Abandoned Cart Strategy for 2020

With the new decade comes the opportunity to really take a look at your existing marketing strategies to see which ones might be in need of an update. In particular, how you handle your abandoned carts can have a serious impact on your bottom line.

Abandoned carts are going to happen; they are inevitable. However, you do have control over what you do about them. With the right abandoned cart strategy in place, you will see a serious boost in your conversions and potentially your customer retention rates as well. Without one, those carts will simply stay abandoned, and even worse, those users may never turn into customers at your store.

To fully cover what your abandoned cart strategy should be for 2020, we’ll be breaking our content up into two important sections: a true strategy section on what you should do, followed by a content section for helpful tips on what your campaigns should look like.

With these two elements combined, you are sure to have an awesome abandoned cart strategy that will have you recovering more carts in 2020 than ever before.

Strategy

Utilize Multiple Platforms

While you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with messages coming at them from every platform, you should consider utilizing more than one platform when it comes to your abandoned cart campaigns. People respond differently to various platforms, and what might work best for one customer, might not work best for another.

Email is a classic platform for abandoned carts, but what about people who are bombarded with emails and have an overflowing inbox? Utilizing Facebook Messenger is great (as pictured above) and definitely something to consider for 2020, but the downside is that you are limited to just mobile traffic. Web push is great for tackling both desktop and mobile devices. Both web push and Messenger are great for delivering alerts immediately, something you don’t always get with email.

Don’t feel like you have to abandon your emails (see what we did there?) but consider adding in an additional platform that will help you really connect with your audience quickly. Speaking of speed…

Act Fast

Timing matters when it comes to abandoned cart campaigns! Most research agrees that you should send your abandoned cart campaign about an hour after a user has abandoned their cart.

If you wait too long, there’s a strong chance that the user has forgotten about your products and moved on, either deciding not to purchase, or has purchased from somewhere else. The hour mark tends to be the sweet spot for people, but we also recommend testing out various send times to see what converts best.

Your specific industry and items will also likely play a role in timing. If you sell larger ticket items, for example, it is logical that a user may need more time before making a final decision. In this case, waiting a bit longer may yield you better results, as your customers need that time to think and make a final decision.

People have short attention spans, and especially when it comes to ecommerce, there is a lot of competition. Acting fast tends to be the best option for most brands looking to recover as many abandoned carts as possible.

Create a Series

Don’t just stop at one abandoned cart message! Why not create a series? The truth is, a lot of people abandon their carts because they are just looking and aren’t ready to buy yet (we’ll discuss other reasons in more detail later). If that’s the case, their mind may not be made up an hour later.

Instead, we recommend setting up a series of campaigns that would deliver in a sequence that would engage your users immediately after they abandon their cart, several hours later, and one day later (that’s just one example sequence).

This strategy ensures that your brand and items stay at the front of a user’s mind while they are making their final decision. We recommend keeping your series at around 3 messages- anything more than that and you could potentially end up annoying the user, which is the very last thing you want to do when trying to secure a sale.

Bonus: Lower Your Abandoned Cart Rate

For a truly comprehensive abandoned cart strategy you should also look at why customers are abandoning their carts in the first place. By tackling some of these issues, you can lower your overall abandoned cart rate and secure the sale from the very beginning. While it is true that you will always have some abandoned carts, that isn’t an excuse to not look into things!

We already mentioned what you can do about users who are just browsing and aren’t ready to buy yet. However, there are plenty of other reasons that have less to do with the individual user and more to do with your actual store and your policies.

It is in your best interest to analyze all the reasons why your specific customers keep abandoning their carts- be sure to ask for feedback, but also look at your analytics to see where people are leaving- say for example on your product pages or your checkout page?

Are your customers complaining about shipping costs? Creating an account? Can they not contact customer support easily? Maybe your site speed is too slow? Does your site lack trust/or an SSL certificate? While you might not be able to fix every complaint (everyone wants free shipping for example, but that may not be feasible given your products), there is likely some good room for improvement that can help you secure more sales from the very beginning.

Content

Incentivize

Give them a reason to come back! Chances are, if a user committed to putting an item in their shopping cart, they like it. Something is holding them back from purchasing, and an incentive may be just the thing they need to commit.

A popular incentive is to give a discount for a percentage off the purchase, or perhaps a code for free shipping. If you don’t want to go that route, you could also consider some cross-selling opportunities, like what is pictured above. Make sure the incentive is good so that people are actually interested. If you do engage in cross-selling, make sure the item you offer a discount on is related to what the user is interested in.

Pro tip: Check out our list of abandoned cart campaigns that feature some other unique incentives.

Personalize

The more personalization you can add into your overall marketing strategy, the better off you will be. Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when the brand offers some type of personalization.

In this case, we recommend adding personal touches like the user’s name, as well as an image of what they left behind in their cart. Not only will that serve as a useful reminder, it also adds that personal touch that can help the user feel connected to your brand. A generalized abandoned cart email, or even web push campaign, is not likely to land well with your audience and will likely get looked over or deleted.

Include a CTA

While it’s true that it’s more or less implied that an abandoned cart message is sent with the mission of the user completing their purchase, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include a call to action!

All of these tactics- including the incentive and the personalization, are working together to encourage the user to click. The copy you create can have a big impact on whether or not someone decides to finish their purchase. Be clear and put that call to action there, and even better, make the call to action clickable so that users can head right to their cart and finish where they left off. That could be a button in an email, an action button in a web push campaign, or a link in an SMS message.

Make it obvious (and convenient) for the user to finish the sale- the happier they are, the better a chance you have at them purchasing from you!

Wrapping Up

This year, be sure to take some time updating your abandoned cart strategy (or creating a new one if you don’t have something in place already). By utilizing different platforms, getting your timing right, and sending multiple campaigns that are personalized, feature a call to action, and provide an incentive, you are sure to reclaim a lot of abandoned carts.

What is your favorite abandoned cart tactic? What has been most successful for you? Let us know!

Are you thinking about using web push notifications to send abandoned cart campaigns? If so, you can get started for free with Aimtell, or learn more about web push by reading our Beginner’s Guide.

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