Recover Revenue With Enticing Cart Abandonment Emails

This guestpost on customer recovery is shared by our friends from Cartstack.

A basic cart abandonment email plugin is no longer a viable option to recapture lost customers. There, we said it. Cart abandonment rates are still at 69.57% - a figure that’s high, not moving, and losing you three in every five potential customers. What is needed is a recovery strategy that goes beyond cart abandonment emails - reducing abandonment from the start, capturing leads and recovering more sales.

Why A Basic Cart Recovery Strategy Is No Longer A Viable Option

Cart abandonment emails target customers who have an account, were logged in, looked around, selected a product, and then left before paying. In other words, they’re a small solution to a wider problem, ignoring:

1. Users Who Haven’t Logged In Aren't Tracked

Cart abandonment emails target only those who have signed in with an account and added an item to their basket - ignoring potential customers who don’t have an account or were simply browsing, window shopping or checking you out.

2. Excessive Development Time (Even for Basic Tools)

Basic tools might claim to be “plug and play” but in reality, they come with excessive development, regular updates, and on-going testing - which is also not great for your website’s speed.

3. There's No Personalization

Variety is the spice of life, yet traditional cart abandonment emails adopt a one-to-many approach - sending all abandoners the same email, rather than segmenting and targeting your hottest leads. While this might work for your hottest leads, it neglects the rest of your audience -   information they need to make a purchasing decision and cutting your results in half (or worse).

4. Doesn't Connect to Your Marketing Software

And, it’s not just your potential customers who are being ignored. Most cart abandonment software simply doesn’t have the technology to connect with your other lead generation or marketing platforms - keeping vital data to itself and preventing conversions later down the line.

5. Forgets About Multichannel

Lose a customer shopping on the train, only to later recover them on their home desktop? Most cart abandonment tools can’t track this - losing sight of conversions across different devices and giving you inaccurate conversion data.

6. Siloed and Silent

Finally, basic abandonment tools whir away in the background, regardless of what’s happening on your website. This means that you’re not alerted when leads are failing to convert - whether that’s because of a broken integration or something else.

Not only are traditional cart abandonment tools only dealing with a tiny part of a gigantic eCommerce problem - they’re also failing to solve the problem, create new opportunities, or warm up cold prospects. We like to think of them as an aspirin for a broken arm - it’s going to do something, but, quite frankly, not enough.

So, What Is A Viable Alternative?

The answer? It’s simple: to recover more revenue, it’s important to implement a recovery strategy that incorporates:

On-site retargeting campaigns - working to reduce abandonment from happening in the first place by targeting website visitors with offers while also capturing their contact information at the same time.

Recovery campaigns - using this contact & behavioral information to send segmented recovery emails that bring lost customers back to your website to convert.

Let’s take a look at how.

How To Maximize Your Customer Recovery Campaigns To Recover 20% Of Lost Sales

First, let’s consider your recovery campaigns - specifically what you’re doing wrong and what you can do right to recover 20% of lost sales.

Abandoned Cart Recovery Best (And Worst) Practices

Almost everyone knows what a cart abandonment email is - not everyone knows how to get them right. To maximize the open, click-through, and conversion rates, you must focus on:

Speed

Sending an email the second someone abandons their shopping cart might seem a little eager while waiting a few days might seem a little uninterested. Our research shows that the best time to send cart abandonment emails is between 20-30 minutes after abandonment. Following that, you’ll want to send two follow-up emails within the week.

Personalization

Personalization grabs attention, generates clicks, and sells - so it’s crucial for your recovery emails. Personalize your cart abandonment emails by using the customer’s first name, reminding them what they were looking at, and staying relevant to their stage in the customer funnel.

Incentives

You need to give someone a reason to come back to your website, which is why you should incentivize your cart abandonment emails with genuine, tailored, and useful offers. That means not sending a code for free shipping when that’s readily available on your website, but instead identifying that they left on the final payment page and giving them a code for 20% off if they complete today.

Psychology

The subconscious mind has a funny little way of convincing us we really need to buy something, that we really don’t need. Use loss aversion marketing tactics to create a sense of scarcity that encourages the subconscious mind to buy - but be careful. Lying about a product being “the last one left” is bad practice, will damage trust and can destroy any chances of increasing customer loyalty.

Results

Different strokes for different folks - cart abandonment email tactics that work for a pet food retailer, might not work for your surfboard business.  Use A/B testing to split test the effect of subject lines, content, imagery, and colors on open rates, clicks, and overall conversions. 15-20% recovery rates are more than achievable for many website, so keep tweaking until you get there.

Re-engaging Lower Interest Shoppers With Browse Abandonment Emails

Once you’ve successfully conquered your cart abandonment emails, it’s time to start targeting a new audience: your low-interest shoppers. Browse abandonment happens with 92% of your website visitors - yet this is an audience you’ve probably never contacted. Why? Because they haven’t logged in or added anything to their shopping cart and your basic cart abandonment tool can’t logged them. Now, you can record these customers, but this different kind of shopper requires a different kind of approach - one that includes:

Speed

Browse abandoners are less engaged - making them more easily scared. Adopt a low-key email approach by sending a browse abandonment email within one hour and no later than 24 hours after abandonment.

Relevance

These customers haven’t yet added an item to their basket - so regurgitating your cart abandonment email about “saving your shopping basket” will quickly see your email in the trash can. Instead, introduce yourself, send personalized product recommendations, and adopt a softly softly approach, offering help rather than coercion.

Personalization

Personalization is just as important with browse abandonment emails - encouraging of customers to shop with you. Personalize your email content by addressing the customer by their name and inserting dynamic product recommendations that are not only helpful but also act as a visual queue to re-engage these colder leads.

Help

Speaking of help, dynamic product recommendations based on browsing history, product comparisons, and social proof work really well in browse abandonment emails. In fact, 80% of consumers think brands aren’t personalizing content enough - so it’s really important to include this type of information.

How To Empower Your Recovery Strategy With On-site Campaigns

So that’s how you go about handling the problem, but didn’t we mention something about fixing the problem? To truly empower your recovery strategy, you need an on-site campaign that reduces abandonment while obtaining as much customer information as possible to fuel your recovery emails should it happen anyway. And here’s how.

Driving Conversions & Capturing Leads with Exit-Intent Technology

Exit-intent popups do more than increase your newsletter subscription numbers. They are a useful tool for:

1. Counteracting the reasons for abandonment

Exit-intent popups allow you combat the potential reason for abandonment by presenting offers that incentivize customers to convert on their initial visit.

2. Obtaining contact information

Exit-intent popups also offer your customers deals, information or discounts  in exchange for contact information - information that you can use for your browse and cart abandonment campaigns should this customer not convert while on your website.

Other exit-intent tools include:

Send my Cart

A send my cart dropdown tool gives customers the option to abandon, while saving their shopping cart. They get quick access to come back to their basket, and you get their email address in case they don’t.

Push notifications

Push notifications provide you with another way to communicate with your customers that’s harder to ignore than an email. You can also time a push notification to appear at the most optimum time - increasing the chances of conversion.

The Importance Of Real-Time Lead Capture

The success of your abandonment email campaign depends entirely on having an email address to mail - regardless of whether your customer is logged in or has added items to their basket. A real-time lead capture tool achieves this by:

1. Real-time, site-wide capture

Tracking and recording leads in real-time across your entire website, a real-time lead capture tool can quintuple your email leads simply recording email addresses input into live chat, newsletter signups, contact forms and (especially) the shopping cart pages. And, unlike any standalone plugin, this happens regardless of whether the user actually submits a form, or not.

2. Real-time segmentation

Using real-time segmentation, you can automatically segment these visitors based on behavioral data (including what products they’ve viewed, which category pages they’re interested in, and whether they’ve added a product to their shopping basket), and then queue them into an appropriately targeted recovery campaign.

Other “must-have” tools that boost recovery campaign results

And it doesn’t stop there. You can continue squeezing every last drop of revenue out of your potential customers by complementing your on-site and recovery campaigns with:

Zapier

Advanced cart abandonment tools provide you with more than just an email address. They cross-reference contact information across the web to find enriched contact data such as social media profiles and organizations - data that’s really useful for your other marketing tools. Simply use Zapier to connect your abandonment software with your marketing tool, CRM, and ESP, and use this information to fuel other marketing campaigns - converting those slow burners.

Machine learning

86% of consumers are influenced by personalization - yet only 32% say that they have received personalized product recommendations. Ensure that your cart abandonment suite includes machine learning technology that can make genuine product recommendations that convert.

Session replays

Finally, boost your revenue recovery even more through continuous improvement. Use session replay data to identify your conversion leaks and fix them - preventing abandonment from happening in the first place.

Cart abandonment emails - final thoughts

Cart abandonment emails work, you just need to do them right. Implement an abandonment strategy that incorporates on-site campaigns and recovery tools so that you can start reducing abandonment and increasing recovery. If you cart abandonment emails are not part of your email marketing stack, you should definitely start incorporating these.

About CartStack

CartStack’s customer recovery solution gives you access to the most advanced on-site and recovery email tools out there - allowing you to send browse and cart abandonment emails that work. Start now and recover $1,000 for free with a trial.