If you have an online store you need to be proactive with shopping cart abandonment.
You should take steps to ensure no one falls through the cracks.
You have done the work to get traffic, right?
You have enticed them to press the add to cart button. Then the drop off a cliff during checkout…
I know from experience this is an eComm business owner’s nightmare.
What’s going wrong? Is the technology failing at checkout? Are we supplying all the required information around delivery, returns, etc.?
While these things are super important to have in place, you have to take a breath and realise, life happens.
Your partner or kids can interrupt you. The phone might ring. Any manner of distractions can pop up when your customers are sat, credit card in hand.
Do not despair. You only need to set measures in place to be proactive, and you can turn things around.
Your shopping cart recovery rate will increase. You will get more sales. Everyone will be happy.
So how do you do it?
Well, if you are on software such as Shopify or BigCommerce then they have feature sets to deal with this. If you are not on the top pricing tier or have other software, all is not lost.
Regardless of the eCommerce platform, your store is on it is ridiculously easy to get a process in place.
All you need is an account with an ESP (Email Service Provider) that allows you to use automated workflows.
If you are on Shopify, I would recommend ActiveCampaign as they have a deep integration. This deep integration allows you to do some pretty amazing stuff in your workflows.
The ESP script works like magic, tracking visitors on your website. When a user lands on the shopping cart page and doesn’t complete checkout within a given time frame the sequence begins…
The recovery sequence may take the form of a friendly email reminder 30 minutes or 1 hour after the cutoff.
Your first reminder email may look something like this…
Hey First_Name,
We noticed you didn’t complete the checkout with your items.
If you need any help or have any questions please let us know. We would love to help.
Click here to complete your order.
Kind Regards,
Yourstore.com
This kind of reminder is a simple nudge for those distracted during checkout. But what if they simply decided not to buy?
Well, you have the automation in place now. You could add a step to your workflow that checks again a few hours after the first reminder.
If that visitor still hasn’t checked out, you could send them an incentive to complete. The incentive might be a discount coupon, free shipping, or something else.
These are some simple measures you can take to make sure your conversion rates are rising.
Better conversion rates equals more sales and more profits.
Anything you can do that will affect your bottom line is worth your time and energy, right?
Reducing shopping cart abandonment is a no-brainer. Most of these people WANT to complete the sale. You need to put the mechanism in place to prompt them to do so.
Then you are home free. Shopping cart abandonment fix in place, check. You can then concentrate your efforts elsewhere.
Next Steps
Sign up for an account (if you don’t already have one) with an ESP that will allow you to create automated workflows.
Install their tracking/integrations into your website.
Set up your abandonment workflow with reminder emails, discount offers, etc.
Activate the workflow. Sit back and watch the magic happen.
