Cart abandonment is a major challenge faced by online retailers. The availability of alternative merchandise to the consumer and the fact that your customers can shop 24/7, a lot of the time, mobile users are window shopping. They are on the go looking to be persuaded. Invariably six in ten shoppers who place items in a cart do not check out.
So where does mobile come in to play? Well the increase in consumers using Smartphones to shop can be contributed to the increasing cart abandonment rates on mobile devices. In fact, between 66% and 97% of shopping carts are abandoned on mobile. Consumers may use the cart to compare online prices and shipping rates, or treat their cart as an ongoing shopping list and often prefer to switch to a PC or laptop to complete their purchases. To increase conversion rates on mobile retailers need to work out a strategy to turn browsers into buyers. And as consumers buy more from mobile and tablets, retailers will need ways to recover sales from the high percentage of carts abandoned in their mobile app
To combat cart abandonment Email Marketers have already gotten on the bandwagon so now is an opportune time for Mobile Marketers to do the same. The results of email remarketing after cart abandonment are favorable; research can reveal that email remarketing drives higher order values, showing an increase of as much as 55% and that the majority of customers who are going to buy as a result of a remarketing campaign, will do so within 24 hours of abandoning a purchase.
Here are useful ways push notifications can be used for abandoned carts:
- Buy within the next hour and get free shipping
- Add a handbag and get 25 % off
In the above examples in the case of a retailer, through tight integration with their checkout flows in their app, they can send personalized push notifications to shoppers who have abandoned a cart. And with this, a retailer can notify shoppers through re-engagement where there is already a product in the shopping cart.
Similarly to shoppers who haven’t put anything in the cart a personalized push notification could be sent out such as:
- That Ted Baker Skater Dress with Lace is available in red
- The Karen Millen Black Patent Strappy that you looked at are available in your size
These pushes were delivered following on from the customer selecting a colour or a size.
Unlike email Push messaging can help to deliver a frictionless experience to the customer. With push messaging the shopper is placed right at the checkout, removing friction where your message and brand are elevated above the noise of the customers already crowded email inbox.
Push messaging can be used as a mechanism to reengage your customers who may have abandoned their carts or are on the verge of doing so. And for the retailers that embrace push notifications in this way, they will be miles ahead of the competition. And if it yields comparable results to email, you could recover up to between 12% and 16% of abandoned carts. However before your customer abandons ship there are mechanisms you can put in place to combat cart abandonment. One significant determining factor is free shipping, where a Deloitte study found that 69 % of customers are more likely to shop with online retailers who offer free shipping and 61 % of shoppers would quit their order if free shipping wasn’t offered. Ultimately with more and more consumers using their smartphones to shop and their carts being abandoned, now more than ever is an opportune time to take advantage of push messaging.