This year has seen the shift away from physical retail to online shopping accelerate by approximately five years, which means two things:
Online retail has become incredibly competitive, making it more crucial and challenging to attract, convert, and retain customers. And, if you’re still using last year’s abandoned cart and customer recovery strategies, they’re now vastly out of date.
The shift towards online retail has seen cart abandonment rates skyrocket, and basic abandoned cart strategies aren’t cutting it anymore.
But, fear not.
In this guide, we’re sharing our expertise on how you can future-proof your abandoned cart and customer recovery strategies for 2021 and beyond, using:
Cart abandonment has existed since the dawn of eCommerce. But it was only in 2020, when online sales became crucial for business survival, that sellers started questioning why abandonment was still happening on their website.
In the quest for answers about eCommerce abandonment, sellers have discovered four things.
There are three main reasons behind cart and browse abandonment:
However, sellers have learned that abandonment isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is because:
The reason why cart abandonment is a problem for many sellers isn’t because it’s happening; it’s because a basic abandoned cart model doesn’t maximize customer recovery.
What do we mean by this?
A basic abandoned cart model targets customers at the end of the consideration phase of the customer journey. This includes those making it to the final stage of your checkout flow – the shopping cart and the checkout page:
It might recover these customers nicely. However, it does nothing or little to:
This means that a basic abandoned cart model only recovers a tiny drop in a big pool of potential customers, which is a problem for any online seller looking to grow in 2021 and beyond.
A resilient abandoned cart model maximizes conversions during challenging times and increases leads during fruitful times. This allows your eCommerce website to survive and thrive independently without relying on online marketplaces such as Amazon or worrying about global pandemics.
The best way to take advantage of cart abandonment, overcome the limitations of a basic abandoned cart model, and increase business resilience for 2021 is the customer recovery model.
The customer recovery model minimizes the occurrence of abandonment and maximizes the customers recovered from abandonment by targeting leads across the awareness and consideration phases of the customer journey.
Specifically, a customer recovery abandoned cart model targets:
Cold leads are active website visitors who haven’t yet made it to the checkout but haven’t abandoned your website either. The customer recovery model turns these visitors into leads by obtaining their contact details and engaging them throughout the checkout flow to prevent abandonment from happening.
Warm leads are website visitors that browse your products but leave before adding anything to their cart, known as your browse abandoners or window shoppers. The customer recovery model warms these leads up and recovers them back to your website and through the checkout, using softer tactics than a traditional cart abandonment email.
Hot leads are website visitors who add products to their cart but abandon before converting, known as your cart abandoners. The customer recovery model reengages these “low hanging fruit” leads, using methods of persuasion, scarcity, and personalization to bring them back to their shopping cart and encourage them to convert on the spot.
Let’s start this section by clarifying that there’s nothing wrong with abandoned cart emails. Cart and browse abandonment emails work incredibly well at recovering lost customers and winning more sales, and you should continue using them.
However, to prepare your business for whatever 2021 holds, you want to minimize abandonment and increase your abandoned cart conversion rates as much as possible.
Five future-proof abandoned cart and customer recovery strategies to do this are:
You want to engage customers as soon as they click onto your website to increase purchase intent, reduce the chances of abandonment, and obtain their contact details to use should abandonment occur.
Three ways to do this are:
The best leads are hot leads, so you want to retain as many customers as possible through the awareness phase by disrupting any exit intent.
Two popular ways to disrupt the process of abandonment are:
If someone does abandon your website during the consideration phase, you still want to re-engage their interest and bring them back to your website, albeit in a slightly softer and gentler way than you would recover a hot lead.
The best ways to do this are:
Your hottest leads are the easiest leads to recover, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do more to maximize the effectiveness of your abandoned cart email campaign.
A multi-channel approach to recovering customers from cart abandonment can include:
Continuous improvement is the process of making incremental improvements to your customer recovery and abandoned cart strategy to increase effectiveness, maintain relevance, and maximize success. This is especially important when customer spending habits and purchase motivators are routinely changing.
Three simple ways to continuously improve customer recovery are:
The key message we want to get across isn’t that basic abandoned cart emails are bad or ineffective. It’s that you can maximize their results by addressing website abandonment across the entire checkout flow and targeting visitors regardless of where they are or where they abandon in the customer journey. This includes:
If you do this, you can squeeze every last conversion out of your existing web traffic, increasing sales and future-proofing your eCommerce business against whatever 2021 holds. Good luck!