You are browsing a website, you add an item to your cart to make a purchase, and your boss walks by. You instantly click out and go on with your day... Sound familiar? While looking for a new pair of shoes, you place multiple items in your cart from different stores to keep track of them while you search for the best deal... Sound familiar? These are just a couple of the many circumstances in which consumers might abandon their shopping cart. Other factors that might cut the shopping experience short are: · Shipping costs · Forgetting login credentials · Ability to try on and test the product · Complexity of checkout process · Inability to contact customer support · Comparison shopping So how can you best remarket to get these customers back to your site to seal the deal? Make them feel special by wowing them with a sophisticated abandoned cart campaign. There are different types of abandoned cart campaigns you can send. It can be a friendly reminder of a pending shopping cart, an email with specific products that the subscriber previously viewed listed within the message, or a cross-sell of other items they may be interested in based on their previous activity. According to MarketingSherpa, online retailers report that up to 60% of shopping carts are left abandoned. For every 100 unique website visitors, two to five will make a purchase, and the rest will abandon the site. A Jupiter Research study also stated that emails that leverage click stream data can return nine times the revenue and 32 times the net profit of a standard email -- so why isn't everyone doing this? In today's crowded inbox, this may be a marketer's place to SHINE. Aside from the other promotional, transactional and personal messages in an inbox, this message can be tailored and specific to the consumer. Abandoned cart programs are well-oiled machines; they are segmented and targeted SPECIFICALLY for an individual in order to get to the end goal, a sale. Some have experienced a 20% to 40% increase in open rates, and a 15% to 30% increase in click-through rates when deploying an abandoned cart campaign over their day-to-day emails. These numbers speak for themselves, and the revenue associated with them is even higher than a standard batch and blast campaign, since these are reminder messages sent with a transactional tone. When ready to implement an abandoned cart program, make sure to watch out for the "coupon effect" and the "creepy factor." Are you being too Big Brother-ish? Do your customers feel like you are watching their every move? This is where you need to know your customer and TEST. Figure out what works for your subscribers, whether it's a basic reminder cart email, a product-specific campaign or a tailored cross-sell with a coupon attached. Some marketers send out coupons with each abandoned cart campaign. This could be a free shipping promotion or a dollar/percentage off. So are your customers being trained? Do not allow your customers to abandon in order to receive a coupon. Test sending a certain offer, promotion or none at all. Even though abandoned cart programs are automated, you should always be reinventing your program and testing which method works best. Some other items to test for abandoned cart campaigns: · Item Specific vs. Link to the Cart Only · Personalization vs. No Personalization · Offer vs. No Offer · Timing after Abandonment · Free Shipping or Free Returns If you are a retailer and are not sending abandoned cart messages, now is the time to start. Work on getting this up and running during the holiday season, when more people are shopping online and abandoning carts than during any other time of year. Finally, ALWAYS track your overall ROI. These programs drive such high results that marketers can leverage the data to launch online marketing efforts in the future. Implementing these tips will set you on the way to a solid abandoned cart program. Now if only we could keep them from abandoning, and keep them shopping!