On average, 76% of people that visit your site and show an interest in your products will leave before completing a shopping cart payment. This is a common issue and many companies have now started to take action by remarketing their products.
Every ecommerce site should either have a remarketing system in place, or be planning to implement an effective process.
The main objective of your strategy is to convert people that abandon your website into paying customers, so here are the main options worth considering:
#1 Email remarketing
Email remarketing is used to connect with the customer immediately after they abandon to remind them about items they left in their cart. Often this is coupled with a discount in price, or free shipping, as an incentive to finish the order.
Customer engagement isn’t as powerful by email however, as they are easy to ignore and often fail to deal with other problems customers may have online, such as delivery options, or sizing guides. By using email in combination with other channels you can increase the chances of reaching a customer and increase your revenue.
#2 SMS/Text marketing
SMS – or text marketing – is sometimes overlooked by marketers looking to stay ahead of the technology curve. Smart devices have made browsing web pages on mobile phones a lot easier, which is why many companies are now returning to text marketing and inserting hyperlinks into their messages.
99% of text messages are opened by customers and over 30% of hyperlinks are clicked through. For a marketer, these are excellent figures and it is easy to see why SMS campaigns are making a resurgence for cart recovery.
#3 Phone calls
It doesn’t matter if you are in Retail, Travel, Insurance, Finance, Utilities or Telecoms, phone calls are the most effective cart recovery channel at your disposal. Not only do they achieve a good contact rate over 65% (source Optilead), but they also regularly achieve conversion rates well over 20% – many times more than that of email, which rarely rises over 5%.
An automated phone strategy would mean that when a customer leaves items in their online shopping cart and abandons their browser, a call is triggered to connect them with a member of your team to provide support.
This could result in an easy sale if, for example, the customer was having minor payment issues. For average cart values in excess of a few hundred pounds, the ROI far outweighs any call charges.
Capturing data for remarketing purposes
To connect with prospects that abandon carts, data capture is clearly very important. For calls and SMS, a valid telephone number needs to be captured before the customer has the chance to leave your website. To send emails too, there needs to be a seamless process in place to capture a valid email address so you can direct your remarketing later on.
It is important you implement a system that has the ability to validate and de-duplicate information instantly when it is input into your data capture screens.
The benefits of a multi-channel solution
When deciding on a strategy, it is clear that phone calls, email and SMS all have their own strengths and weaknesses. A multi-channel strategy incorporates all of these channels and makes sure each one has a role to play.
Calls have the best conversion rates, so it is important they are used for your most valuable website leads.
Emails are very low-cost, so they are more suited to leads of lower value.
SMS has fantastic open rates, which makes it ideal for those that haven’t responded to either of the previous channels. The majority of adults now have their mobile phone at their side throughout the day, making contact tremendously easy.
Shopping cart abandonment is a problem that affects some businesses worse than others. For those with a proactive system in place, what was once a problem is now a great source of online leads.
If you would like to know more about how you can manage online shopping cart abandonment for your business, feel free to fill out our contact form.
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