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Don't Abandon Hope: You CAN Remarket To Abandoned-Cart Consumers

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

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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!

1 comment about "Don't Abandon Hope: You CAN Remarket To Abandoned-Cart Consumers".
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  1. Kim Shadbolt from LeadCall, December 6, 2010 at 8:55 a.m.

    Cart abandonment email remarketing is certainly the most commonly known solution to try and improve online conversions however most email remarketing campaigns are produced at a cost as they require an offer or incentive to attract a customer to rethink the purchase. For example an airline may encourage customers to book a holiday by offering 10% off flights if they book within the next week.

    At LeadCall we have found that the best solution to lowering cart abandonment rates is by actually talking to the consumer and asking them first hand, why they haven't decided to complete a transaction. This way companies have the chance to try and convert the customer, and even if unsuccessful they still have the opportunity to find out where they are going wrong.

    This relates directly to point 5 in your article explaining other factors that might cut the shopping experience short, *Inability to contact customer support*. At LeadCall we don’t wait for customers to contact us, we identify an online drop-off and contact them within seconds of the process taking place, and results/feedback to this approach have proven much more effective than previous attempts at remarketing.

    LeadCall captures customer data as they enter it online along with information about their query or potential purchase. It then relays this information to well informed agents at the companies call-centre and within seconds the agent can call the customer in order to offer their help or assistance and hopefully complete a transaction. LeadCall clients, such as Hughes Insurance and bmi have seen conversions of up to 30% along with huge increases in revenue and an excellent reputation for customer service. LeadCall offers companies a 2 week trial of their service for free, to enable them to experience the benefits for themselves. For more information visit: www.leadcall.co.uk

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