How To Stop Cart Abandonment
Don’t give your customers a chance to abandon their cart on your website.
Cart abandonment is a serious challenge in ecommerce. On average, 65.45% of customers will abandon their carts for a variety of reasons. However, research has also found that abandoned cart rates can be as high as 80%.
This is lost revenue for your business and one website states that this could be worth up to $4 trillion to US businesses. If you want to know the impact on your business last month – double the revenue you made.
Therefore, you should seek ways to minimise the number of carts abandoned on your site and bring those customers back to your website. The good news is that studies have shown that 64% of customers who abandon carts can be brought back within 48 hours.
So, what are the best practices for your small business?
1. Add An In-Cart Chat Option
Not all customers will be web-savvy, or they may experience issues during the purchasing process. This can frustrate them, and if they don’t have support, then they may abandon their cart. That is why you need to offer this customer support.
One way is to add an in-cart chat option where the customer can speak to you live during the purchasing process. These aren’t expensive and can be added to most websites. However, they will require constant monitoring.
2. Allow The Customer To Edit Their Cart
The longer you allow the customer to edit their cart, the more flexibility you offer. If a customer is forced to exit the purchasing process to make a change, then they could become frustrated that the process is not easy.
It also gives them an opportunity to exit the whole process. Instead, the customer should be given the chance to make changes right up to the payment page so they can add, remove or change products to get the best deal for them.
3. Add A Wishlist Or ‘For Later’ Option
Sometimes customers don’t want to make a purchase straight away. They are just researching prices and options now, to buy later, perhaps when they’ve been paid or when they’ve spoken to friends and family.
If you don’t include a ‘save-for-later’ option, you could lose the potential customer if they become frustrated at having to search for the product again.
Another option is to have a recently viewed product section on the website that reminds visitors of what products they looked at when they last visited your website. This should be based on the IP address of the guest.
4. Capture Their Email Address
Even though customers might prefer not to sign up to an account on your ecommerce store, it is good practice to capture their email address. This enables you to send reminder emails about the products they’ve added to an abandoned cart.
The first email should be sent to the prospective customer one hour after they’ve left the website. The next email should be sent 24 hours later. In these emails, you should remind the customer of the product they took an interest in and include a link to a cart with the item already in it.
You might also want to incentivise the purchase by offering a coupon, free delivery, or a gift for when they click through and complete the purchase.
Research has shown that reminder emails sent within one hour have 80% open rates and 20% click through rates. The software for this system can be easily added to your website and run automatically.
Conclusion
Your ecommerce is losing you money. When carts are abandoned, the potential revenue is lost, and this could stunt the growth of your business. There are numerous ways you can reduce the impact of cart abandonment, but you should also run an email campaign that brings customers back to complete their purchase.
How do you reduce cart abandonment? Do you automatically send out reminder emails?
Let us know in the comments below.
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