We’ve all heard the statistics.
70% of eCommerce carts are abandoned and Billions of dollars in revenue are lost to abandonment each year. The pundits call this a huge problem for online retail.
What if we looked at this “problem” through a different lens? What if we treated cart abandonment as an “opportunity”. It could be an opportunity to learn about why customers aren’t converting, an opportunity to provide great customer service, or an opportunity to leave a great impression with one of your potential customers. After all, cart abandonment is just a natural human behavior that we’re not going to change.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try. To reduce abandonment, eCommerce companies employ triggered pop-ups, segmented offers, machine learning, retargeting with display advertisements and of course cart abandonment email.
There are plenty of case studies out there that demonstrate the revenue generating power of cart abandonment email. In fact, over 20% of the Internet Retailer 500 have an active cart abandonment email campaign as I write this.
Over 20% of the Internet Retailer 500 companies have active cart abandonment campaigns. Do you?
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What we’re focusing on in this post is not whether you should or shouldn’t send cart abandonment email. That’s a given.
We’re going to explore a benefit of cart abandonment email that almost no one talks about, but could be more important to your business then simply winning back orders.
The hidden benefit of cart abandonment email is this: It creates a continuous feedback loop with one of the most important customer groups that visits your website: those customers that almost bought something but didn’t for some reason.
There are many reasons why customers abandon, right? They could have gotten spooked by high shipping costs, experienced a bug with payment or a hundred other reasons. What’s important is that cart abandonment email gives you the opportunity to continue the conversation with customers who got right to the conversion finish line but walked away.
By asking the right customer service questions such as, “Was there a problem?” or “How can we help?”, you’ll be amazed by how many of your potential customers take you up on the offer to start a dialog about why they didn’t buy.
We’ve launched over 300 cart abandonment email campaigns at Rejoiner and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve uncovered friction points that our clients didn’t even know existed. It could have been a bug with their payment gateway, unclear language about additional costs on the checkout form, or trust issues that caused customers to bail before converting.
Most retailers are so close to the operational components of their business, that they forget to regularly experience the buying process from the perspective of their customers. By establishing this feedback loop and having the systems in place to constantly monitor the feedback of cart abandoners, you can more proactively address the friction points that are causing customers to abandon in the first place (which should increase your conversion rate over time naturally)
There are several ways to start gathering more qualitative feedback from the customers who abandoned your website. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Send from a live, monitored reply-to address
We always recommend sending your cart abandonment email campaigns from a live, monitored inbox. It’s important that you set up a system so that customer replies are parsed by a real person and trends are noted and shared with the team. Sending your cart abandonment email campaign from a real person’s name vs. a company name will also go a long way in increasing your campaign open rates. Some even include their own picture in the email signature.
Use a toll-free # and document concerns
When you send a cart abandonment email, it’s hugely important to include some way for customers to contact you via phone. Many times customers abandon simply because they have unanswered questions about some aspect of buying from you. A simple phone call can resolve those issues in minutes. Be sure to set up a system with your customer service reps to document the concerns of callers and socialize the insight across your organization.
Encourage live chat
If you don’t have the team to manage incoming calls, give live chat a try. Directing cart abandoners to a special landing page with live chat installed can be just as effective. The point is getting customers with high buying intent to a place where they can get their questions answered immediately. Use a tool like Olark that can automatically save chat transcripts, then mine them once a month to identify trends.
Send a survey
Many of our clients forgo trying to win the order back completely. Instead they send a simple email to cart abandoners that requests a survey response. They usually give away a small offer in exchange for the survey completion as well. This does two things: let’s the potential customer know you are trying to get better and incentivizes the customer to use the offer in the future. You get awesome qualitative feedback and your potential customers gets a reason to come back to your site.
Cart abandonment email isn’t just about winning back conversions. Delivering this type of campaign is a fantastic way to gather qualitative feedback from your customer base as to what’s causing them not to convert in the first place. This is insight you can use to improve your conversion funnel and create a better buying experience for future customers.
What about you? Have you ever used this tactic to learn about where the friction points are in your conversion funnel?
The post The Hidden Benefit Of Cart Abandonment Emails appeared first on LemonStand.
