How to deal with abandoned carts?
You have carefully analyzed the site and especially the order form, set everything up to the latest web, simplified, clarified and beautified, but potential customers still slip out of the basket. How to return them back and convince them to make a purchase?
It is to increase the number of regular customers that you should throw the “heavy artillery” of your marketing resources. To win customer loyalty, you need to deftly and quickly return them to the site. It is especially important to pay attention to visitors who have left the shopping cart, because they are a priori interested in buying. There are several methods of "war" for returning the user to an incomplete session.
Email Marketing
It would seem that the automatic distribution of triggers - personalized emails that remind you of an abandoned cart - is an obvious step, but a negligible percentage of retailers resort to it. E-mail marketing is practiced mainly by the "mastodons" of the Ecommerce market with a wide range of geotargeting. However, with increasing competition, more and more online store owners are resorting to this method of increasing the conversion of the basket. To organize mailings, you can use special paid and free services or use a system of your own design.
According to research, 46% of users, having received a reminder notification, would return to the site to continue checkout.
To send a letter, you first need to get the email address of the site visitor. Ask the user to provide their e-mail at every opportunity:
- to send a message about the appearance of a product that is not currently in stock;
- when placing an order, but in no case, not at the time of adding products to the basket;
- to send special offers, sales messages, etc.
In the TOP 1000 rating of Internet Retailer magazine, 97.5% of online stores ask for “soap” on the first page of the application.
What must be in the letter?
- An unobtrusive reminder of an incomplete transaction.
- Offer to help complete the purchase.
- Call to action.
- Link to quickly proceed to checkout.
- Link directly to the basket to edit its contents.
- Detailed description of the goods you like with photos.
- Link to online chat or any other way to contact support.
- Information that stimulates the purchase: a reminder of the terms of the “expiry of the basket”, that is, the time to complete the checkout, or information about the limited stock of goods in the warehouse.
Optionally, other products from the same or a related category that may be of interest to the visitor are added to the trigger email.
If there are too many products in the basket, then in the letter it is recommended to reduce their number. The optimal number of displayed products is best determined by testing various trigger options.
One of the latest email marketing trends is the use of GIF animations in emails. If used properly, GIFs can increase sales by 300%.
In pursuit of stunning click-rates, be wary of offering discounts and free shipping. Loyal customers will soon see through your strategy and deliberately abandon carts in anticipation of benefits. It is best to leave a discount on dessert and not offer it in the first reminder email.
The classic method of sending triggers involves three letters, but the optimal time for sending them varies, and testing is also necessary here.
Be sure to ensure that no reminders are sent after placing an order.
Remarketing with contextual advertising
Search engines offer a wide range of options for setting up retargeting ads for different categories of site visitors, including cart abandoners. With the help of special settings, users who have performed a certain action (visiting a site, a specific page, an incomplete checkout, etc.) are included in the remarketing list, for which text or banner ads are compiled. They will be displayed on partner sites of the search engine, the subject of resources can be strictly regulated by excluding sites with unwanted content. Messages with a photo of the viewed product and offers of similar models from the same categories are especially effective.
Ads for users who have left the cart should certainly include a call to action and, if possible, an enticing bonus. For retargeting, it is important to correctly limit the period of displaying an ad to a site visitor from a specific list, while taking into account the time it takes to make a purchase decision for various categories of goods.
Small tricks to return users to the site
- Provide customers with a variety of payment methods, including the ability to use electronic payment systems that are gaining popularity.
- Don't forget about cross-browser compatibility.
- Check the functionality of the shopping cart on mobile devices.
- Use Google Analytics to track the stages at which users leave the cart.
- Simplify the checkout process as much as possible.
- In addition to Internet marketing tools, also use direct calls from managers to the client, work "the old fashioned way" always shows a consistently high percentage of conversion.
15-25% of returned customers successfully complete the checkout process.
The most interesting and most difficult thing in returning potential customers to the site is an individual approach. There is no and cannot be universal advice, so study YOUR customer , test different ways, and you will get an army of brand fans, as well as a stable income in addition.