An average website loses 69 percent of sales to abandoned carts. Studies show that recouping 30 percent of those sales can result in a 64-percent increase in revenue. How? With an abandoned cart email campaign.
Abandoned cart email campaigns are an effective way of recovering sales lost in the checkout process.
The benefits of implementing an abandoned cart email campaign include, but are not limited, to the following:
- You gain insights and qualitative information for improving the sales in the checkout process.
- You create a better customer experience.
- You recoup sales and revenue lost in the abandoned shopping cart.
Taking the time to execute an abandoned cart email campaign can help combat those statistics. But how do you increase your conversion rates after implementing a campaign?
4 effective strategies to boost abandoned cart email conversion rates
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Offer customer support within 15 minutes.
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Use drip email or schedule a series of emails.
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Optimize emails for mobile devices.
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Use discount and coupon offers.
Let's take a closer look at each of these four ways you can begin to turn those abandoned carts into new customers.
1. Offer customer support within 15 minutes
Abandoned cart emails provide the perfect opportunity to interact with customers, create memorable customer experiences, and recover lost sales. The tone of your message (copy), including images used in the email, can influence your customer's reception and purchase intent.
Sending a personalized email after 15 minutes of cart abandonment — asking why the customer abandoned his or her cart and offering help with making a purchase — can boost your conversion rates. This can also be used to determine why the customer abandoned the cart and avoid future occurrences.
Your first email should encourage the customer to call you or swiftly reply to you with their feedback/complaint. This email should contain any of the following:
- Ask for any issues or problems encountered at checkout and how you can help.
- Tell them you appreciate their patronage and offer assistance in completing the order by contacting customer support via phone, connecting with your live chat agents, or responding to this email .
- Inform customers that their cart will be saved for more than a week and they can return to complete their purchase at their convenience.
For optimal results, send the first email within 15 minutes of the cart being abandoned. The chances of closing the sale are three times higher than after an hour has passed.
Be sure to send you customer support email from a live, monitored account. Email should be sent from a real person with a photo and name.
2. Use drip mail or schedule a series of emails
Before launching an abandoned cart email campaign, your sales retrieval strategy should be reviewed for a three-part email series. Timing is important in making a sale, according to a research conducted by SaleCycle on 200 global brands sending abandoned cart emails.
The research showed that:
- Emails sent within 20 minutes achieved, on average, a 5.2-percent conversion rate.
- Emails sent within an hour achieved, on average, a 4.5-percent conversion rate.
- Emails sent more than 24 hours after the shopping cart was abandoned achieved, on average, a 2.6-percent conversion rate.
To achieve desired results, send the email series in the following time frame:
- First email: 15 mins after cart abandonment.
- Second email: 24 hours after cart abandonment.
- Third and final email: Split test five or seven days after cart abandonment.
In a perfect example, Boot Barn created a three-part email campaign to remarket to customers who didn’t complete their purchase. The strategy was to send three different emails within a space of one week.
- The first email opened a dialogue (offering support) between Boot Barn and the customers. It was sent 20 minutes after the cart was abandoned and achieved an open rate of more than 46 percent and CTR of over 6 percent.
- The second email, which was sent 23 hours after the cart was abandoned, emphasized the trust factors that set Boot Barn apart. It received an open rate of about 40 percent and CTR of 9.79 percent.
- The third email was sent one week after the cart was abandoned to inform the customer that they had a final chance to complete their purchase or lose their shopping cart. This generated an open rate of more than 27 percent and CTR of just over 10 percent.
3. Optimize emails for mobile devices
In 2015, mobile commerce sales in the U.S. topped at $51 billion. For the huge percentage of your customers and visitors, mobile devices will be their default shopping platform.
Optimizing your abandoned cart email campaign for mobile devices should boost your conversion numbers.
Simple tweaks when optimizing emails for mobile devices include:
- Design responsive email that will render well on all mobile devices with different screen sizes.
- Include a regenerate cart session link in the email so customers can continue from where they stopped.
- Add a huge call-to-action in your second and third email (only) with “PROCEED TO CHECKOUT” in bold letters, beautiful fonts and bright colors.
4. Use discount and coupons offers.
According to a study from RetailMeNot, 85 percent of consumers look for coupons prior to visiting a retailer. Another study from WorldPay shows that presenting customers with unexpected total costs at checkout is the most common cause of cart abandonment (at 59 percent), but including discounts and coupon offers into your abandoned cart email campaign can boost conversion rates.
Customers are always looking for discounts and coupons.
The most effective way of using coupons and getting customers to complete their abandoned purchases is to offer coupons in your final abandoned cart email. For example, you can only find Nike’s clearance sales coupon code can in their third abandoned cart email series, and they can’t be used until the email is activated.
If you use coupons on your website, you will have to offer cart abandoners twice the value of the original coupon. One-use coupon codes can be generated for individual customers, and eliminated after use, to combat customers sharing the coupon code with other internet users.
One creative way of including coupons in your campaign email is to include the code into the linkback URL so it’s automatically applied at checkout.
Conclusion
In closing, be sure to always include the customer’s shopping cart in the three-part abandoned cart email series. Offer customer support in your first email. Use humor in your email copy. And offer a compelling discount. Implementing these tactics can help move those abandoned carts through the checkout process.
