Every single business that sells online has shopping cart abandoners. They are those people who leave their cart in the middle of the digital aisle, even though it may be full of items. And often avoiding that they do so is about simple customer experience and conversion marketing improvements, making the shopping process easier, more focused and more task-oriented, while avoiding interrupting clutter.
Yet, while every business experiences the phenomen, very few businesses actually try to turn it into a benefit by marketing to shopping cart abandoners, Econsultancy found in its ‘Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2011’. And that’s too bad since those that do are noticing some good gains that make it very worthwhile to look into.
The percentage of businesses targeting shopping cart abandoners is dismally low, only around 26%. Among that 26%, a whopping 70% noticed an increase in sales. 19% say they didn’t just increase sales, they increased sales by a lot.
60% of respondents targeting shopping cart abandoners, use automatic cart abandonment email based on the website activity of the online shoppers. 26% of manually select email based on website activity to target the shopping cart abandoners.
The second most popular method is remarketing with 32% of respondents. Remarketing is the fastest increasing method to increase sales.
Discounts for shopping cart abandoners: don’t forget the emotional bonding and longer term
Econsultancy also found that response times of marketers in targeting shopping cart abandoners have shortened. Real-time data and interaction insights seem to be the key drivers of this.
Shopping cart abandoners are often ‘reactived’ using discounts. However, the discount is just to seal the deal and the real work here is the emotional bonding with the customer.
Plenty of businesses pretend to care, but when it comes down to it, very few are willing to ask a customer if they are OK.
Optimizing the shopping experience and improving conversion in a customer-centric way is key in reducing shopping cart abandonment and targeting the abandoners should not be an excuse to avoid it.
However, targeting and retargeting activities are a must as well: they increase revenue and offer you an opportunity to “make it up”, identify issues and do better in the future.
