On average, 71% of baskets are abandoned without purchase. But not all shopping abandonment is negative, as it can be an important part of the buying cycle for customers.
New buyers in particular require multiple visits and potentially multiple ‘abandons’ before purchasing. Retailers must therefore make sure their conversion strategy is focused on supporting this by offering superb customer service with personalised communication and targeted offers.
A variety of third party solutions exist that provide retailers with sales-recovery capabilities, from basket abandonment email campaign tools, site exit overlay to behaviour personalisation tools. There are also more advanced features such as customer segmentation based on site and behaviour metrics.
Email marketing is proven to recover, on average, between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 abandoned baskets. But how do you make sure you choose the right solution for your business?
Step 1: Identify the problem
Do you understand the composition of traffic to your site? Choosing the right solution requires an understanding of new versus returning visitors and the key drop-off points during the purchasing cycle. Benchmarking these metrics against competitors will give an insight to where major gains are to be made. For example, a retailer may have unidentified traffic levels leaving a site without adding any items to their basket and would likely benefit from a site overlay that captures visitor’s email to offer them incentives on first-time purchases.
Step 2: Choose the provider
Once the problem has been identified, the next decision-point is ROI versus budget and the provider that gives the best return based on site metrics. A retailer with a high number of page views but an unusually low conversion rate might benefit from cost-per-acquisition based pricing compared to a retailer with low level but high relevant traffic and a per-page view pricing model.
Step 3: Implement and follow best practice
Once you have settled on a solution, make sure to get the most out of it by following best practices. Common mistakes that retailers make include not setting up the frequency cap on basket recovery emails, getting the timing of the emails wrong, or leaving money on the table with non-personalised one-size-fits-all offers. For example, according to SeeWhy, the first few hours after an abandon are critical. Make sure to send the first post-cart abandonment email after 45 minutes to an hour; then follow up with the second email 23 hours later; and send the final reminder one week later. Successful implementation will generate on average 18% conversion rate from these emails.
By Kevin Sterneckert, CMO of OrderDynamics.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus