Although several studies report varying percentages, the agreed-upon average for an abandoned cart rate is about 70%. This means 7 out of 10 people are adding a product into their online shopping cart and then leaving the page without completing the checkout process. If your store happens to be encountering the same problem, don’t worry! We’ll be going over some suggestions that address the abandonment rate as well as tips for recapturing some of these customers.
Preventing Shopping Cart Abandonment
The first line of defense against a high abandonment rate is to do what you can to prevent customers from leaving. In this section, we’ll talk about what you can do to reduce the reasons that might prevent a purchase.
Simple Checkout Process
Shoppers are more inclined to complete their purchase if the process to do so is as easy as possible for them. If your customers have to fill out several forms, it’s more likely that they’ll drop out of the funnel due to the checkout being more complicated than they expected. The goal is to have your shoppers trust your site and want to come back for future purchases, so by providing a positive checkout experience, you’re encouraging this behavior.
Transparent Shipping Costs
After entering their shipping information, any sort of additional charge might deter someone from finalizing their purchase. Customers usually abandon their carts when they feel as though their expectations are not being met and unexpected fees definitely fall into this category. Rather than having this come as a surprise to them, find ways to inform your visitors of your shipping costs in advance so that they don’t feel any mistrust towards your brand and those “sneaky” shipping costs.
Guest Checkout
Customers shouldn’t have to be pressured into signing up for an account in order to purchase a product from your website. For example, if your visitor happens to be a first-time customer, they likely aren’t ready to take that step yet and in many cases, this is just an unnecessary hindrance to them. To make their checkout experience as frictionless as possible, we recommend not including this requirement in your funnel and providing the option of a guest checkout.
Secure Payment
When it comes to paying online, it’s understandable that a customer would be want to be extremely cautious. If your website doesn’t seem like it’s safe, customers are likely to go somewhere where they feel their personal information would be more secure. If this is the case for your website now, addressing this issue could help you boost your conversion rates and encourage shoppers to complete their purchases. Having an assortment of popular payment options is essential too because customers are more willing to buy when there’s a payment method that is trustworthy and convenient.
Lots of third-party options, like Facebook Ads for example, can help to supplement your retargeting strategy by integrating it with your ecommerce store. Even something as simple as showing the shopper the product(s) in their cart can convert them into being a paying customer.
Emails can be sent not only as a friendly reminder but also to create urgency to motivate them through limited availability or other offers.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
Regardless of how much effort you put into preventing abandoned carts, the rate will never go down to 0%. However, in this section, we’ll go over various things you can do to try and reengage your customers and encourage them to return to complete their purchase.
Abandoned Cart Emails
A powerful way to interact with your customers is through a personalized email that leads them back to your website and reminds them that they still have content in their shopping cart. Here are some of our tips to write a successful recovery email.
1. Exciting Subject Line
The average open rate for any given email ranges from 12-25%. In order to lead your customer back to your website, you’ll need to grab their attention first. With open rates as low as they are, it’s likely that if your subject line doesn’t catch their eye from the start, they won’t bother clicking on your message.
2. Include Product Images
If you’re able to get your customer to click on your email, you’ve completed the first step! By including images of the products in their shopping cart or even images of similar products, you’re reminding them of what they wanted to buy and can even show them products that you think they may also like.
3. Provide Discounts
Sometimes all your customer really needs is a slight incentive to push them towards completing their purchase. You wouldn’t even need to provide a storewide promotion! A small discount personalized to the customer, like free shipping or a small percentage off, is often enough for them to reconsider the product and some might even go through with buying your product.
4. Consider Incorporating SMS
Just like email, you’ll want your text messages to have compelling copy, exciting imagery, and even an occasional promotion. The focus of this campaign is exactly the same! By setting up a great SMS recovery campaign, which actually has a higher open rate than email, you’ll be able to recover carts from shoppers who genuinely had an interest in your products on their own.
Retargeting Ads
Another great way to recover lost customers is through retargeting ads! Web browsers store data that keeps track of websites that people view and this data, known as “cookies”, helps e-commerce marketers create specific ads to retarget those who have visited their site. These ads also have an average clickthrough rate of 0.7% which is much higher than that of typical display ads. Since these ads target those who added products to the shopping cart but didn’t finish the checkout process, their effectiveness makes sense because these people were already interested in these products on their own.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are great platforms for retargeting. Google alone controls almost 40% of the total pay-per-click market so it’s a top contender that can make sure your ads are finding your target audience. The Facebook pixel is also easy to implement into your website and with nearly 2.5 billion users every month, it’s one of the most visited sites on the Internet. You’ll be able to use this pixel to track the traffic on your site to see what pages are looked at the most and dynamically retarget shoppers that have interacted with your products.
E-commerce brands lose approximately $18 billion worth of sales revenue each year due to shopping cart abandonment so this is quickly becoming an issue that many companies can no longer afford to ignore. We hope this article has been helpful and that these tips can help you keep up with that 70% abandonment rate!