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Shopping cart abandonment impacts all brands online. Who hasn’t abandoned a basket at some point? There are many reasons as to why this might occur. Simply leaving this a just one of those things is not the smartest move. There is a way that can help online brands reduce or reactivate abandoned baskets using re-engagement multi-channel marketing campaigns that will send automated messages to remind and entice the user with the aim of getting them to return to complete the order. Introducing these campaigns to your marketing strategy will enable brands to reduce shopping cart abandonment and help drive revenue.
Before implementing a basket abandonment programme, brands first need to identify if they have an issue? And what percentage of your users are abandoning their online shopping cart at the final stages?
Below are the average industry shopping cart abandonment rates, how does your business measure up?
Statistics from SalesCycle
If you are finding that you have an issue with the number of abandoned baskets, don’t panic, you have a massive opportunity to win back these abandoned baskets and drive the users to complete their purchase.
Why are Online Shopping Baskets Abandoned?
It is well documented as to why baskets are abandoned. The main reasons include
Hidden Charges
Higher Than Expected Delivery Costs
Delivery Options
Payment Methods
Technical Issues
Forced Registration
User Experience
How many of these do you think are a contributing factor to your abandoned baskets?
Hidden Charges
If retailers are adding extra charges during the checkout phase that are not abundantly clear to the shopper than you are likely to find your abandoned rate will be higher. Keep your pricing simple, clear and fair and you will see a higher purchase completion rate.
Delivery Charges
Offer free delivery? But only for qualifying orders? Again, let the customer know beforehand. Additionally, are your shipping cost out of the norm? For example, if you are shipping a book, that the customer is expecting to be shipped for a couple of pounds/euros/dollars etc. and your site are changing double that, you may find that is a major issue for your customers and they will abandon their online basket.
Payment Methods
Nowadays there are plenty of different ways for transactions to be completed; Debit Card, Credit Card, Paypal, Giropay, Google Checkout, WePay etc. so it is important for online retailers to embrace the growing trends and accept different payment options available to your customer.
Technical Issues
If the process is broken, and the customer cannot actually complete the purchase than abandonment is inevitable. Make sure you are checking your process and have a robust system in place to alert you to any issues that occur.
User Experience
Don’t take this for granted. How many steps need to be completed in order to complete the checkout? How obvious is it for the customer to complete the correct area’s? What are the security measures in place to make sure that the customer feels safe and is protected? How long does your checkout process take, compared to other competitors? To make the users experience perfect you will need to make sure that you tackle any issues that you have within the checkout process.
Forced Registration
This links to the User Experience, but I wanted to single this out. How important is it for you for your customers to register and become members? If this is imperative to your business then, by all means, request this before an order can be completed, however, if not, you could give the option to the customer or allow them to checkout as a guest. It is likely that you will still be requesting the same information for the most part. And after the completion of the checkout, you can easily incentivise them to register with an offer.
Discover your common reasons to abandonment and look at how you can tackle them head-on.
How to reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
How can online brands re-engage their user in order to complete their purchase?
Intelligent personalised multi-channel marketing campaigns can enable online brands to re-engage their user and drive purchase completion. In this blog, we take a look at what engagement channels can drive online shopping cart recovery.
Web Push Notifications
If you aren’t already using Web Push, then initializing it for cart recovery campaigns is a great way to start. You can engage web users with web push notifications when they are on your website or even if they are browsing another site. e. Specifying an ideal time after abandonment will allow you to target the abandoned user at the optimal time for your business, with a tailored message based on the item(s) they have abandoned. The major benefits to this are that you can instantly deliver this abandonment message when they leave the site. This will allow you to remind them that they didn’t complete the purchase and also give them a quick call to action that will bring them straight back to the abandoned basket
Web Push isn’t limited to desktops as it is available across multiple mobile devices as well, which means you can target your customers on the go, and get them back to complete the order.
Web Push Notifications can be tailored and link directly to the user’s basket, meaning a frictionless process for the user. When they click on the notification the user will be brought back to the basket in their browser, with the chosen contents in place.
When creating Web Push campaigns, you can choose how long after the user has abandoned their shopping cart, they will receive a web push notification. This enables you to use your optimum time for cart recovery.
One of the big benefits to the web push solution for basket recovery is that you can really drive urgency with your notification. For example, you could choose to offer a discount to the user if they complete the order in within 24 hours, driving them complete the purchase. This method also enables you to send a reminder notification perhaps 4 hours before the deadline to complete, to remind and continue to drive the user to complete the purchase.
Email Marketing is an important engagement channel that businesses use and is often the first channel that they utilize due to the reach, targeting and sophistication of the tools available.
So it is only natural for email to be a big player in the cart abandonment recovery campaigns. Email allows you to send a basket recovery email to your subscriber directly into their inbox, for the next time they view their email. The email can be behaviourally targeted to each subscriber individually, containing the details of their abandoned basket and recommendations of alternative products that they might also be interested in. The recovery email can also direct the subscriber back to the abandoned basket like with web push.
An additional benefit of email is that you can create automated campaigns that will send a series of emails to the customer after shopping cart abandonment. This allows online retailers to increase the incentive of the completion through the purchase, for example on email 1 you could remind them what they left in the basket, email 2 you might offer free delivery or a nominal discount and the final email you could go all in and give them an additional discount if the purchase is completed.
In order for you to use email to target abandoned shopping baskets, you need to know who the shopper is. This is one of the reasons why many sites will ask for registration before checkout can be completed. Using email as part of a multi-channel approach to basket recovery will give you the option to bypass the registration stage by targeting those baskets via a different channel.
On-Site Notification Centre and Messages
Another channel that you include in multi-channel recovery campaigns is an onsite notification or message centre. These channels offer you the option to message visitors to your site and they don’t require an opt-in as the requirement is for the user to be on the website. So how can you utilise this when a basket is abandoned, especially as the user may well have left your site? A good question isn’t it, but not all baskets are abandoned in the same way. Often it is perceived that the user has to leave the site in order for the basket to be counted as abandoned, but what if the user had added some items to their basket but hadn’t started the checkout process and were lying dormant on your site, perhaps looking at competitors site to compare prices or delivery options. Onsite messages allow brands to deliver rich content to the user when they return to the page, this could contain some product information based on their browsing history or recommended products. So even though this might not be a traditional abandonment, this can be used as a proactive method of getting the checkout process completed, instead of abandoned.
Deliver Multi-Channel Campaigns
Now hopefully by getting this far, you will have realised that one channel on its own cannot service all of the abandoned baskets. Which is why having a basket recovery campaign built using multiple engagement channels will give you larger opportunities to recover lost revenue. The three channels picked for this post are ones that allow you to reconnect with the known subscriber by email, the known and unknown notification subscribers by web push and the unknown but non-subscribers by using the on-site notification center and in messages.
Xtremepush are experts in helping brands with basket recovery and re-engaging users across multiple channels. We have work with many companies across many verticals including Retail & Ecommerce, Sports Betting & Gaming, Retail Banking and Publishing to help them to drive revenue and increase with multi-channel marketing campaigns. You can view our recent customer case studies here.
Find out more about how our solution can help you reduce online cart abandonment here.
