A surprisingly high number of potential customers place items in their shopping cart before leaving the e-commerce website they are visiting without actually making a purchase. If you were to be asked what percentage of customers do this, what would your answer be? 50%? 60%? – in fact, up to an unbelievable 80% of online shopping carts get abandoned without a purchase being made.
Think about how much money this adds up to. Your e-commerce website could be making a huge amount more money if customers who put things in their online shopping cart ended up buying them too.
There are obviously a lot of reasons why someone may abandon their cart. The common thought process seems to be that the customer is not ready to buy right now and needs some extra thinking time. However, more common reasons why carts get abandoned are website errors (crashing or slow speeds), complicated checkout process, or the customer decided to visit another website and forgot about their purchase with your business.
Some reasons for cart abandonment may be out of your control but you can certainly convert a good percentage of your abandoned carts into actual sales with an effective abandoned cart email strategy. To make the best use of abandoned cart emails, there are some key points to consider.
Get Potential Customer’s Email Address
Around 45% of abandoned cart emails get opened by those who receive them. On top of that 11% actually return to the website that sent it to them to complete the purchase they had previously abandoned. If your business can send effective emails like this, your sales figures can quickly grow.
The problem a lot of e-commerce businesses have though is that they don’t have the customer’s email address until they are going through the checkout process. If they abandon their cart before their contact details can be taken, you’re not going to be able to follow up with them.
While it can be a bit of a challenge to get some customers to share their details with you prior to making a sale, there are many people who will do so for some kind of reward or incentive. One way to get hold of customer email addresses before they try to make a purchase is to simply ask them to sign-up for updates from your business. A well-worded pop-up or banner suggesting how useful your mailing list is can be enough for some potential customers to share their email addresses with you.
Taking this a step further, you may want to try and get visitors to your website to “join” your business in a kind of membership. Offering them perks such as discounts on their orders, free shipping, and special offers for simply signing up for a free membership can be very convincing. A lot of people will likely share their email address for rewards like this.
You may also want to consider getting email addresses as early on in the checkout process as possible. As soon as you have the email address of your potential customer, even if they don’t go through with their purchase, you can easily follow up with them at a later stage and try to convert them. Get customers’ email addresses before any kind of payment is asked for as an email address can end up being much more valuable than their current shopping cart value.
Create a Powerful Abandoned Cart Email
Once you have the email address of any customer who has abandoned their shopping cart, you can then think about reaching out to them in the hope of converting them into a paying customer. This isn’t as simple as just emailing them and asking them to buy from your business though. There are certain things you need to keep in mind when you’re putting together your abandoned cart emails.
The first thing is to use a relevant and powerful subject for your email. Anything that sounds too much like a sales pitch or too spammy will likely be ignored or immediately deleted without opening. Keep your subject simple and clear – you’re just reminding the recipient that they have left some things in their cart and you wouldn’t want them to be forgotten.
One part of abandoned cart emails (and pretty much any other email) that seems to be overlooked is the preview text. This is the text that will be readable under the subject line in the customer’s inbox before the email is opened. Preview text that is descriptive and catches the receiver’s interest can go a long way in convincing them to open the email.
Putting your potential customer first is the main priority for abandoned cart emails. While making sales is obviously important for an e-commerce business, trying too hard to make a sale at this point could easily lead to you losing the sale of the abandoned cart, but also of any potential future purchase the customer may have made. Your abandoned cart emails should be engaging, fun, and highlight that your brand is looking out for its customers.
Abandoned cart emails will work better if your customer can access their cart directly via the email. Customers want simplicity and convenience – having to leave the email and re-find your website can put them off so a link back to their saved shopping cart can make a big difference. Offering them a discount or some kind of promotion if they buy the contents of their cart within a set period of time can also help encourage customers to complete their purchase.
Your emails need to have a very clear call to action (CTA). You want your potential customer to return to your website and purchase the items in their cart. Being creative yet clear in your CTA’s can be the difference between someone just opening your emails and doing nothing and opening your emails and doing what you want them to do.
Another important aspect of abandoned cart emails is timing. You need to send your emails close enough to a cart being abandoned for the customer to still be interested, but not too soon to appear pushy or annoying. Sending multiple abandoned cart emails seems to generate good levels of results in converting the recipients into paying customers. Reaching out to customers 1 hour after they abandoned their cart, 24 hours after, and then 1 final email 72 hours after can increase your success rate by up to 30%.
Including your business’s contact details can help build trust with potential customers. Customer service contact details, social media handles, or even a phone number can be enough to help someone feel trusting enough of your business to head back to your website and buy the things in their cart.
One final thing to consider when creating your abandoned cart emails is to give the customer the option to not receive any more emails from you. This might seem counterintuitive as you want to be able to reach out to them for multiple marketing purposes. However, having a clear opt-out or unsubscribe button goes a long way in making your business seem honest and trustworthy. You’re trying to use your abandoned cart emails to help your customers so giving them the option not to receive anything from you in the future shows you’re not trying to force them into a sale.
Think About Your Customers As Individuals
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all template when it comes to abandoned cart emails. Usually, you’ll probably need a few different templates that you can send to different customers depending on what you think will work best for them.
For example, a customer who abandoned their cart because the coupon code they were trying to use wasn’t working will likely need a different email than a customer who abandoned their cart simply by leaving the website partway through the checkout process. As an e-commerce business owner, understanding your analytics and how your customers behave during their visit to your website can give you a much better idea of why they abandoned their cart.
Knowing why customers are leaving your website without buying anything is useful outside of abandoned cart emails too. If you can spot patterns of behavior from website visitors, you might be able to pick up on things on your website that are putting people off from making a purchase.
Make sure that, if the email recipients do click back onto your website, their experience is a good one. Think about keeping everything as simple and as straightforward as possible. They’ve clicked the link to come back to their abandoned cart. This shows they are still interested in buying the products from you. If they leave your website again without buying, you will probably need to take a good look at what they are seeing as something is clearly not working for you. Conducting A/B testing can help you work out what works well in your abandoned cart emails and what isn’t as effective.
Your emails and website should look good and function as they should on all devices. While laptops and PCs are still used for online shopping, over half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. This number is only going to get bigger in the coming years so your emails and website need to adapt. Your abandoned cart emails should be mobile-friendly to make sure that customers can read them and interact with them no matter what device they are using. The same thing needs to be considered when it comes to taking your customers back to their cart. They may have been visiting your website on a laptop initially but are now on their cell phone or tablet – unless your website works on both, the experience they receive could be very different from the one they are expecting.
It is estimated that by 2024, nearly half of ALL retail sales (42.4%) will involve a mobile device in some way. Unless your website (and any emails it sends) is fully mobile-friendly and functions well on all devices, you run the risk of losing a lot of customers and a lot of money in the very near future.
