How To Reduce Cart Abandonment To Drive Sales

There’s lost revenue sitting in your shoppers’ abandoned carts. Probably, a lot more than you’d like. In fact, eCommerce stores lose a combined £18 billion to cart abandonment every year in the UK alone.

But how much revenue can you recover by running a solid cart abandonment program?

Considering The Baynard Institute calculated that shoppers abandon 69.99% of their carts, there’s huge potential for profit. For instance, converting just one-third of those abandonments into buyers would result in a 23% boost in sales. If you make £10,000 monthly, that’s an extra £27,600 every year!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What are the Key Types of Abandonments? What causes Cart Abandonment? The Killer Abandonment Tactic Marketers overlook How to Reduce Cart Abandonment How to Prevent Cart Abandonment

THE KEY TYPES OF ABANDONMENT YOU NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS AN ABANDONED CART?

Cart abandonment, also known as basket abandonment, occurs when an online shopper places items in their cart but never buys them. It’s a common and frustrating problem for eCommerce stores. Fortunately, a well-thought-out marketing strategy can reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate.

Example of cart abandonment

WHAT IS AN ABANDONED BROWSE?

An abandoned browse happens when a potential customer looks at products but leaves the online store before adding items to their cart or purchasing.

Setting abandoned browse triggers is a great way to identify browsers with more buying intent. It’s best to set a trigger at a specific interval, for example, when a shopper has spent 10 minutes browsing your website or looked at multiple products in the same range.

Targeting abandoned browsers is a valuable part of any marketing strategy. But it doesn’t pack the punch of a shopping cart abandonment campaign because browsers may not be ready to purchase.

WHAT IS CHECKOUT ABANDONMENT?

In the case of checkout abandonment, an online shopper fills their cart and initiates the checkout process but exits the website before buying. A customer who clicks the “checkout” button is undoubtedly interested in buying. Therefore, there’s a good chance an avoidable problem has put them off completing the order.

Complicated checkout pages, unexpected costs, and forced registration are common issues. Instead, make the checkout process convenient and easy. Adding time-saving features like auto-fills, well-placed shortcuts, and payment options helps maintain buying momentum.

WHAT ARE THE LEADING CAUSES OF CART ABANDONMENT?

Many factors influence shopping cart abandonment rates, so it’s important that you figure out your specific causes to drive your conversion rate. It can range from shoppers seeing unexpected shipping costs, no BNPL payment options like Klarna, cart items going out-of-stock, not having a guest checkout – and much more. The best way to identify the problems on your website is through first-party data collection and analysis – while remaining GDPR-compliant, of course. With solid metrics, you’ll be able to get a clear view of the customer journey and pinpoint where and why customers are losing interest by analyzing their drop-offs. From there, you can make changes to improve the customer experience and encourage sales.

Now let’s explore the key impacts on abandonment rates.

PRICE CHECKING

“With the whole web at shoppers’ fingertips, price comparison is easy. You’ll need competitive pricing to lower your cart abandonment rate. But there’s a problem – squeezing prices isn’t as easy as it sounds when you’re running an eCommerce store with fine margins.

Often, reduced prices mean less profit for some businesses. But with events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis occurring over the past few years it’s tightened shopper budgets and pressured brands to lower prices. You need to find a middle ground. Use careful cost analysis to identify whether price reductions are right for you and your shoppers. The most likely culprits are products with the highest cart abandonment rates. Directly compare your pricing of these products with your competitors’. If you think you need to charge less, test whether more sales at a lower price will drive more profit than fewer sales at a higher price.

For example, suppose you usually sell a product for £100 at a £20 profit, and 50 customers buy it each month while 150 people (75%) abandon their carts. That’s £1000 in profit. If matching your competitors and selling the item at £95 reduces the cart abandonment rate to 60%, so 80 customers buy it at a £15 profit, that adds up to £1200 monthly. In this case, a lower price and a lower cart abandonment rate result in 20% more profit.

Additionally, another critical part of price considerations is checkout costs. Research by The Baynard Institute suggests that 48% of shoppers exit checkout pages because of unexpected fees, such as high shipping costs.

STRONG CUSTOMER AUTHENTICATION (SCA)

Strong customer authentication is recent legislation introduced to improve payment safety. Unfortunately, the added verifications can slow the checkout process, increasing checkout abandonment.

SCA affects the checkout process of all eCommerce stores. Therefore, addressing it puts you at an advantage. The first step is to ensure you’re adhering to the updated regulations. Next, use first-party data to gain quick insights that help you understand whether your checkout abandonment rate is a result of simple field validation errors or SCA friction. Use this to fix errors and run retargeting campaigns to deterred customers.

WEBSITE FUNCTIONALITY

Bugs, errors, and sluggish loading are unacceptable in 2022. A poorly functioning website breaks trust, frustrates customers, and increases your abandonment rate. Consider the following improvements:

• Website Content: Develop high-quality content across the board. Foster trust with social proof and key info (free shipping for example), while prioritizing convenient features that create a hassle-free experience, such as multiple payment options, one-click check-out, auto-completing forms, and guest checkout.

• Optimize Layouts: Organize your website to ensure a customer-friendly and intuitive shopping experience. Product pages and checkout pages need focus in being mobile-friendly, as making purchasing easy will encourage buying. Consider a progress-indicator at checkout, so shoppers don’t find the checkout form time-consuming.

• Propose Relevant Discounts: Collect sufficient data to suggest personalized discounts. For example, exit-intent popups featuring intelligent offers just as someone is about to drop off your website can improve your conversion rate.

Example of Personalised Offer Popup

Knowing why customers fail to purchase through your customer data helps you to boost sales. But, many businesses struggle with the data management that’s fundamental in improving shopping cart abandonment rates.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Mapp Cloud can help. It gathers, stores, and organizes your data into real-time, actionable insights so you can deliver accurate cart abandonment campaigns – and much more.

THE KILLER CART ABANDONMENT TACTIC THAT MARKETERS OVERLOOK

Marketers are pretty sharp when it comes to dispatching cart recovery emails. However, they often miss a simple but effective cart abandonment tactic: maximizing shopper identification.

You can’t retarget potential customers if you don’t know who they are. Matching browsers with stored data provides the contact details you need to send cart recovery emails. The better your identification rate, the better your retargeting. Customer Data Platforms are essential here, as they help you identify and get to know your customers.

Improving identification is a quick win if you’re already running an abandoned cart program. New campaigns are often costly and unpredictable, so enriching a successful campaign is a low-risk earner.

Small improvements to Identification Rate can give big results

HOW TO REDUCE CART ABANDONMENT

Multi-channel communications (or cross-channel marketing campaigns) are an excellent strategy to re-engage shoppers, increase sales, and reduce your abandonment rate.

Once you identify who’s on your eCommerce website, shoppers are never out of reach. Leverage the matched customer details to dispatch automated messages to shoppers who abandon their carts.

The most common form of contact is cart abandonment emails. Sending emails at set intervals after the customer has abandoned their shopping cart draws them back to your website. With nothing but a click between shoppers and their abandoned cart, they’re much more likely to pick up where they left off and complete their purchase!

Shopping cart abandonment campaigns are excellent earners. For example, the home furnishings retailer, Ponden Home, boosted its abandoned cart revenue by 250%. All it did was incrementally tweak an already-running shopping cart abandonment program.

But cart recovery emails aren’t the only option. You can expand your communications across SMS, Mobile Push, Web Push, and other channels to generate a higher conversion rate. Geo-targeting is also an excellent solution in encouraging online shoppers to pop into your brick-and-mortar stores to complete purchases. A multi-channel approach reaches your customers where they’re most likely to engage.

Mapp Cloud: Campaign Automation

Mapp gives you the capabilities to create and enrich customer profiles and launch a cross-channel shopping cart abandonment campaign. Our tools help you personalize your communications and reach your customers on the right channel at the right time based on customer intelligence.

HOW TO PREVENT CART ABANDONMENT

Cart abandonment campaigns are excellent marketing tactics for every eCommerce store. If you’re not running one already, it’s a great earner that’s worth considering. In summary, the relevancy of your shopping cart abandonment communications is what drives your open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and ultimately sales.

If you do have a program running, look to improve your shopping cart abandonment rate and retarget customers. Improving identification through data collection is an absolute must. Having the means to get back in touch with customers who abandoned their carts is a marketing superpower!

Whether you’re running an abandoned cart campaign or not, a Customer Data Platform can help you secure more sales. It’ll take the stress of data management, analysis, and interpretation off your shoulders and provide you with easy-to-digest insights that you can act on quickly.

This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.