Abandoned carts are a real pain for online retailers. As hard as you’ve worked to drive people to your store, the real hard work begins once they’ve abandoned their carts.
According to stats, 69.89% of your customers will abandon their carts, which equates to almost three quarters. You’ve welcomed them to your store, you’ve convinced them you’ve got the products they want – but you haven’t made the sale. Yet.
The good news is there’s plenty of time to bring them back. Customers have already made up their minds that they want to do business with you – it’s just that they need help overcoming one final obstacle/objection.
In this article we address the reasons why your customers are abandoning their carts, and we’ll show you how you can bring them back to make the sale.
Send Out an Automated Cart Abandonment Email
To do this, first you need to make sure that you grab prospective customer’s email address. The easiest way to do this is on your checkout page. Before anyone can make a purchase from you, make sure to ask them to register with their email address first. You could offer them a free gift in exchange, for example.
Once you’ve got their email address, you’re then free to contact all shoppers who have abandoned their carts.
Automated cart abandonment emails is a tactic that works, too. A study has shown that such emails have an average reconversion rate of 12%.
Don’t stop with just the one automated cart abandonment email but try a follow-up email if the first hasn’t converted. While the first email in the study had an average open rate of 66%, the second had an average open rate of 59%.
The study has also shown that 51% of shoppers actually find it helpful when they receive a reminder email that tells them they still have items in their shopping cart.
In the email itself, make sure to include an incentive. This could come in the form of a discount, for example, or it could be that you …
Offer Free Shipping
It might come as no surprise that unexpected shipping costs are one of the prime reasons shoppers abandon their carts. This is the case for 28% of your customers.
There are a couple of ways to combat this. One way is to inform your customers early on that they will have to pay X amount for shipping. Remember, 28% of customers aren’t abandoning carts because of high shipping costs – they’re abandoning them because of unexpected shipping costs. To that end, you can raise awareness of your costs earlier in the funnel.
Alternatively, you could implement a “calculate shipping” feature.
On the flip side, a lot of customers will still abandon their carts if the shipping costs are too high. To remedy this, you might want to retarget first time customers with free shipping to keep them in the game – and perhaps even turn them into repeat customers. It’s all about spreading that initial goodwill factor and making first time customers feel good about your business.
Give Them The Option To Checkout as a Guest
While we mentioned that grabbing emails before a customer makes a purchase is a great idea, it can also count against you. Some customers are in a rush and won’t want to be delayed by having to input their details first. As a result, they will abandon their cart.
It’s a good idea, then, to also give your customers options. They can either register with you now or checkout as a guest.
Optimize Your Checkout Page For Mobile
More and more of your consumers are accessing your store via their mobile devices. This means it’s hugely important that you optimize your checkout page for mobile.
To do this, you need to design the mobile version of your website with your customer in mind. This means enlarging your fonts and buttons on your checkout page so that they don’t have to pinch and zoom to see things. Everything needs to be readable and everything needs to be bigger. If a mobile user clicks ‘back’ instead of ‘next’ they might just scream.
And because mobile users are more impatient than desktop users (they often abandon sites after 4 seconds), you should keep things simple. Keep your forms short and concise (remember, forms aren’t fun), and make sure the checkout process is super easy to follow.
Build Trust With Your Brand
Any business or marketer will tell you that your customers have to trust two things if they’re going to make a purchase from you: They have to trust your product or service, and they have to trust your brand.
Where does trust come from? It comes from credibility and relationship-building. And the best way to establish credibility and build relationships is with your brand.
Branding is going to be super important to your longevity. If you can nail your branding so that it resonates with your customers and appeals to them, you will go a long way.
It all starts with your logo. Your logo represents the face of your brand. It’s how people recognize you and it’s a sign of your professionalism and values. Your logo needs to be consistent across all of your channels – and it especially needs to be present on the checkout page. Here, it will create that sense of familiarity and trust that’s important to your customers as they prepare to send you payment in exchange for goods.
If you don’t yet have a logo, you can use a tool like Hatchful to create a professional-looking logo in a matter of minutes. Then, take your brand new logo and customize your checkout page with it.
Other than that, make sure you restyle the rest of your checkout page so that it aligns with your overall branding aesthetic. The last thing a customer wants is to enter your checkout page and be met with a sense that something doesn’t seem quite right anymore. It can easily break their trust.
Once you’ve overhauled your checkout page, send your customers an email telling them all about your update and how excited you are.
Test For Errors
If the user experience is poor, your customers might make it all the way to the checkout page only to run into one problem too many. As such, they’ll bail out.
To make sure your checkout process is as smooth as possible, you need to keep monitoring and testing for problems and bugs.
Loggly is a tool that lets you track and correct errors. If there are any errors, the tool will alert you immediately and you can then rectify the problem as soon as possible.
Loggly will also alert you to add-to-cart failures. By removing these potentially major issues, you could drastically improve your abandoned cart rate.
Once you’ve made the improvements, make sure to reconnect with customers who have abandoned their carts with an email that offers them a discount or a coupon code. Bring them back into the game, show them how seamless the user experience is now, and then keep working on turning them into loyal customers.
Bonus Tip: Omnichannel marketing creates an ideal customer experience. Learn how to turn abandoned carts into sales with an omnichannel approach.
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s always a reason why customers abandon carts. Once you’ve uncovered the reason, you can then work on providing a solution. Use the tips in this article to keep your customers happy and engaged, and keep testing and tweaking to take your store to the next level.
