3 Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

By Barry Nolan On Nov 23, 2018

Each year, more and more retail sales are completed online. Despite this fact, the overwhelming majority of shoppers still make their final purchase in physical stores. This juxtaposition is a reminder that shoppers regularly mix and match shopping channels in an effort to find the perfect product or best deal. Meeting customer expectations across all channels is not an easy task for brand marketers as mobile shopping cart abandonment rates hover around 70 percent. Marketers struggling to convert item-laden shopping carts into purchases should take heed of the following suggestions in order to help their businesses grow.

Develop Apps to Understand the Problem

Without a comprehensive app analytics solution in place, it will be nearly impossible to understand who your users are or how they are using the app. If you’re sending marketing messaging blind, it undermines your ability to reach the right users and turn abandoned carts into completed purchases.

Instrumenting mobile apps with analytics-providing solutions can help with this issue significantly. Consider a mobile app for an airline. By instrumenting the app to take notice of behavior, such as time and date stamps for departure and arrival times, cabin class, passenger number, and type of payment, marketers can gain a much more granular understanding of what individual customers place in their carts. It’s difficult to send a recovery message about a flight if marketers are unsure whether the intended flight was destined for Tokyo or Dubai.

By instrumenting apps to understand the problem, marketers can help optimize checkout flows and automate cart recovery messaging. These factors can significantly reduce the cart abandonment problem and greatly increase revenue.

Optimize the Checkout Process

Though the phrase “trust the process” is most often heard in a sports context, the concept is just as important for e-commerce marketers. If cart abandonment is a challenge, then understanding what processes are leading to shoppers abandoning carts is paramount to lowering abandonment rates. One way to keep shoppers from abandoning their carts is to optimize the checkout process.

Typically, marketers can help optimize any facet of their app through rigorous A/B testing. In this case, they should test the content and timing of their checkout messaging, as well as the flow, calls to action and imagery (including button colors and copy) of the checkout process. Additionally, testing the flows of third-party implementations, such as Apple Pay, is crucial to turning browsers into buyers. While A/B testing may sound automatic to some, not all marketers test each and every variant of the checkout process to determine which checkout processes drive the highest conversion rates.

Incorporate Relevant Cart Recovery Messaging

At this stage, marketers likely have a much better grasp of their cart-abandoning users’ behavior patterns. Once they segment users and optimize the checkout process, they can work to recapture abandoned carts with carefully targeted recovery messages. Marketers must take care to use different techniques for different segments.

By combining avenues like push notifications to re-engage shoppers outside the app, marketers can maximize their conversion rates. If the purchase was abandoned in an app, it makes sense to bring users back to the app to complete it. Marketers must ensure that when the recipient opens a message notification, they are deep linked directly to the purchase page. Deep linking has a large impact on conversion.

Furthermore, marketers should attempt to automate recovery messaging, in order to reach out to each user who abandons a cart without involving manual processes each time. This can take the form of a cart abandonment push notification, email or in-app messaging or re-targeted messaging.

The most important thing for marketers to remember is that the more personal the messaging, the more effective it will be. Personalization should go further than using a customer’s first name. Tone and language matter too: Marketers should create a unique and conversational voice in order to avoid sounding like a robot.

Cart Recovery Messaging Boosts Conversions, Revenue

Each year, brands lose out on revenue because shoppers abandon carts and never return. By leveraging these methods to implement abandoned cart recovery messaging, retailers can realize upwards of 15 percent increase in conversion rates. Even employing just one of these tools, such as a simple series of automated messages, can generate millions in revenue that were otherwise lost. This holiday season, and in planning for next year, marketers should reconsider how they approach cart abandonment. By executing relevant messaging campaigns across a wider reach of channels, brands can effectively improve conversion rates and positively impact the business.