A shopper adds a product to the cart on your webshop but leaves the webshop and doesn't make a purchase.
Familiar with that?
If so, you would probably want to reduce cart abandonment. In order to do that, we must understand what it is and why it keeps happening.
Welcome to our new blog (keep reading for a free ebook)!
1. Abandoned Cart: an introduction
It is estimated that cart abandonment rates are around 70% on average across all industries. That means that only 3 out of 10 digital shopping carts turn into complete sales, and the rest are considered lost sales - which is a lot. The average cart abandonment rate has been slowly but steadily rising over the past decade as well.
Shoppers list lots of reasons: unexpected costs, having to create an account, delivery taking long, lack of trust, long and/or complicated checkout process, and even bugs as some of the reasons they abandon their carts. We should not easily discard market competition either.
See for yourself:
As we can see, it is a complex problem, and it should be approached from multiple angles. We will reduce it to two approaches: pre-abandonment, and post-abandonment. Generally, we will want to reduce abandonment rates before abandonment happens, and at the same time bring the customers back to the website after abandonment.
Reducing the chances of abandonment before it occurs revolves around improving our webshop - think new features. Optimizing the checkout process, being transparent and upfront about extra costs and introducing new payment methods are just some of the ideas.
After some shoppers inevitably abandon their carts, we should aim to bring them back to complete their purchase.
2. Bringing back the shoppers
But why is this part important?
Because we will never be able to reduce the cart abandonment rate to 0 just by improving our webshop. Some customers will, inevitably, still be leaving our webshop with their carts full. And this is the perfect time to remind them about it!
In doing so, we would be optimizing the marketing cost - if we take a look at a single sale, it is always more cost-efficient to bring a potential customer back, rather than bring a new customer in.
We would be developing a relationship with the customers, improving their experience and increasing loyalty and retention. We can easily do that with personalized content or additional product recommendations, tailored specifically for them, using AI. We can offer them exclusive deals as well - let’s go back to the #1 reason shoppers abandon their carts: extra costs. What if we offered them free shipping, a coupon code or some other incentive if they completed their purchase?
Sounds good?
3. How-to: The Marketing Cloud Way!
To put it simply - remind customers that they still have items in their carts. We can send them a slight nudge, offer an incentive, suggest other products they might like (using AI) etc. We can use email, SMS, push notifications and other lines of communication. The possibilities are vast!
Our tool of choice for this is Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Besides setting up the abandoned cart emails, it allows us to efficiently craft, automate and optimize our digital marketing. It allows us to engage customers using customer journeys and effective messaging sent across multiple channels: email, SMS, push, WhatsApp etc. We can leverage Salesforce’s AI solution, Einstein, to deliver relevant product recommendations and target the customers more efficiently and effectively, through segmentation and send optimization.
And so much more!
To put it simply, Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation powerhouse!
4. Download your guide
We have created an implementation guide for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We will show you how to get the Abandoned Cart Emails up and running. And it is yours, for free!
To get it, simply download our eBook.
We hope you find it useful, and if you have any further questions, feel free to get in touch.