Abandoned Cart Recovery

Abandoned cart recovery is a marketing strategy that aims to re-engage with clients who have added items to their online shopping carts but haven’t completed the checkout process. With this approach, e-commerce companies remind these people about the products left in their carts and encourage them to finalize their purchase.

In this article, we’ll uncover reasons to recover abandoned carts and provide you with specific strategies. We’ll also explain how to recover abandoned carts with SendPulse.

Why should you recover abandoned shopping carts?

Abandoned cart recovery helps business owners recover lost sales. However, its significance goes beyond just revenue recovery. In this section, we’ll uncover the benefits of this approach that might pique your interest.

• Improved revenue. Abandoned cart recovery drastically impacts your revenues, moreover, if you are involved in e-commerce. Even a slight positive change in conversion rates can bolster your business’s financial health.
• Customer loyalty. Successfully bringing back customers who abandoned their carts can enhance customer retention and loyalty. By applying the right strategies and providing a seamless shopping experience, you establish good relationships with clients and encourage loyalty and repeat purchases. Personalized approach, special offers, and excellent service might be the reasons for clients to come back and repeat their orders.
• Competitive advantage. While many brands employ various abandoned cart recovery strategies, analyzing customer behavior and enhancing their experience with your brand can give you a competitive edge. Understanding why consumers abandon carts enables you to refine their interaction with your brand, enticing them to make a purchase.
• Reduced costs. Reviving previous customers is cost-effective compared to acquiring new leads. Customers with abandoned carts are already familiar with your brand and products, making them easier to re-engage, unlike new prospects who might be unfamiliar with your company.
• Better user experience. With abandoned cart data, you can analyze insights into customer behavior and preferences. It helps you figure out the problems customers face when adding items to the cart and checking out. If you manage to identify their pain points and improve your site, you can ensure a seamless shopping experience. As a result, clients will come back to your site and complete their purchases.
• Personalized approach. Abandoned cart recovery allows you to personalize your interaction with clients. After analyzing the products in customer carts, you can provide consumers with incentives related to the items in the shopping carts. It’s a perfect way of encouraging these clients to complete their orders. Special offers and incentives are the most effective ways to re-engage clients.
• Higher customer lifetime value. Successfully implementing an abandoned cart recovery strategy increases the likelihood of having loyal customers who make repeat purchases. Long-term customer relationships boost their lifetime value, benefiting your business in the long run.

Now that you know the reasons to incorporate the strategy, it’s time to figure out why clients leave their shopping carts without completing the checkout process.

10 Reasons Why Users Abandon Their Shopping Carts

In this section, we’ll explain why customers leave their shopping carts without completing the desired action. It will help you identify the issues with your site and eliminate them.

1. Poor mobile experience. Providing an excellent experience for all types of devices is a must for every e-commerce company. Poor mobile experience might become a reason for customers to abandon their shopping carts. That’s why you need to ensure that your website is mobile-responsive and provides a seamless experience for mobile users. If so, clients will proceed to checkout.
2. Limited payment methods. If you have only a few payment options, it might become an issue for some customers. It’s always better to provide users with several payment methods. When you have many options, customers will find a way to complete the transaction.
3. Website technical problems. Errors, poor interface, or slow website speed can become obstacles for customers. They distract users and don’t let them complete the checkout or even proceed to it.
4. Distracting pop-ups. Promotions, ads, and pop-ups can negatively influence customer decisions when they are at the checkout stage. They can be the reasons for clients to leave the site without making any purchase. That’s why make sure that your site is ad-free during the checkout. Let your clients focus on completing their orders.
5. High shipping costs. Unexpected shipping costs that appear during the checkout are one more reason for customers to abandon their carts, if the costs are very high compared with the total cost of the order.
6. Long checkout process. Users can abandon their carts when the checkout process is too complicated. It might involve many form fields, steps, or account requirements. All these obstacles can deter customers from buying the items in their carts. So, you need to provide a user-friendly checkout for more sales.
7. Additional taxes. Additional taxes during the checkout will frustrate customers. All the costs should be shown to clients before checkout and payment. Ensure that all costs related to your products are visible before customers add them to their shopping carts. It will prevent customer churn.
8. Out-of-stock products. Customers can abandon their carts once they find out that some products are out of stock. It can be frustrating for them to figure it out only during the checkout. That’s why it’s essential to update customers on your stock before they add these items to their carts. Make sure to check your inventory and assign the right status to all of your products.
9. Low level of trust. If customers have hesitations regarding your site, seller, or company in general, they might abandon their carts. That’s why building trust is essential. You can do it by encouraging customer reviews and placing them on your website, reviews under product cards, and providing clear return policies.
10. Long delivery process. A lengthy delivery process can be a significant issue. Certain customers anticipate specific delivery dates and times. If the estimated delivery period fails to meet their expectations, they may abandon their carts. Prolonged processes significantly increase the likelihood of incomplete checkouts

Now that you know the reasons, let’s proceed to the effective platform that will help you recover abandoned carts. In the next section, we’ll show you how to do it without additional hustle.

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How to recover an abandoned shopping cart with SendPulse?

Since manual abandoned cart recovery can take a lot of time and effort from your team, we’ve decided to show you how to do it quickly and for free with SendPulse. We’ll provide you with a short step-by-step guide on how to do it.

Automation 360 enables you to re-engage with users who have abandoned their carts with little or no human involvement. You need to set the conditions for your flow and the automation will be triggered instantly after customers abandon their carts or after a specific timeframe. With its help, you can send abandoned cart notifications, personalized recommendations, and special incentives on autopilot.

Feel free to add as many channels as you need. The service empowers you to send emails, SMS, web push, and Viber campaigns, and abandoned cart notifications on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. So,now that you know some general information about Automation 360, let’s dive deeper and find out how to create abandoned cart automation for your business.

Step 1. Create a new event

Go to “Automation 360” in the upper tab and click “Events Manager.” Then click “Add new event.”

Select the “Abandoned cart” preset event. After, you’ll see user variables. You can manage them as needed (add or delete some). Consider setting the variable type.

Once you finish with the settings, the platform will generate a link your system will send requests to. You should select your request method and copy the generated link.

Step 2. Create an automation flow

Go to “A360” and click the “Create automation” button. Next, you can choose whether to create a new automation from scratch or use the given templates.

After choosing the “Abandoned cart” template, you’ll be taken to the platform’s editor, where you can adjust and modify the flow. Consider adding the necessary elements and channels for more effectiveness of your abandoned cart recovery.

Below you can see an example of an abandoned cart flow. You need to set the start condition that will trigger the flow. For instance, if items are in the shopping cart without a checkout for three days. After that time the system will start the automated flow of reminders. You can send emails, messages in messengers, and SMS. When customers complete their purchases the flow will stop.

Now that you know how to create automation for clients with abandoned carts, it’s time to unveil how to prevent customers from leaving their shopping carts without buying. Check out our article for more detailed instructions on how to send abandoned cart messages.

10 Abandoned Shopping Cart Recovery Strategies

The company's ability to recover abandoned carts is a vital factor for increased sales and revenues. Bringing back customers who have abandoned their carts is key. That's why we've put together the 10 most effective strategies to do just that. Take a look if you're aiming to boost your conversion rates.

1. Send automated email campaigns. Consider incorporating automated email reminders and sending them to users with abandoned carts. To grab customers’ attention, you should include a clear call to action and a personalized approach. These two elements are essential for encouraging clients to complete purchases.
2. Offer special incentives. When sending re-engagement emails, make sure to include some interesting offers for customers. You need to provide personalized incentives to users to encourage them to continue with the checkout. Analyze clients’ abandoned carts and provide incentives based on their added products. For instance, if a client added face cream, consider giving a discount on an eye cream from the same series. Alternatively, you can provide free shipping or a gift to make customers return to their abandoned carts.
3. Provide real-time inventory information. If you don’t want to frustrate customers, display up-to-date information about your inventory. It’s necessary to prevent users from finding out that some of the items are unavailable during their checkout process.
4. Send personalized product recommendations. Consider enticing customers by providing them with personalized recommendations. For this purpose, you need to analyze their browsing and cart history. After identifying the products they are interested in, you should include them in your further email campaigns. It will help you re-engage with them and encourage purchases.
5. Ensure a seamless checkout process. Your checkout should be straightforward so as not to interfere with customer buying. Avoid many steps and form fields to simplify the process as much as possible.
6. Improve your website. Before allowing customers to explore and buy products, you need to ensure a seamless user experience. Check your site speed and optimize it if necessary. Review your site for technical problems and errors, ensuring it's free of any issues.
7. Ensure transparent prices. To avoid frustrating customers with surprise charges at checkout, it's advisable to list all shipping and tax costs upfront. Display these costs clearly so customers are aware of the total amount they will need to pay.
8. Establish trust. Your company should look trustworthy to encourage purchases. You need to add trust badges, reviews, and testimonials on your site. Provide all the necessary information about the security of clients’ payments. They should be sure that their costs are safe.
9. Incorporate exit-intent pop-ups. Exit-intent pop-ups serve as reminders of uncompleted purchases. When customers are about to leave your website without checking out, you can use pop-ups to re-engage with them. The most effective way is to offer a special incentive. It can make clients complete their orders. With smart pop-ups from SendPulse, you can provide customers with personalized experience. Pop-ups can include information about incentives related to products in customers’ abandoned shopping carts.
10. Use retargeting. Consider using Google Ads or ads on Facebook to remind consumers about uncompleted orders. These ads with the items in their shopping carts will pop up when they search Google or social media platforms. It will remind them of their abandoned carts and items they wanted to purchase. Some of them will come back to the checkout to complete their orders.

Congrats, now you know what abandoned cart recovery is and why it’s crucial. Hope that our 10 strategies will help your customers back and encourage them to check out the items. Register with SendPulse to recover abandoned shopping carts for free.

References:

1. This article defines the term and unveils how to recover abandoned carts.
2. In this article, you’ll find seven excellent abandoned cart recovery strategies.

Last Updated: 06.11.2023