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Marketing to the Abandoned Cart
April 24, 2006
Adapted from an article by Ken Burke
Consumers are changing how they shop online
and this is leading to higher rates of cart
abandonment throughout the e-commerce
industry. Fortunately there are some highly
effective techniques you can use to recover
a large part of these “lost” sales if you
employ a few tried-and-true tactics.
An abandoned cart occurs when a shopper
places something in their online shopping
cart and then fails to make a purchase
during that visit. Like the big fish that
got away, it may at first seem impossible to
lure them back. Finding the right bait
depends on their reasons for abandoning in
the first place.
Consumers’ online shopping activities are
focused more and more on browsing,
searching, comparison shopping and
knowledge-building. They have been
conditioned by shopping comparison engines
and auction sites to browse longer to see
what is available and at what price. The
overabundance of marketing emails and online
promotions has made them very price
sensitive, and the blurred boundaries
between online and offline channels make it
easy to switch indiscriminately from website
to catalog to store when they are ready to
actually buy. Broadband adoption lets more
people load more websites faster and faster,
so there are fewer impediments to switching
from one merchant to another. For all these
reasons, shoppers can afford to be cautious
and do their research before buying. They
may visit your site several times before
laying down their money.
And there’s a lot of money to catch.
Forrester Research found that the industry
average abandoned cart rate was just about
50%. That is, fully half of all filled carts
never result in a purchase. Approximately
88% of shoppers abandoned shopping carts at
one time or another in 2005. Forrester also
estimated that in 2005, $33 billion was lost
due to abandoned carts. There were six
primary reasons for abandonment:
■
Did not want to pay shipping costs -
57%
■
Total cost of purchase was more than
expected - 48%
■
Used the shopping cart for research -
41%
■
Didn’t want to wait for the product -
19%
■
Purchased offline instead - 18%
■
Checkout process was too complicated
- 15%
■
Other reasons: - 12%
Source: Forrester Research. Base:
North American Web buyers who have abandoned
a shopping cart (multiple reasons accepted)
You can recover sales lost for all these
reasons, and get your shopper to complete
the purchase online. You can encourage them
to buy offline with you, and maintain a
positive relationship with them. But you
must act quickly and with the right
approach.
How to recover those lost sales
Automated pop-up messaging on exit
Most e-commerce applications let you set
business rules that will activate in
response to specific customer actions. An
excellent use of this is to trigger a pop-up
box when someone leaves your site with
something left in the shopping cart.
Examples of highly effective messaging
include:
■
A discount, effective immediately,
for completing the order during the current
shopping session.
Consider offering a percentage off, free shipping, or dollar
amount off.
■
An offer to send a list of cart
contents to the customer via email. You also
get the added bonus
of potentially gaining one more opt-in for your email list.
■
Offer to save the entire shopping
cart as-is for easy shopping when they
return.
■
Promoting offline purchasing with
“Print Cart” functionality and a store
locator. Many merchants
include a discount as an incentive to buy at a store.
■
A promotion for in-store pickup if
available.
■
Offer to send them a printed catalog,
and provide fields for them to input their
shipping
information and email address.
■
Promote email sign up, enticing them
with the promise of newsletters, product
announcements,
future promotions, and other value-added materials.
Live chat
Use your online analysis tools to gauge
when an abandoned cart is imminent, and then
launch a live chat window. Overstock.com
initiates such windows after a customer has
been on the site for a specified time
without purchasing anything. Direct
interaction with a customer service rep can
often favorably tip the scales.
Automated pop-up at re-entry
When your site recognizes a customer who
last left your site after abandoning their
cart, greet them with a pop-up window with
messaging targeted at them. Offer an
immediate discount for completing their
prior order (if your site can save shopping
carts) or the order they are about to start.
Test different messaging and promotions to
see what works best. Recently there has been
an increased use of pop-ons, which function
similarly to pop-ups except that the pop-ons
dispense with the browser-like frame around
their windows, and are more carefully
designed to be visually integrated with the
site.
Event-triggered personalized email
marketing
Some advanced e-commerce applications
can automatically trigger emails to
individual customers based upon parameters
you set. This can be used in several ways:
■
Recently abandoned cart
Set the system to watch for abandoned carts and then
automatically send a carefully designed
email message after the time interval you specify. List the
contents of the cart and include
messaging or promotions that stimulate them to return and
buy. Pro Flowers uses this tactic to
encourage the completion of orders for its numerous gift
bouquets.
■
Abandoned cart expiration
This requires that your site be able to save shopping carts
and their contents. You are probably
allowing these saved carts to expire after a set period so
send an email 7 days prior to
expiration, reminding them of their recent shopping visit and
the items they were interested in.
Discounts are usually not necessary with this tactic.
■
Product availability
Alert the customer when a product in their abandoned cart is
about to sell out, imparting a
sense of urgency. If they abandoned a cart because one of
their selections was out of stock,
let them know when it is available again.
■
Product price status
Let the customer know when one of the products they abandoned
has gone on sale. Macy’s
does this with a “Good News” HTML email announcing sale
prices and including product images.
Or, if the product they chose was on sale when they placed it
in their cart, let them know in
advance when it is about to revert to regular price. If you
want to drive these shoppers to your
retail stores, let them know when the product is on sale in
the store.
Segmented Email Marketing
If you can’t do event-triggered email
marketing, send generic batch&blast emails
targeted to each of your customer groups.
For example, all people who have abandoned a
cart within the last 30 days might receive a
special “We Want You Back” promotion. Such a
mailing will not include the contents of the
cart, because the mailing is not
personalized. You can increase the
effectiveness of your targeting by grouping
customers according to the category of
products they had in their carts. Send each
of these new customer segments an email
promoting top sellers in these product
categories with “You may be interested in
this” messaging.
Things to keep in mind
As you create your cart abandonment
response strategy, here are some important
points to keep in mind.
■
Type of messaging or functionality
Always keep in mind exactly what you want to accomplish, and
tailor your messaging to suit
your requirements. If you need to prevent people from
abandoning the cart in the first place,
use a method that will hit them at the moment they abandon or
just before. Pop-ups, pop-ons,
and live chat are highly effective here. Email is great to
use after someone has abandoned their
cart but it is not useful in preventing abandonment in the
first place. Be careful with pop-ups;
measure customer reaction to them because they are not always
popular and you may need to
select a different tactic.
■
Timing of message
Again, this depends on what you want to accomplish. To
prevent an abandoned cart you need
to be able to act immediately, with something they will see
right on the site. To get them back to
your site after abandonment there will be a lag of some kind.
Some messages may be best sent
virtually immediately, such as the “contents of the cart”
email. Others, such as cart expiration
notification, are best sent after some time has passed. When
in doubt, err towards sending
your emails sooner, before your shopper has much time to find
an alternate deal elsewhere.
■
Content of message
Always be conscious of exactly what you want to happen and
shape your messages
appropriately. The statement “We want your business” works
very well in post-abandonment
emails, but it may not work well in a pop-up on the site. A
pop-up with “Can we help you find
something?” can be very effective with those who are about to
abandon, but it may be too little
too late to someone who receives it via email a week
afterward. Always word your messaging as
a customer service, so your shoppers can see that you are
trying to help them find the things
they want or to make their shopping easier.
■
Additional dependencies
You do not necessarily need to respond to every abandoned
cart. Start by addressing those
that represent the greatest potential return for your effort.
You may choose to set a minimum
dollar amount, so you can focus on the high-value sales. Some
customer segments may be more
important to you, and you may choose to chase them more
assiduously. Such segments may
include long-time customers, new customers, catalog shoppers,
repeat cart abandoners, or any
other that is important to your online strategy.
■
Saved shopping carts
Use it if you have it. This is a very powerful tool that you
should be using if your e-commerce
platform offers it. It is the basis for some of the best
recovery tactics, and customers respond
very well to it. If you can, place some kind of indicator
next to items that are from a previous
shopping session, such as a “placed in cart” date. That way
your more forgetful customers are
less likely to be surprised when they look at their cart for
the first time during a shopping session
and see more items in it than they remember placing there.
■
Discount strategy
Discounts are a great incentive for getting cart abandoners
back, but be careful about how
many promotions you offer. You do not want to train your
customers to fill their cart, abandon
it, and then wait around for you to offer them a discount.
For this reason, start with the
smallest discount you think will bring people back, and test
it. Try more generous discounts, and
then select the one that you calculate gives you the best
return for you dollar. Different
discount types may have a different effect on each of your
customer segments.
■
Place products in your emails
When you send your post-abandonment emails, include
thumbnails of interesting products.
Ideally these will be the items they abandoned, assuming you
use a personalized, event-based
email system. Emails to entire customer groups may include
items that that group often
abandons, or even just a couple of best sellers. Provide
something that is likely to catch their
interest and get them back to your site. Link the product
images to their respective product
page, and always include a “Buy Now” button that places the
item in their cart and starts the
checkout process. This may seem aggressive, but it works.
■
Find out why customers abandon
carts
Use your site analytics tools to find out where your
customers are abandoning their carts. Your
site may have a flaw that stops some shoppers dead in their
tracks, such as a confusing
checkout process, excessively high shipping charges, or
programming bugs that simply won’t let
them proceed. If you discover it you can fix it, and
eliminate the need for a lot of cart
abandonment follow-up.
Cart abandonment is inevitable, particularly
now that customers are using your site as a
research tool. Most customers want to
complete their purchases in one way or
another and they often just need some help.
You will never be able to reduce abandonment
rates to zero, but with a little well-placed
intervention you can recover a lot of the
sales that would otherwise get completely
away.
For more information on streamlining the
checkout process and displaying shipping
charges on product pages, see:
Streamlined
Checkout™
Streamlined
Shipper™
Contact Sienna Jones
marketing@streamlinedcheckout.com
Digital Beach
Digital
Beach provides advanced Ecommerce and
Internet Marketing services to a wide range
of companies from small merchants to medium
and large corporate clients.
Digital Beach has been delivering Streamlined Checkout™
with the StoreFront™ cart as part of an overall
eCommerce solution to online merchants since
both products appeared on the market some three
years ago. Nearly two years ago, we
decided we liked
the product so much, we bought
the company.
More about Digital
Beach
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