Save That Shopping Cart! Tips To Prevent Cart Abandonment.

How many times have you gone to a website, put something in your cart only to leave it there? Now imagine condensing the amount of people that abandon their carts over the course of a month into one single day. We call it Cyber Monday and it is right on the horizon. Make sure you are ready for all the Cyber Monday activity by setting up systems to take advantage of abandoned shopping carts.
By this point, you’ve probably already created your marketing campaigns to promote Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but here are some ways you can take your campaigns to the next level.

Timing is Important

The effectiveness of abandoned cart emails is reliant on the timing of the reminder you send to your buyer about what they left in their shopping carts. If you send your email a month later, most likely that person will have forgotten that they even wanted that item, or they may have already purchased it from a competitor.
Create trigger based campaigns that listen for people who added an item to their carts but did not convert by purchasing that item. Then create a wait step, which could be a couple of hours to a day, that sends an email reminder about the items in their cart and that they still have time to make their purchase. Do not send an abandoned cart email if the items are limited–unless you include in the email campaign logic to wait a couple hours, but to not execute the campaign if the items have all been sold and you no longer have inventory.

Incentivize Further

If you really want to move your inventory, then add an additional discount, or points, for people who end up making the purchase after they receive your abandoned cart email. Also, you can use this touch point as an opportunity to include other purchases that are recommended for them–or you can highlight positive reviews from other people who bought that item.  Try to think about why the cart didn’t convert to a purchase from a customer’s point of view –it could have been because of price, because they found something else they liked better, or purely because they were shopping for so many things that they forgot. Pay attention to these conversion pain points and find ways to help people get over them.

Take a look at this Nordstroms email. It is effective because it creates incentives in two ways–the email highlights free shipping and returns, which is an added incentive that a buyer may not have known about, and the email creates a sense of urgency by letting the buyer know that popular items may sell out soon.

Beyond the Holidays

A lot of marketers think about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They put together full-blown plans, but often forget about continuing the conversations past these two discount days. To take your campaigns to the next level, make sure to track all of the behaviors that are occurring. Who is purchasing, who is sharing, and who is not purchasing? Then takes your learnings and create behavior based campaigns that address your consumer behaviors, such as triggered campaigns that send messages for people to share on social media, or an invite for people who completed a purchase to enter a loyalty or reward program as a thank you for purchasing.
How have you addressed abandoned carts in the past? What are you doing differently this time around? Share your thoughts in the comments below.