An abandoned cart doesn’t have to be a lost cart. Around 81 percent of users abandon their carts while shopping online. For business owners, abandoned carts can signal that the checkout process needs to be optimized and generate more sales. You will need to learn more about your customers and understand what products they are interested in. Further, it is important to compare the items that are abandoned to items that are bought.
But beyond this, sometimes people abandon carts just because they are busy. We’ve all been there, shopping for something online and then we realize that we are late for an appointment and run off before purchasing. In this guide we will go over the process of turning these potential customers with their abandoned carts into actual customers, and what you can do as an ecommerce business to lessen the chances of it happening.
Optimize Your Cart and Checkout Page for a Seamless Checkout Experience
Your checkout page is pivotal to your store’s success. If the checkout page doesn’t encourage action or is difficult to use, you may drive away customers. This is the final moment before your customer puts down their personal information and gives you their money, and therefore it’s when they have their last opportunity for them to back out of the deal and leave you with an abandoned cart.
What can you do? Some top tips include adding social proof for products and services, streamlining the checkout process by making it as easy as clicking one button, cultivating urgency with checkout countdowns, and offering multiple payment options. The biggest one of all is just making sure you have a high-quality website. Less loading times are a great way to minimize the amount of time your customers have just waiting around. According to a survey from Radware, approximately 51% of US customers abandon their carts because of a website’s slowness. In the internet age, customers can lose patience very easily, so therefore minimal screens during the checkout process and having faster loading times can help minimize abandoned carts. You need to make sure your website’s core vitals are boosted and are running smoothly if you want to keep customers.
Of course, streamlining the checkout process can be a bit of a hassle if you are not a professional. As somebody running a business, you have enough on your hands. Designing high-quality ecommerce pages can be tough. Reach out for help from top web design companies to get the conversions you need.
Put a Greater Emphasis on Trust and Transparency
Along the lines of waiting around on your site, you need to make sure the website itself is not just visually appealing and easy to navigate (though these are very important when boosting your search rankings), you also want the website to appear professional and trustworthy, or else your users will leave abandoned carts more willingly. Customers want to know that your business is trustworthy when they decide to shop with you. Achieve this by making sure all costs are made known upfront and demonstrating your authority with seals or awards that speak to your product or service’s quality.
In a 2017 study, 79% of consumers said that a brand would need to establish a trusting relationship with them in order for them to buy products from their website. That is a serious amount of your business right there and needs to be coerced with the help of a website that is trustworthy by appearing professional. The more professional your site is, the fewer abandoned carts there will be.
Use an Exit-Intent Pop-Up
An exit-intent pop-up is a great way to catch the customer’s attention right before they are about to leave your website. It works by having the pop-up appear right as the mouse moves to the address bar or the back button, catching them off guard and giving them one last opportunity to change their mind. It shows a degree of professionalism (as we talked about before, trust is essential when getting customers), informing the customer that you care about them and taking the time to make sure they know they are leaving your website and leaving an abandoned cart. An abandoned cart can happen due to many variables, but it is important that you give your customers one last chance to make a decision before they leave your website.
Another important aspect of the exit-intent pop-up is that it asks for the user’s email address. With this address you can do a myriad of things, such as sending them a newsletter, updates about limited-time offers or seasonal sales, and (as we will talk about below) give them email reminders about the products they had in their carts. Having a potential customer’s email address is a great way to send them information about products they might love (like products that weren’t in their abandoned cart but are similar), and keep them in the loop about your business and what you are providing.
Website Push Notifications
Requesting website push notifications when somebody first enters a website can be another great way of bringing back their cart. A website push notification is a notification that can be sent to a person’s desktop when they are not on the website. Usually, these alert-style messages can contain similar content to what you would send in an email, but you can also send them reminders about what they left in their cart. The purpose of these push notifications is to help create more engagement with your website, and the abandoned cart is a perfect way to help gather user-specific data about a customer and what products they might like.
Even if they don’t want products in their old cart, you have the opportunity to send them alerts about other products similar to what they had in their old cart. It allows you to continually engage with a potential customer and can help you develop a larger spread of data that can be used across your website. You can learn what products customers usually buy together, and you can learn what products are just not as profitable.
Make Sure the Cart is Easy to Recover
It’s a simple rule, but making sure a customer’s abandoned cart is easy to recover is a great way to help make sales. You can do this in many ways, but some apps allow you to have an email sent to the potential customer with their old cart intact. These apps are great because they send out the cart automatically, making sure you have nothing to worry about while keeping engagement with the potential customer.
Offer Real-Time Customer Support
This goes back to our talk about trust earlier. When a customer has the ability to go to a store in person, they know exactly what they are buying. There is no abandoned cart due to transparency and trust. They can not only see, hold, and understand fully what the product is doing with their own two eyes, but they also can talk to a store employee about any question they might have about the product. The employee then reassures the customer and helps to educate them on the product.
While a customer surfing your website can’t go into the store, having real-time customer support gives them the reassurance that your product is legitimate and your business is professional. As a business owner you can never expect what a customer might want to ask about, and rather than having an obscene amount of information on your website, having customer support will give your customer’s content, and result in fewer abandoned carts.
Add Customer Reviews
When it comes to running a business and selling a product, there is always one major question that comes to mind when you are creating branded content and are debating about how you should “sell” your product: what makes my product stand out against the competition? Of course, as a proud business owner, you have plenty of reasons, and it’s these reasons that attract your users to your site in the first place. You have product placement and bring them in with top-notch content that your customers want, but what helps bring in even more customers is by having customer reviews. Customers trust one another, and they want to know why they shouldn’t abandon their cart.
Customer reviews are great because if you have a solid and reliable product and treat your customers well, you basically have free advertising (of a sort)! Having these customer reviews popping up either on the product page or on the checkout page is a great way to help reinforce the quality of your product, and inform the customer of why they should choose this specific product over a product from a different business. It helps create a sense of community in a way. With the voice of the business and the voice of the happy previous customers on the same page, a new customer is invigorated with a sense of belonging and excitement, that they too can have this amazing product. It’s this type of invigoration that keeps customers having abandoned carts.
Give Customers the Option of a Wishlist
Everyone loves to window shop, and being online shouldn’t change that. Even if your customers don’t have the money at the moment to purchase your product, giving your customers the option of having a wishlist they can keep is another great way to prevent you from having abandoned carts.
Develop Email Marketing Sequences to Engage With Individuals Who Have Abandoned Their Carts
You can’t stop every prospect from abandoning their cart. What you can do, however, is ensure that they’re reminded of the items they have in their cart and cultivate a sense of urgency to buy the products they were interested in. Abandoned carts can always be sent in an email.
Creating email marketing sequences for cart abandonment makes it easy to personalize messages to these users and drive them back to their cart.
You can create cart abandonment email sequences with these tips:
- Create an abandoned cart automation
- Add conditional actions to determine when they receive the email (how many days after and if they have more than a specific amount inside their cart)
- Add promotions or reminders to the email body
As we talked about before, promoting engagement in any way possible with the customer is a great way to keep in contact and remind them about their abandoned cart.
Ensure Guests Have a Pleasant Shopping Experience and Can Navigate Your Website Quickly and Easily
Making sure that it’s easy to navigate your store and that your website runs quickly and smoothly is crucial to keeping people on your website, regardless of whether they’re using a desktop or a mobile device. Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is a huge aspect of keeping customers. 85.65% of cart abandonments occur on mobile phones, and while some of this can be blamed on the fact that people are on the go while they are using their phone, plenty others just get tired of dealing with a website that is a pain to use on their phones and leave behind abandoned carts.
Make sure your website’s design is mobile-friendly if you want to give your customers the best experience possible.
Offer Promotions That Encourage Visitors to Return to Your Store
One great way to bring back customers is to offer special promotions to encourage them to finalize their purchases. Whether you’re offering 10 percent off, BOGO half off, or another exciting deal, consider capturing their attention with these types of offers to avoid losing their business altogether. Everybody loves something free, and coupons and other promotions can easily be sent to customers via the email automation we talked about before. This just gives your customers another reminder (and opportunity) to return to their abandoned carts.
Get Help From a Web Design Service Company
When running a website, it’s important to look at any loss as a perfect opportunity to examine your website and see what is working and what is not. Analyzing your customers’ abandoned carts is just the same. It’s a great opportunity to see if certain products aren’t selling or if there’s a specific reason that they keep leaving behind potential purchases. Of course, it can be hard to do all of this work by yourself, but fortunately, there are plenty of talented and experienced sites that can help you and your abandoned carts and give your business the boost it needs.