When you have an online business selling products and services, your shopping cart facility is the lifeblood of your company, and you need to treat it as such.
There are many reasons why people abandon their shopping carts, and a common one is additional charges. Research has shown that 79% of customers are more likely to purchase online if there is free delivery.
You may not offer free delivery for whatever reason, but being clear and transparent with additional charges will go a long way in reducing your abandoned shopping cart rate and there are estimates of it being almost 70% across all industries.
All online businesses that have a shopping cart see customers leaving them all the time, but there are ways you can entice them back to keep the sale if you follow the advice below.
Understand why people leave the shopping process
You need to understand why so many shopping carts are abandoned, which can be as high as three out of four shopping carts.
As mentioned above, shipping charges can be a killer to a sale, so if you do charge for shipping, make sure you clearly state that and you have a page on your website explaining the charges.
You can also find that people will walk away from buying a product if you try to force them to create an account, so you will want to have an option to complete a sale without creating one.
There are other reasons why people abandon shopping carts, which can include:
- Unclear shipping times
- Internet issues
- Website issues
- An overly complex checkout process
- The terms & conditions or returns / exchange policies
- They were comparing prices
- They got distracted
- They were only browsing
- The overall cost
- Payment declined
Create an abandoned shopping cart strategy
To combat your abandoned shopping carts successfully, you will need to create a strategy to deal with these. This can prove lucrative if done well and significantly increase your sales.
You can use their email address if you have it to remind them of their abandoned cart and entice them to come back to complete the transaction.
Therefore, it can be critically important to gather the users’ email address at the earliest opportunity. You may be able to entice users back with a browser notification. However, most don’t agree to these so it is somewhat unlikely. No, here you’re going to need to rely on good, old-fashioned email.
You will need a succinctly worded email and to personalise this to the user, which often gets much higher engagement rates.
You can highlight various aspects of your company or the products they were looking to purchase, which can also go a long way in encouraging them to complete the sale.
You can also include multiple automated follow-up emails. This automation will reduce your own time investment while significantly increasing sales.
How to encourage would-be customers back through email
You can do lots of things to encourage users back to your website to complete the sales process, and you may need to experiment to find which works best for your company.
Some things that you may wish to try to win the sale are as follows:
Highlight product / services ratings
You can often entice a customer back to their shopping cart by highlighting the product’s ratings left by other customers.
By highlighting positive ratings you are demonstrating social proof which can be a valuable persuader.
If they think that it is a quality product that lots of other people like, you can help win back the deal and remind those that forgot about their cart to complete the sale.
Highlight stock availability
If you can make people afraid of missing out, you can encourage them to follow through with the purchase, so if you have a product with limited stock, you can send a gentle reminder of this in the email you send.
However, you must be careful with this as some industries use this tactic and lie to their users to try and get them to buy, even when there is plenty of stock available, which can get you into trouble… and is generally regarded as bad practice.
Concentrate on one product
If the cart has multiple products in it when it is abandoned, instead of highlighting them in the email, focus on one of them.
Whether you choose the best selling item or the most profitable product is up to you, and this tactic can push the user to complete the sale after abandoning their shopping cart.
Offer them A discount
One of the most effective ways to encourage people to go back to an abandoned cart is by offering them a discount.
If you consider the sale is lost, anything you can do to save it, even cutting your profit margin, is a worth the effort. You can send a discount code via email that they can use in their cart, which can push them to complete the sale and win you more business.
You will never be able to win all the abandoned sales, but even if you can get a small percentage of them, you can significantly improve your bottom line.
Ensure that you create clear and concise emails, and address pain points that customers may have.
Finally, you should select a high-quality email platform, and you can give your business the boost it deserves.