Ecommerce & 70% Cart Abandonment: Regain Those Dollars With Email
The word on the street is that in the world of ecommerce, shoppers abandon carts up to 70% of the time before a purchase is made.
70%!
Ouch.
What hurts even more is that only 34% of ecommerce sites reach out to the shoppers who abandoned those carts with an opportunity to re-engage with their would-be purchases via a triggered email campaign. If your ecommerce site doesn't attempt to reconnect with shoppers who abandon carts on your site, you could be missing a considerable amount of revenue simply because you didn't ask.
As the preferred remarketing method, email outreach is relatively simple to implement and automation makes sending out follow up messages a no-brainer. Check out the following chart from a recent eMarketer article about cart abandonment and the intended move of ecommerce sites toward remarketing to the shoppers who abandoned a cart. Remarketing takes a number of forms including email marketing, targeted advertising, and outbound phone calls. But look at the bottom of the chart for a shocking statistic:
43% of ecommerce sites are not currently employing any form of remarketing to regain dollars lost on abandoned carts. Is your site one of them? If you think chasing those abandoned carts is a waste of time, consider this:
If your average cart total is $150 and if an average of 100 shopping carts are created on your site each month, statistically, up to 70 would be abandoned. Simple math shows that 70 abandoned carts each with $150 in merchandise in them results in $10,500 of lost sales. Over the course of a year, you'd be losing $126,000 with my simple model. If your cart size is larger and the number of abandoned carts is higher on your site, your monthly losses could be considerably higher. Consider that if your average cart size is $750, you could be losing $630,000 per year.
What can you do to remarket to those shoppers that abandon carts on your site? The industry go-to is definitely an email campaign. To make the most of an email remarketing campaign, consider the following tips:
- Follow up in a timely manner. While the exact number of days or hours might vary based on your product and target market, the rule of thumb is to strike while the iron is hot and ask for the sale while the purchase isn't too far from the shopper's mind. Don't wait too long. The shopper who abandoned a cart on your site might be just about to complete a purchase on your competitor's site.
- Automate, automate, automate. Make sure that your site offers automatic emails that are triggered by a shopper creating and abandoning a cart. Automation means that the shopper still gets the remarketing offer on the weekends and during holidays when your marketing department is closed.
- Personalize, personalize, personalize. If you have the opportunity to address the customer by name, do so. Likewise, use any information you gathered about the shopper's last visit--and any relevant personal information that they've shared with you--to customize the remarketing email just for them.
- Revisit cart contents. Remind the shopper of the items they put in their cart with thumbnail images and brief descriptions as well as a total for the purchase.
- Provide incentive to reengage. Internet Retailer tells us that 46% of shoppers abandon carts because they felt the shipping charge was too high. Your remarketing email provides the perfect opportunity to offer an incentive such as free shipping if the shopper returns and completes the purchase within a specific time frame, such as the next 24 hours. Other discount offers are also acceptible incentives, although free shipping speaks to the majority of shoppers' initial concerns.
- For large purchases, especially in the B2B market, consider a follow up phone call. A personalized phone call on a large abandoned purchase can go a long way in the B2B world. Just make sure to use a personable and knowledgeable sales person, not a generic call center employee who doesn't know your products or services. Ideally, the call would come from a person that the customer knows and trusts.
Still not convinced? S&S Worldwide saved 25% of abandoned carts using an email campaign. If your remarketing effort results in similar returns for the two simple examples that I gave above, you would move $31,500 and $157,500 from the "abandoned carts" column to the "booked sales" column over the course of one year. A quick calculation using your abandoned cart percentage and average cart total will tell you exactly how much money you are leaving on the table.
The question is this: Can you afford not to remarket on abandoned carts?