Today’s article on Most effective strategies to recover abandoned carts on BigCommerce is brought to you by Laura Sánchez – Marketing Product Manager at Clever ecommerce

Let’s welcome Laura Sánchez in our blog, and learn from her invaluable experience!

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Abandoned carts are always one of the most frustrating things for ecommerce owners. Why wouldn’t people complete a purchase if they already took the time to navigate your store and choose the products they desire?

However, this happens a lot. Around 70% of shoppers abandon their carts. This does not mean that they never come back to  finish the purchase, sometimes they check your competitors’ products and then come back to you, or are reminded about your product. Some studies found that 60% of these potential shoppers come back to complete their purchase after they’ve been reminded about your product.

Assuming that someone who liked your product and added it to the cart will also remember it, may seem like an obvious outcome, but the reality is that this is also not happening. We are not rational.

That’s why it’s really important for your business to check the following ways which you can use for reminding potential customers to come back to your store. Stop losing revenues because of abandoned carts by applying the following strategies:

#1. Retarget your lost shoppers with Google Ads.

Out of sight, out of mind. Remarketing is one of the most efficient ways to remind people to come back for your products. Why? Because remarketing ads follow the abandoners around the Internet showing them the products they left in their cart, acting like a visual reminder.

It is also the easiest way to get to them, assuming you do not have the abandoners’ email. You should use remarketing campaigns for bringing them back before they buy from your competitors!

Tips for your remarketing campaigns:

• Segment your cart abandoners depending on the product they bought, depending on if it was their first sale or a repeated one, and the value of the cart. You would probably like to give a higher incentive to someone purchasing a more expensive product. Also, a person that already bought from your store will recognize you easily, so the ad copy won’t be the same as the one you would use for retargeting a new customer.
• Create a burn pixel, that allows you to stop showing the ads to the people that finally made the purchase.
• Target a time frame and frequency. If you show your ad too early you can annoy your potential clients, but showing it too late could give them time to shop from a competitor. Showing your ads too often can be also annoying, we would recommend you not to exceed 20 times within a month.
• Test it all. Retargeting is not something you can set and then forget about it, you can create different variations of the ad changing the picture, the text and especially the call to action.

Too much to think about? BigCommerce makes it easy for you! There are a huge variety of apps in their marketplace, and of course there is a free app for creating your Google Ads campaigns. This app is Clever AdWords. Clever AdWords creates your ads, banners and generates your keywords for free. All you have to do is pay Google for the clicks your ads will get. The app also offers a Google $75 voucher so you won’t have to  pay for your firsts clicks.

#2. Remind them your existence with emails.

Email marketing has been shown to have a better ROI than social media, SEO and content marketing, so it should be a key part of your marketing strategy, including your actions for cart recovery.

But, when should you send recovery cart emails? The longer you wait for your abandoners to remember you, the less possibilities are that they will come back. According to different studies more than 50% of all carts are recovered when they are reminded to come back. Act in real-time and send your cart emails as soon as possible!

For this reason, you need to collect their emails while they are in your store. You can do it through pop ups or a form, offering them discounts, ebooks, a subscription to your blog, if you have one, asking them to sign in for making a purchase, etc.

Once you already have their email, you can send them one or several reminders. Sending them a series of emails is usually the most effective emailing strategy. It does not matter how well you design the first email or which discount you offer. Inboxes are always crowded and people are busy, so they don’t usually take action the first time.

Sending them a series of emails increases your chances to be successful as you can offer them more value than just a discount. Also, with more emails you have more chances that they notice you and raise awareness on you.

A proper strategy for a successful cart recovery could be the following:

• Segment your customers. As said before when talking about remarketing ads, the success of an email campaign is directly proportional to its relevance. The reasons why a first-time customer abandons the cart is different than the reason why a loyal customer does. Segmenting helps you personalize the message you send.
• Create the perfect subject line. Most of email recipients open their emails depending on the subject line. Your subject should be unique, and cause feelings, a sense of urgency or even scarcity.
• Make sure that your emails are responsive. A lot of people use their phones for checking their emails and buying products. You should make sure that your emails, including product images, text, CTA and buttons are working properly on mobile.
• When sending a series of emails, test the impact of these additional emails and personalize them based on the customer actions.

#3. Prevent shoppers from leaving their cart with pop ups.

This is an effective way to prevent the people from leaving the cart in first place, especially live-saving if you don’t have their email addresses. You can always target abandoners with an exit-intent popup, and even returning visitors who are not answering to your emailing strategy. But, how can you convince them to purchase? There are some proven ways to reduce your shopping cart abandonment through pop ups:

• Re-engage them instantly with a strong call to action, you can use humor or urgency in the title so they feel they are losing a great opportunity if they leave.
• Give them a reason to stay. Again, it’s not all about discounts, there are another valuable features that your visitors can be interested in, like free returns, a free gif with their purchase, free shipping, etc.
• You can install exit-intent popups on any page of your store, including shopping cart and checkout pages. Personalize the pop ups depending on the page where they are set.

#4. Keep the cart visible on your webpage.

Sometimes people navigate your website adding the products they are interested in to their cart. However, then they continue checking other products on your website and even in your competitors’ websites. A good way to remind them about the abandoned cart is by highlighting it and making it very clear on the web, especially when there are products in it.

Almost 25% of people abandoning their shopping cart would like to save their items there for future consideration. This is also why your shopping cart should be visible. Amazon does it really good as it displays the number of items in the cart, highlighting it in another color.

#5. Activate your web push notifications.

Push notifications are really popular, specially on mobile. However, when it comes to the web only a few marketers are using them. This is a mistake; as a web push notification is an excellent way to recover carts in real time, which would not be possible with emails.  

#6. Eliminate surprises and mention all the charges from the beginning.  

More than half of the people leaving their carts do it because shipping costs, and other extras, made the total purchase more than expected. People don’t like these kind of surprises, don’t surprise them.

For solving this problem, if you have shipping costs, what you can do is to add a shipping calculator in your site so they can calculate the shipping costs before going to the cart. Other types of costs like sales taxes, handling fees or product customization charges should be clear in the product page.

#7. Make the checkout lightning fast.

Eliminate unnecessary pages and processes for reducing your shopping cart abandonment. Paying is the worst part of shopping, so don’t make customers click through 4 different pages to complete a purchase.

Enabling the “guest checkout” option, will prevent the lazier customers from leaving the page because they feel overwhelmed about filling blank spaces.  Requiring all customers to create an account before checking out makes the process slow, and will increase your bounce rates. You can even ask for this information after they have actually made the purchase.

For instance here they only have to put their email, and paying details, hit the button “pay” and it’s done! In just one click. They even have the option “remember me”, which would make the process even easier for customers the next time they make a purchase.

#8. Let them contact you easily.

A lot of customers have questions during the checkout process, or simply like to feel supported while making a purchase. Give them all the support necessary, not only through your FAQs question but also through customers reviews and giving them the option to contact you directly.

A chat for instance, is the perfect option. The problem about the chat is that you need to be actually available there for solving their doubts. In case you don’t have the availability or a team that can be in front of the computer for offering such services, a customer service number will do.

#9. Activate security badges.

People know there is a lot of cheating, and that some sellers diddle their customers to earn more money. A lot of them are afraid it will happen to them, specially the ones that don’t usually make online purchases.

Including security badges guarantees customers they can trust the businesses when giving them their credit card information, helping instill confidence and reducing cart abandonment. But not all the badges give the same sense of trust:

As you can see, it is not the same to display a security badge from Norton or McAfee as having it from Comodo. Make sure this is not a problem for your business, and increase your finished sales by displaying the right security badges in your store.

#10. Offer customers different payment methods.

Some customers prefer to pay with their card details, others use paypal… they want to choose their preferred payment method, and if you don’t have it available, they may leave. That’s why it is really important to know your buyer persona.

This is specially important if you take into account that most of your clients will pay with American Express, Mastercard, VISA, but there are people using Discover Cards, Diners Club, JBC and others. Learn which cards are using your customers and make it available to pay with them in your store.

You need to test all of these different strategies for seeing which one works best for you. So, test, test, test! Test all the strategies and optimize them both, individually and overall. From mentioning the product in the subject line in your emails, to testing the number of emails you will send, testing different keywords and banners for your ads or changing the call to actions.

Do not  lose any more time and start putting into action all the above strategies for recovering your carts abandonments. Try some or all of them, but take into account that the more you use, the better chance that you will increase your conversions!

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We feel honoured to have Laura Sánchez’s insights featured in our blog, and we are incredibly thankful for the knowledge she has shared with us.

Author bio here

This post is brought to you by Laura Sánchez – Marketing Product Manager at Clever ecommerce and a frequent blogger at Clever ecommerce blog.

In Clever ecommerce blog, we talk about marketing tips for ecommerce and Google Ads, for helping online stores owners take their business to the next level.