Did you know that site visitors abandon about 69,57% of their checkouts?
Insane, right?
You’d think this cart abandonment rate is the concerning part, but it happens to be an industry standard for eCommerce sites.
The problem comes in when brands do not re-investigate this trend or don’t follow up on their customers to potentially regain easy revenue.
Naturally, this can hurt your return on ad spend (ROAS).
This is where abandoned cart recovery comes in.
This is a simple practice followed by eCommerce retailers to follow up on potential customers, nudge them to return to their carts, and effectively convince them to complete their purchases.
This can guarantee up to 10% revenue increases in some cases.
For this reason, abandoned cart email sequences are an invaluable asset that could help to improve your ROAS over time.
Perhaps shopping cart abandonment is one of the trials your eCommerce store faces?
And maybe, you are unsure of how to approach it?
Luckily, we have a list of things to keep in mind, and tips on optimizing your abandoned cart email automation flow.
The Reasons for an Abandoned Cart
Why is it that customers abandon their carts?
If you’ve streamlined your customer purchase experience from landing page to adding items from your store, then surely sales should be guaranteed. Right?
Wrong.
Truth is, a lot of variables determine shopping cart abandonment. For your consideration, we can cluster them into two broad categories.
Timing
Some variables are merely out of your control, such as the way in which a customer’s immediate environment impacts them.
You could have just caught them at a busy time. Or something in their vicinity could distract them at the moment of the potential sale.
Let’s say a customer added some clothes to their cart while scrolling through the site of their favorite sports brand.
Their boss walks in, forcing them to leave the site immediately. Thus, we have an issue of bad timing.
Similarly, if you’re always popping abandoned cart emails at 1pm when your customer is at work, you’re staggering your replies.
This illustrates why it’s important to have a good amount of follow up at different times during the day and with different mediums (i.e. using SMS marketing as well as email marketing).
Other times however, it may hinge on the degree to which your customer has interacted with you.
In fact, it can take anywhere from 5-8 touchpoints to convert a cold customer into an actual sale.
Some of these touchpoints could include:
- The background story of your brand,
- Guarantees of quality,
- The uniqueness of your product/service,
- or the purchase moment itself.
Meaning, you may not have warmed up your customer enough to actually buy something yet.
Potential Objections
To warm up your customer, you first need to know them.
It’s that simple.
Which is why active market research should become a reflexive habit in your journey to optimize your conversion funnels.
Sometimes this research needs to take place through testing, to get to know the preconceived ideas that are preventing people from buying what you have to offer.
Let’s look at a few considerations.
- Price—Do you offer value for what you’re asking?
- Logistics—How will shipping, and its associated costs, affect their choices?
- Product Fit—Is this the product they actually need/want?
- Connection—Do you offer a lifestyle fit/change that will make them feel invested?
- Trust—Can your product be relied on to offer the solution they need/want?
- Competition—Is there another brand that addresses the above better than yours does?
Potential objections should either be addressed in your abandoned cart email or raised before the customer even thinks of it themselves.
This way, you’re showing them that you care about their concerns.
Take a look at the below example.
Besides offering a payment option through Klarna, Fender reminds the customer of the included benefits of their product.
Therefore, they’ve already covered two potential objections their customers may have.
Now that you understand the thinking process of your customer, let’s look at ways to help you make that sale!
Tips to Improve Abandoned Cart Recovery
If you’re interested in recovering potential lost revenue, then following the below guidelines should help.
Text Messaging
As important as it is to keep following up, you don’t want to send emails for no reason.
This is even more important if not all your emails are optimized for deliverability, which could make you land in the spam folder of your email recipient.
Though your first email will target the people who got distracted, SMS marketing could be your secret weapon where the first abandoned cart email is not effective.
Check out one of the most basic branching sequences created below.
In this example, called the boiler plate, customers have consented to receive an SMS for marketing purposes.
After the initial abandoned cart email was opened without the desired event taking place, the customer received an SMS.
The benefit of this?
The offer of receiving an SMS is effective for most people, because of its immediacy.
SMSs are also shown to have higher open rates, as high as 98%. That is more than three times more than for email marketing.
And even though SMS marketing does cost money, it will still be cheaper than any retargeting campaign that may rack up ad spend.
Chip Away at Potential Objections
You may be wondering what to include in your abandoned cart emails?
Addressing customer concerns is usually a good starting point, as mentioned above.
Some companies choose to offer discounts or credit options when price is an issue.
Although, generally, you might hurt profitability if you haven’t investigated the potential objections first.
Perhaps you might leverage unique selling points (USPs) in order to compare your offer to competitors. What sets you apart from other brands?
When you are offering a service, including more user-generated content (UGCs), such as reviews, might bump up the trust in your brand.
Because these snippets are objective accounts of your product that aren’t created by company representatives, they are seen as more reliable.
The below examples handle several customer concerns.
The following makes this email effective:
- Customers can test product fit with a trial.
- It highlights USPs and lifestyle benefits that could increase trust in the product value.
- It includes a subscription option through Klarna that makes the price more appealing.
Market Research
Sometimes, to understand your customer needs, you may need to manually call them to find out why they didn’t complete a purchase.
This is a powerful tip, especially for startups still testing their target markets.
Besides building rapport with your loyal clients, the data from these interactions could go a long way to improve your conversion funnel and address the abandoned cart problem overall.
Smart Testing
It is therefore better to test your improvements incrementally as opposed to all at once.
You might already know that reviewing conversion rate optimization in your emails and improving their design takes time.
This may include testing email sequences, the timing between emails, segmenting different email branches for different products.
Even playing around with the preview text of each email.
You could even offer discounts on products that cost more but decrease the overall amount of discounts on offer in your store.
Slight changes in your abandoned cart flow may heavily impact ROAS for your store. So, testing and improving constantly is important.
Then of course, there’s design.
The main goal of your design is to achieve one thing: driving customers to hit the CTA button revolving around the abandoned cart.
If your design promotes you as a random store, you risk compromising your legitimacy. This hurts customer experience.
Therefore, badly designed emails will convert badly.
Consider abandoned cart subject lines for instance. Good subject lines include one or more of the following:
- Name of the customer—to make it personal
- Pain Points—predicted concerns
- Scarcity—the cart may expire
- Potential Bonus—such as freebies
- Humor—for an emotional connection
Check out the below example.
Not only does Rudy’s hit you with a witty line, but they immediately follow it up with a scarcity tactic (expiring cart) while reminding you of the potential bonus (free shipping) that you (the customer) risks losing.
Optimize the Email Sequence
Maybe you’re unsure of what to do after that initial email?
How many follow-up emails is too many?
A good rule to know here is that if the placed order rate of your email is over 1%, this means you can add another email in your flow.
This should get you some more sales.
Another adjustment is to split test segmenting abandoned carts by product category. Merely because some products may be more popular than others.
Use the Right Platform
Considering that you can expect about 5% of revenue to come from the abandoned cart email flow, you want to have the peace of mind that you are doing the automation right.
Klaviyo is a powerful email marketing platform that allows you to build a customer experience driven by its metrics gained from tracking.
By offering powerful analytic tools, you’ll be able to gain useful insights that will inform and personalize your email sequences and make you stand out from your competition.
One way to do this, as mentioned, is to segment your abandoned cart emails.
Add an Opt-Out
It will always be important to add a clear unsubscribe link to your abandoned cart email.
Sometimes, a series of follow-up emails could get annoying, and you want to offer them the option to opt out.
The simple availability of the option may ensure deliverability, or else affect it by being flagged to end up in the spam folder.
A Return to the Cart Means a Return from Your SEO
In the end, you want to be sure to maximize your ROAS as far as possible.
Yet, 80% of eCommerce stores still get it wrong, accumulating in $18 billion loss of revenue annually.
Want to avoid being part of those statistics?
Feel you need someone with the experience to make you more revenue from your traffic and ad spend?
Contact us at KAMG today, and we’ll put you into touch with our expert email-marketers.
Allow us to get you the best out of your email marketing campaign!
FAQs
What to include in an abandoned cart email?
Besides handling potential objections, these emails should: a) remind the customer of the cart content, b) actionable copy, and 3) a clear CTA that has its aim to recover the abandoned items.
Where can I find abandoned cart email templates?
If you need some help with layout, and you’re still testing the design features that work for you, Bolt and TargetBay might be useful to get the feel of what an abandoned cart email should achieve.
How many emails does the standard abandoned cart email flow have?
The email sequence should include a minimum of three emails. The first is sent after an hour. The second is sent after a single day. The last email should reach the customer after the third day. However, this will all depend on how you personalize or segment your sequences.
