Savvy marketers know that driving traffic to your site is only half the battle. Once a visitor gets to your site, the challenge becomes getting them to complete a conversion. For ecommerce sites, a major hurdle to completing a sale is shopping cart abandonment – when shoppers add items to their online shopping carts but do not complete the purchase.
The latest research determined that 68% of all online shopping carts are abandoned, leaving behind approximately $4 trillion in merchandise sales in the past year alone. The good news is that online retailers have a major opportunity to recover those sales using re-engagement tactics.
To effectively re-engage a potential customer, it is important to understand why they may have abandoned their shopping cart in the first place. Here are the top 5 reasons online shoppers abandon their carts:
They are spooked by unexpected costs. Customers are surprised by the price spike once shipping and taxes are included in the total.
They get interrupted. Some customers have to walk away from their phones or computers in the middle of the checkout process.
They are doing research. Some customers compare prices between various retailers or add an item to their cart with the intention of researching it later.
The checkout process takes too long. Some customers get impatient with lengthy, multiple-step checkout processes or need to create an account.
The checkout process is not mobile-friendly. More and more consumers are shopping from smartphones and tablets and will abandon their purchase if the checkout process is not optimized for mobile.
By re-engaging potential customers, you can turn abandoned carts into sales. For the most effective results, utilize one or more of these tactics:
- Follow-up email within 24 hours of their site visit. Sending the customer an email with product images and direct links to the product page can remind them to complete a purchase.
- Offer a time-sensitive incentive to complete the purchase. Offering free shipping or a discount places urgency on the purchase, and can convert shoppers who left for better deals or lower prices elsewhere.
- Use dynamic retargeting to serve ads in real time that feature abandoned products. That way, the shopper is being reminded of their abandoned products wherever they are spending time on the web, including on social media.
While it may seem like a lot of work to set up re-engagement campaigns, chances are you already have a lot of the data you need. By segmenting your customers based on their specific behaviors, you can implement automated, custom-tailored re-engagement campaigns to turn abandoned carts into sales.
