According to a recent survey from Marketing Sherpa, nearly 60% of online shoppers put something in their cart but do not purchase. While there are many ways to improve the abandonment rate at the point of sale (many discussed in the same Marketing Sherpa post), there are also actions you can take on the back end to regain business from people who’ve abandoned their shopping carts. Marketing automation can be a critical factor in revenue generation for B2C and B2B companies alike – but for the purpose of this example, let’s focus on the B2C market.
The Essentials of an Abandonment Campaign
Imagine this: a customer comes to your website and puts an item in their cart. They begin the checkout process by either logging into your site (if they have previously registered), or they provide they provide their email address via web form to start the process. At some point they may decide they do not want to complete the purchase, so they leave your site. Collection of the email address is critical – more important than their name or postal address – because email is the least expensive yet quickest and most effective way to contact a shopping cart abandoner.
Now you are playing a game of timing. It’s nearly impossible to determine to moment someone leaves your site, because tracking page visit time is dependent upon the visitor moving to another page on your site. So, you need to estimate how long it takes the average customer to complete a purchase. Most online purchases can be completed within 30 minutes. So, using a marketing automation service, you can set conditions to trigger an email to anyone who viewed the checkout page, provided their information via a web form, but did not view the thank you/order confirmation page within 30 minutes. This means that within 30 minutes of leaving your website without a completed purchase, you should deliver an email to that potential customer’s inbox while your product or service is still fresh in their mind.
Getting Back to Basics
Automated abandonment emails are not a new concept – online retailers have been doing it for years – but the type of emails being delivered today has changed. Many of our clients utilizing our system for shopping cart abandonment have gotten away from professionally created HTML emails from talented designers for a much more simple approach: text emails. In today’s spam-tastic world people expect fancy HTML emails, so it is often the simple personalized text emails that can draw more attention. Our clients regularly build emails containing the contact information and email signature of an actual customer service rep offering order assistance to the shopping cart abandoner. Using personalized fields they even insert the first name of the customer (if available) and the item they failed to purchase… making it appear to come from a human being reaching out to them rather than an auto-generated response. You’d be surprised at how well adding a personal touch works.
To Incentivize or Not to Incentivize
So “incentivize” might not be recognized by spell check as a real word yet, but it’s become a popular term in the online marketing industry. Many abandonment emails used today contain some kind of incentive to the customer, such as free shipping or a discount code, to entice them to complete the purchase. However, this could be a slippery slope if your incentive offer is always the same. Word travels fast on the internet, so potential buyers who learn your tricks may abandon their carts just to get the discount email – including those who may have otherwise paid full price. The upside is, your conversions could be substantially higher with the incentive, so proper testing and variation is the key to success. We recommend not incentivizing the initial email you send, but consider offering some kind of discount or bonus on a second or third attempt.
Know When Enough is Enough
Marketing automation systems, such as the one offered by Net-Results, will often allow you to create an endless cycle of emails to be triggered daily by abandoners who still do not order. We know users who send emails every single day for 30 days to abandoners unless they order, unsubscribe, or complain. In our experience, we’ve found that after the third unopened abandonment email you become much more of a nuisance than anything else and likelihood of actually converting an order from subsequent emails becomes very low. The goal is to maintain a relationship with those who have provided their information, not alienate them. Adding them to your monthly newsletter list or product announcement campaign (if your privacy policy and opt-in method allows it) is a much more subtle approach at regaining business, and a method we recommend over the pesky alternative.
