Cart Abandonment: What it is and How to Fight it

Winback Team on Jun 14, 2021 9:57:22 AM Every year, billions of dollars are spent in marketing activities across the globe by eCommerce sellers. These efforts succeed in bringing a sizable amount of traffic to online stores, but a large number of these leads don’t complete their purchase. They browse through the web stores’ catalogs, add items to their shopping carts but do not complete the purchase due to various reasons. This is very common for online sellers (we will discuss the numbers later), and today, I am going to discuss how you can decrease the abandoned card rate with some low effort-high reward methods. decrease cart abandonment winback-1

This article will discuss the following: What Is The Severity Of Abandoned Carts? How To Approach The Abandoned Cart Problem? Strategies To Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates Remember, the losses are quite significant for every eCommerce store, and winning back even a small chunk can boost your bottom line by leaps and bounds. Let’s get started.

What Is The Severity Of Abandoned Carts?

Before we dig deeper into the approaches for minimizing the losses caused due to cart abandonment, let us first understand its impact. Over $4.6 trillion is lost on a yearly basis due to shoppers leaving web stores without making a purchase. Its formula is given by:

(Image Credits) No doubt, a significant portion of this figure can be attributed to window shoppers and unsure buyers who might not make the purchase in most cases. Many of them might be surfing out of the pure hobby as well. But still, the online retailer community can recover $260 billion, as you can find in the below infographic:

(Image Credits) And another infographic that adds more light to it:

(Image Credits) That’s a serious problem for any eCommerce brand since Statista finds that 2020 witnessed a total online sales of $4.28 trillion. Here’s an infographic that would help you understand the rate of cart abandonment in different industries:

(Image Credits) On the flip side, you can consider it as an enormous opportunity too. If you play your cards right, you can boost your revenue significantly due to the fact that buyers are well educated about the products they are looking for. Also, they would have gone through various competitor websites and product alternatives as well. Approaching such leads can be extremely rewarding as it would be a make-or-break effort to do so. A gentle reminder might do the job in many cases, while others would require you to throw an appealing offer. In the worst-case scenario, you didn’t make the sale, but at least you didn’t shoot in the dark for a considerable amount of time as the sales cycle, in this case, is pretty brief.

How To Approach The Abandoned Cart Problem?

Now that you know the magnitude of cat abandonment for the eCommerce industry and the basic psychology behind approaching it let’s understand how you can fix your leaking sales funnel. The first thing you would need to do is understand what makes your visitors leave their shopping carts. This is crucial since they would have made efforts to go through the items and pick up those specific products. In the below infographic, you can find the top reasons why shoppers don’t complete their purchase as of January-2019:

(Image Credits) It is observed that the smartphone users tend to abandon their carts more often as compared to computer users while the tablet users sit in the middle:

(Image Credits) That’s enough homework, and we will now have a look at different tactics that will help reduce cart abandonment rates.

Strategies To Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

In this section, we will have a look at different tactics that you can employ on your e-commerce website and outreach strategies. Here you need to understand that the success rate of these approaches relies heavily on the overall combination of your offers and how you approach your leads. Also, you will require a proper strategy for engaging your prospects multiple times during a stretch of at least three days or more, depending on your industry. For businesses dealing with infrequently consumed, inexpensive items like nail polishes, the overall time for running a cart abandonment campaign is fairly shorter than a high-worth product. We will recommend the readers employ all of these tactics together for getting the best results. Conversion is a cumulative result of implementing many best practices as opposed to a one-shot solution. Let’s get started with card abandonment prevention measures that you can implement right away.

Exit Intent Popups

This may sound annoying but having an exit-intent popup is a must if you want to minimize the losses caused by cart abandonment. Many times, people casually go through websites without actually paying adequate attention to the products. Exit-intent popups and overlays attract the user’s attention and give you a chance to highlight the products that have maximum chances of conversion. You can also provide a website-wide sale offer or draw attention towards an existing one. You can also collect the email address and name of the visitor to contact them later. This way, you can successfully tap between 10 to 15 percent of the outbound visitors. That’s a significant improvement given the fact that the exit-intent popups are a relatively inexpensive solution, while even a 10% increase in your revenue is a massive boost to your online business.

Leverage Social Proof

Social proof in the form of feedback and ratings is undeniably one of the best ways you can reduce cart abandonment. You can display them as trust badges on your product listings, category pages, and especially on the checkout page. We have noticed that a lot of businesses use social proof extensively in their marketing material, including social media posts, but the most effective way of using them remains through emails. We will discuss emails separately, but I would like the readers to understand the fact that including social proof in your confirmation emails reinforces the trust in your products and brand. This will help stop cases where your customers change their minds in case they find an alternative more suitable. Social proof can become a deciding factor in reducing cart abandonment and promoting a higher conversion rate. It is due to the fact that we cannot expect to have enormous price differences between various eCommerce websites, and in many cases, the products are too identical to distinguish for a normal person. In such cases, social proof acts like word of mouth as people tend to trust other customers’ reviews as much as a personal recommendation from their friends. So make sure you collect reviews and ratings proactively from all your existing customers and display them at all the right places.

Retargeting Ads

Google remarketing ads can work like a charm given the fact that they are relatively less expensive when compared to regular advertisements and target the people who have already visited your website. These individuals will have a better idea of your website structure, the type of products you have listed, and a rough estimate of your pricing structure. On top of that, you can also expect better conversion rates as they are more likely to be aware of the item since they would have browsed through many websites. This reduces the conversion parameters to the cost and other value additions as they are well educated regarding why they want to make the purchase in the first place. In the below infographic, you can clearly find why remarketing ads are highly popular in the eCommerce industry:

(Image Credits) It generates 147% higher conversions when compared with traditional display ads and increases abandoned cart conversions by a staggering 297%. These are enough reasons for you to include them in your search engine marketing strategy with immediate effect.

Minimize The Fields Required For Creating An Account On Your Ecommerce Site

(Image Credits) This is a small yet important tip that I would like to share with you: Try to limit the number of fields required to create an account on your eCommerce website. People are usually hesitant about sharing their details online and the least you can do is minimize the data you collect at least in the beginning. It will encourage users to complete the profile creation process and then you can of course learn more about them as you strengthen the relationship. You can also notify them that they are in full control of the marketing communications that they might receive. By doing so, you will clearly address the top three concerns that stop people from making an account on your web store and broaden your customer base.

Hone Your Email Marketing & SMS Marketing Game

If we can name one strategy that acts as the bread and butter for eCommerce websites, it’s surely going to be email marketing. Unless you are Amazon or eBay, you wouldn’t have a gigantic brand image to draw people to your eCommerce website. With this being said, you’ll need to put in efforts to stay in their sight and be worthy of their attention when they decide to make a purchase. The best way to do so is email marketing, but we aren’t going to discuss it exhaustively. Instead, we are going to share my two cents on the topic of our concern: cart abandonment emails. They have witnessed some setbacks due to the pandemic, but as the vaccination drives pick pace, it will soon come back stronger: The open rate for abandoned cart emails:

(Image Credits) CTR for abandoned cart emails:

(Image Credits) Abandoned cart emails have a 19x higher conversion rate as compared to standard marketing emails. Combining it with the statistics mentioned in the below infographic, one can easily understand the reason behind its extreme popularity in the eCommerce landscape:

(Image Credits) Generally, it is recommended to send an abandoned cart email within one hour of the visit followed by another message after 24 hours, three days, and a week. This can be altered depending on your sector, as we already discussed earlier. Your first abandoned cart email can include a message asking the recipient whether they would like to go ahead with their purchase. You can always show the carrot later. When it comes to abandoned cart SMSes, they perform even better than emails. After all, the open rates of text messages in 98%, which is head and shoulders above other options, including emails. In fact, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of delivery, which makes text messages an ideal method to get back shoppers to your website for completing the purchase. Win Back’s SMS marketing service has helped its customers recover 34% of their abandoned carts. They also see an ROI of 35X-100X of every dollar they spend on Win Back’s plans. With Win Back SMS marketing setup, you won’t ever have to worry about losing thousands of dollars of sales ever due to high cart abandoned rates. Contact them today to discuss how Win Back can help your business decrease abandoned rates. In most cases, you can convert them using free delivery as shipping charges are the biggest concern for online shoppers. However, it would be best if you try to analyze the reason behind not completing the purchase and send personalized offers to solve the issues faced by your visitors. Discounts are not necessarily the best way to deal with such issues, as many other parameters can impact purchase decisions. Many leading ESP tools allow you to integrate your data from various modules, including CRM, VoIP, ERP, and others which can improve your personalization efforts. Use mobile-responsive email templates and try to feature three products at most to keep the reader hooked and increase conversions. As for the SMS marketing strategy to reduce the abandoned cart rate, you should look into the plans of Win Back, the true experts at SMS marketing. Having a perfect combination of skills, experience, and technology, the Win Back team is a game-changer in SMS marketing.

Summing Up

You can clearly see that reducing cart abandonment requires collective efforts. You can use other methods like running SMS campaigns, adding shopping progress indicators, and optimizing site appearance as well. Adding more payment methods is also another great way of improving the purchase experience. Another option is to sign up for Win Back’s plans as it can help you recover 34% of abandoned carts. Every dollar that you spent on Win Back’s plans delivers up to 35X ROI, which is one of the best in the industry. All in all, you should make it convenient to purchase from your eCommerce store, sign up for a Win Back SMS marketing plan, and drop a few lucrative offers when required. We hope that this actionable mini-guide helps you understand the dynamics of cart abandonment and how you can fight it back.

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