For many ecommerce businesses, abandoned shopping carts are one of the biggest annoyances. You can see someone is ready to go with a cart full of goods, but they bail at the last minute. You can ponder why all you want, and not do anything about it. Or, you can try and win these customers back.
So what methods are most effective in marketing to potential customers who have shown an explicit interest in what you have to offer? And how can you ensure when they come back, they are more likely to convert this time around?
Personal emails
People are more likely to open an email if they can see it has come from a real person, rather than a faceless corporation or other entity.
By utilising a personal email outreach plan, you can get potential customers to open emails they would otherwise ignore.
This also helps to build trust with your audience, as they get to know the people behind the brand.
AdWords remarketing
AdWords remarketing allows you to retarget customers who have previously been on your site – including those that have abandoned shopping carts.
By using remarketing, you can provide these potential customers with a more relevant message across the Google Search and Display networks.
By marketing specifically to potential customers who have been on your site, such as abandoning a cart or someone who has visited a specific page, your messages can be more specific and help with your conversions. By utilising this data, you can see the potential of marketing to people who have already expressed a keen interest in specific products or services you offer – so much so, they added them to their shopping basket.
Facebook Ad Remarketing
In a similar vein to AdWords, Facebook also allows you to target customers who have abandoned baskets or visited specific pages.
If you are B2C, then Facebook could reap particularly good results. However, Facebook advertising is also key for many B2B businesses. At the end of the day, you will need to assess where your audience is more likely to be found, and which approach is most likely to be effective. While Facebook is used by many, many people across the globe, it will be more suitable to particular industries and businesses than others.
Marketing automation
By creating automated emails that get sent out whenever potential customers take particular actions, you can ensure your messaging is highly targeted and timely.
A drip campaign that is automated after someone abandons a cart can be particularly effective, as you can see they were interested in what you had to offer, and continually send targeted messages after this, with personalised cart contents and descriptions that remind them what they were looking for.
The best part about automating your drip campaigns is that once it is set up and ready to go, you needn’t worry about it in the long run. It will continue to market to those who take actions you have previously categorised, or when they abandon a basket.
Incentives
Once a customer hits the shopping cart, are you doing anything to entice them to hit buy now there and then? Probably not.
Whatever you can incentivise, it can be very useful in ensuring more people convert, and don’t abandon a basket. This could be as simple as offering free shipping, as this can be a turn-off when someone hits the check-out without realising there is an additional fee coming their way.
Other incentives could be offers, whether it’s additional products at a discount, or rewards for purchasing such as a points system. Perhaps there is a discount code that has a limited time period, displayed to particular customers, or after a specific amount of time spent on the site or in the checkout stage.
Conversion rate optimisation
Many businesses fail to optimise the checkout process currently on their site. No matter how good the rest of your website looks or performs, a bad shopping cart is a business liability.
Without optimising the checkout process, it’s unlikely abandoned shopping cart customers will come back and convert.
It may be as simple as offering guest checkout, a different way to pay, or altering your shipping options. But whatever it is, you should aim to reduce the number of steps required to as few as possible, and make sure the required buttons and fields stand-out and are easy to use.
