subscribers are interacting with the most.
Ways to reduce cart abandonment
Now we’ve explored how remarketing and an omnichannel approach can drive shoppers back to your store, let’s consider how you can reduce the number of shoppers abandoning their carts in the first place.
1. Be upfront about your shipping costs
Hidden shipping costs are one of the primary reasons behind cart abandonment. There’s nothing worse than finding a great deal on a product, only to see the price double at the checkout because of a high shipping fee.
Tackle this by standardizing your shipping options, so that you have a flat fee for certain types of items. You could include your shipping fees as extra information on your product pages so that they’re clearly visible.
2. Offer free shipping
Free shipping can be a smart marketing technique to help you seal the deal with customers who are already interested in your products. You might want to consider setting a minimum purchase amount or only offer free shipping on specific products or during shopping holidays.
Free shipping may not be a viable option for every e-commerce business, and if that’s the case with yours, there are some other psychological tricks you can use to pull in sales.
3. Streamline the checkout process
Another big driver for abandoned carts is requesting that shoppers create an account before making a payment. This effectively puts a hurdle in the way of the sales. Potential customers may be strapped for time, or simply want a quick and easy checkout process.
A better way is to offer a guest account option which requires minimal data collection or invite customers to register their full details for a customer account after a sale has been made.
4. Evoke trust
Show customers that your Shopify store can be trusted. You can do this by continuously collecting customer reviews and making sure that your site is secure. Display security badges on your homepage as evidence.
Conclusion
Rather than looking at abandoned carts as lost sales, why not look at them as an opportunity instead? When someone leaves their cart before completing their purchase, you can glean some important insights about what they’re interested in thanks to the products they leave behind.
You can use that information along with an omnichannel marketing approach to tempt those would-be shoppers back to your store with a promotional discount or other incentives.
What’s more, with an app like Firepush, you can send abandoned cart reminders automatically across all channels. The whole process is automated, so you can set your abandoned cart alerts up, and then forget about them, at least for a little while, to focus on other areas of your business.
Going forward, you may be able to reduce your cart abandonment rate by being clear and upfront about your shipping cost information or even offering free shipping if that would suit your business model. Simplifying your checkout process will also go a long way to reducing abandoned carts while building up your customer reviews will help your store and brand to be seen as trustworthy.