Reduce cart abandonment, make lots more sales
In the first of ’10 ways etailers may be leaving money on the table’ Eric Tobias, ExactTarget’s vice president of web products, explains how ecommerce businesses can reduce the perennial problem of shopping cart abandonment.
Problem #1 ‘No Cart Abandonment Strategy‘
Our Retail Touchpoints Exposed data found that only 22 percent of retailers on the National Retail Federation’s STORES® 2011 Hot 100 Retail Report send cart abandonment emails to bring customers back to their site. Why are 78 percent of retailers leaving money on the table and letting their shoppers waltz over to their competitors’ site?
Abandoned cart programs are an “easy win” for retailers to recapture lost revenue.
So that leads us to the simple question – does your company have a customer abandonment strategy? If not, here are some easy tips to get started:
• Triggering the first email post-abandonment: The higher the competition and lower the complexity of the product, the quicker you should send your message. Purchases that typically have a longer sales cycle should correspond to a longer wait between messages.
• Capture onsite behavior to leverage the window of opportunity: Tagging your site so that messages are sent automatically during the window of opportunity incorporating their onsite behavior will dramatically increase ROI.
• Single-send or multiple touch-points: Are you just sending one email after a shopper abandons or are you creating a drip campaign with multiple touch points? Consider assigning a cadence or an ongoing drip campaign around the abandon cart- specially for larger purchases that warrant two or three communications.
• To discount or not to discount: A major question many retailers ask themselves when considering setting up an abandon cart drip campaign. Consider leading with a reminder email, not a discount.
By not including a discount in the first few abandon cart emails, customers are not conditioned to abandon their carts in order to receive a discount offer, drastically impacting your bottom line. If you want to experiment with discounting in abandon cart emails try running A/B tests to determine what the best scenario is for your business.
Armed and ready with these abandon cart tips, retailers can go forth to create their own dynamic and impactful abandon cart campaigns to recapture lost revenue and ensure they are not leaving money on the table, especially for their competitors.
For more information visit ExactTarget’s website
couldn’t agree more with abandon cart emails being an easy quick win. However, the real challenge in my opinion is simplifying the offerings around how the solutions can be implemented and offered by these larger enterprises like ExactTarget, Cheetamail and the analytics providers like coremetrics. My feeling is that the main reason why such few sites run these programs is because it’s so difficult to get them off the ground when it comes to using these enterprise solutions. I know from first hand experience because we tried it with ET and through coremetrics. Very difficult and costly.
My feeling is that the main reason why such few sites run these programs is because it’s so difficult to get them off the ground when it comes to using these enterprise solutions. Very difficult and costly.