Every ecommerce business tries to achieve higher conversion rates and increase average order values by getting shoppers to complete transactions and make their way through the sales funnel. However, many businesses face a hindrance in the last step of the funnel in the form of cart abandonment. Irrespective of the interest you generate on your products or amount of traffic on the website, generating revenue only happens when customers complete transactions. While cart abandonment is a universal problem faced by ecommerce businesses, regaining this lost business can often make the difference between a great business and good business.
In this two part series on cart abandonment, we address the do’s and don’ts businesses should follow to reduce cart abandonment and get customers back to complete their abandoned transaction. In the first part we will discuss what businesses need to do to handle cart abandonments.
Cart Abandonment – What to do
Customer Feedback and Testimonials
Building trust with customers plays an important role in gaining new business. Along with displaying security seals and customer testimonials and feedback scores for your products. Let your potential customers know what your existing customers think about your products. Testimonials and feedback scores act as a mechanism to preach your value proposition and address the concerns of your shoppers.
Maintain Optimal Site Speed and Avoid Downtimes or Errors
Your customers expect your website to load faster, provide accurate information and not face any downtime issues during the transaction. Continually test your website for speed, missing product pages or error pages. Update the product pages and inventory at regular intervals to ensure that your customers do not face any “product not found” or not available errors. Also, ensure that you monitor your server requirements during the peak season. Ensure that you have required hardware setup to support higher traffics.
Save the Cart
Let your customers know that you are saving the products they have abandoned in the cart. Send them a personalized email reminding that you are storing their items for later. Similarly, set a remainder to show the products in the cart, next time the customer logins to your website. This data also helps you in understanding the buying personas of your visitors. This helps in executing targeted email campaigns for your customers, based on their buying personas.
Remarketing Email Campaigns
Design remarketing campaigns to reach out to the customers who have abandoned their carts. You want your customers to come back and complete their transaction. If you have collected email addresses, run email campaigns for the products they have chosen. You can also run email campaigns about any deals on similar products in the future.
Ad Retargeting
Retargeting works by keeping track of people who visited your website and display your ads to them while they are browsing other websites. This helps you in reminding your customers about the products they have added in the cart and bringing them back to your website. Retargeting ads can be customized based on the set of criteria you define. However, make sure that you are not getting repetitive with your ads. Don’t rely on a single ad. Create a set of ads for all your customer types to capture their attention.
While the necessary steps to handle cart abandonment are addressed in this post, the next part will address the steps you should avoid in order to reduce cart abandonment.
