Win abandoned cart customer

Increase your revenue by winning customers who abandoned carts

There are various reasons why the customers abandon the cart halfway through the checkout process. These almost-customers are low hanging fruits to give your business a boost. With a more that 65% cart abandonment rate, even if your business can bring in 50% of these customers back, it will increase your toplines.

      1. Pre-requisite to winning back:

When a customer begins the checkout process, it is very vital to gather one of the following: email or phone number. If you don't, there is no way to reach out to the customer and potentially get him back, unless he changes his mind and returns back.

      2. Trigger Emails:

Send a follow up cart abandonment email to the customer. The timing of the email and the content is utmost important. Emails sent WITHIN A FEW HOURS of cart abandonment have higher conversion rate. However, sending an email immediately when the cart is abandoned may be too intrusive. Also, if the email is sent a few days later, the customer perhaps would have lost interest. An email within 12-24 hours has shown maximum conversions. The other important aspect is the content of the email. Personalizing the email and offering help in terms of a direct customer service number or email would be useful to bring back customers. No sales pitch is required here.

      3. Analytics:

The analytics report provides informative statistics. Study the report to see at what stages the carts are abandoned. If you see a clear trend, it’s time to address your website by fixing the problem. Repeat the study post the fix.

      4. Remarketing & Retargeting:

      Remarketing & retargeting the customers who visited your site and did not place order is a good way to remind customers of their abandoned cart. To be able to do so, make some technical upgrades to your site. When the customer visited your site, persist their browse behavior local to the computer. When browsing other websites, the search engines personalize the ads so that they see their recent browse history. This may bring them back. Example: eBags.com – Once you leave the eBags.com site, it picks the browse history and shows the items you were interested in on other sites that you navigate to.

      5. Service call:

If you obtained the contact number of the customer during the checkout, a service call may help understand reasons for cart abandonment. Call them and help address their concern so as to complete the checkout process. A lot of companies have an option to connect with the customer service representative by live chat/ support number on the checkout screen. It helps the prospective customer right away during the checkout process.

      6. Incentivize:

In order to win customers back, have a program to incentivize them. Provide offers and promotions relevant to the products in cart. However, the incentives should be provided to selective customers based on their purchase history, buying pattern, cart value or some other business driver. Sending the offers right after the cart is abandoned may put the customer in a habit of expecting discounts. They will abandon their cart in this expectation each time. Example: GobalWholeSaleArt.com calls customers who abandons cart and works out offers to complete checkout.

Not all cart abandonments are bad. Customers do like to check items, add to cart, compare with competitors, think and come back. You can therefore, only diminish this percentage and not avoid it completely. While these are actions that can be taken post cart abondonment, it is important to understand Why Cart Abondonment happens on ecommerce sites.

Please provide your feedback on this article and add other ways that could possibly help in winning customers from abandoned carts back.