Abandoned Cart Emails for Ecommerce Growth
Ever left an item in your online shopping cart, only to get a friendly reminder to complete your purchase? That’s recover cart, also known as abandoned cart, email eCommerce. An abandoned cart email works to remind the customer of items they left in their cart – to allure the same audience into making their abandoned purchase. Ecommerce companies today are faced with an increase in customers who get sidetracked or even marketed and sold to before they complete checkout. In fact, 70% of shoppers will abandon their carts at checkout, no matter how effective your marketing and advertising efforts are. This fact can be especially tricky for eCommerce businesses because leads who add items to their cart seemingly demonstrate strong purchasing intent. Ecommerce businesses will be afflicted by leaks in their marketing and sales funnel due to these tentative shoppers if they are unable to use this information for their benefit. By implementing an abandoned cart email strategy, your eCommerce business can begin to combat this problem and increase sales by recovering lost revenue.
What is an Abandoned Cart Email?
Abandoned cart emails are simple reminders to your customers that they have items remaining in their cart. This email serves as a CTA to complete their purchase of items they already know they want. The email should have a clear focus on a single item that guides buyers into completing the checkout process.
How do you make your emails stand out?
In recent years, it has been increasingly more difficult to use email as a means of reaching and standing out in your customers’ inbox. In order to complete the sale, grabbing the attention of your customer is critical. How you choose to get creative with your emails can range from including product reviews, specific product details, related products, visual graphics, social content and more.
Abandoned cart email strategies
Here are 5 more ways to ensure your abandoned cart emails recover the sale:
Product Reviews
Product reviews act as a credibility and trust builder for customers who need more convincing. When other people have used, liked and reviewed your product, hesitant customers will be more inclined to finalise their purchase. You can also use product reviews creatively to display to customers that they have left highly rated products behind, increasing urgency and demand around the purchase. Besides, building and sustaining your brand’s message around core issues like trust and transparency will only increase the confidence your customer base has in your product and encourage them to leave more product reviews; continuing the delight cycle of sustainable inbound marketing.
Context
With abandoned cart emails, you should consider the context of your buyer’s purchasing habits. For instance, the customer might not have completed their purchase because it’s not a good time for them, they might need to save up more, or it’s something they want to come back to later. As email marketers, it’s important to maintain your relationship with them until they are ready to finalise their order, not bombard customers with repetitive emails. One way of doing this is by including an option for customers to sign up to your mailing list, in your last abandoned cart email, to keep them close by and engaged with your brand, without sending them more email reminders. This way, your brand will remain top of mind for when they are ready to complete checkout, without risking the loss of an interested lead due to spam.
Single Product Spotlight
Oftentimes, eCommerce businesses fill their abandoned cart emails with multiple items, diluting the effect of the email itself. The abandoned cart email is an ideal opportunity to re-sell and re-market a product to your customer that they are likely to buy, not showcase all 10 products remaining in their cart. When a person has 10 similar items in their cart, it’s safe to assume that they don’t have equal purchasing intent for all 10 items. In fact, customers today use their online carts like (digital) window shoppers; wherein they add multiple products to their cart for future consideration. Your email should aim to highlight the best-selling, best-rated product in their cart because it helped convert many of your past customers. This way, your abandoned cart emails can focus on marketing that single product, removing generic language use and pinpointing the exact benefits of your product.
Rewards Program
Making use of your rewards program can recover sales and boost customer loyalty. Instead of offering a discount which can be counter-intuitive when trying to make a profit, your abandoned cart email can highlight the number of points your customer has within your rewards program, and how many more they need to reach the next rewards tier. By leveraging your loyalty and rewards program, you will be able to augment your recovery rate and convert customers into recurring ones, simply by nudging them to use the points they’ve already earned.
Email Tools
Does your email marketing solution support the tactics required to recover your abandoned carts? Things to consider are:
- Is there a simple and easy way for you to integrate product reviews and ratings into your abandoned cart emails?
- Is there a straightforward way for you to integrate your marketing solution into your loyalty and rewards program?
- Is there something you can do differently than other eCommerce companies in your abandoned cart emails?
Making sure you have the right software to match your abandoned cart email strategy is pivotal to increasing sales. This is because abandoned cart emails can recover 15% of what would have otherwise been lost revenue. Cart abandonment emails have the highest average conversion rate (2.63%) and click-to-conversion rate (21.78%) of any triggered eCommerce email, so implementing the right strategy with the right support is key to recovering and ultimately closing more sales.
