How to Create a Winning Abandoned Cart Strategy

There isn’t a brand out there not trying to develop a strategy to improve their abandoned cart rates. With the industry average pushing an eye-raising 70%, there’s a lot of opportunities to bring these numbers down. 

Even if your brand isn’t getting hit with numbers quite that high, there’s always room for improvement. Converting even a small percent of the shoppers who leave something in their carts can translate to a significant boost to your bottom line. Not to mention, it may help increase the lifetime value of your customer too. 

So how can you approach this problem? Sure there are plenty of tips and tricks you can use to help improve your abandoned cart rates right now. But you also need a good overall strategy to help you focus on bringing those numbers down over the long term. 

Here’s how to start.

Analyze your data

The first place you want to look is your data. Run the numbers and see what is driving abandonment. General data about cart abandonment highlight that the reasons why people leave their carts range from shipping costs to there being too many steps in the checkout process.

There are usually a couple of main reasons why abandonment happens most of the time. Many of these reasons tend to center around processes. It’s not simply that a shopper decided they didn’t like your product. More often than not, it’s because of entirely different factors that go well beyond the products you’re selling.

If you don’t have the data, ask. Getting more data from customers is a great way to give them a more personalized experience. Plus, figuring out some of the most significant barriers can help you improve your numbers and provide a better checkout experience for customers.

Reduce abandonment

Yes, this part of the strategy is probably pretty obvious, but it’s still important. Here’s where the rubber will meet the road regarding the data you’ve collected. Beyond talking to customers, chat with your support team; they can provide many insights here. Go beyond thinking the industry problems are the same for everyone.

When you know directly from your customers what is driving abandonment, you can start taking direct steps to turn those numbers around. Email marketing is a part of this, but where you want to focus in this stage is on those cited reasons why customers are leaving. 

For example: 

• If your checkout process is too long, find ways to make it shorter. 
• Speed up your site so it doesn’t languish during the checkout process. 
• Show consumers their data is protected, so that isn’t a question.
• Let customers estimate shipping costs before they get to the checkout page, and so on. 

Improving your processes is an easy way to start reducing abandonment right away.

Convert abandoners

With your data and process improvements in place, you may already start to see a reduction in abandoned carts. It’s a great sign you’re moving in the right direction. Next, you want to focus on converting more of the people who’ve abandoned carts with you.

Here’s where your abandoned cart email strategy can really kick in, reengage your customers, and drive conversion. Where you want to focus on this is personalization. Sending more personalized content is more than a hot trend. It’s a way to connect and build trust with consumers. 

Use your behavioral and purchasing data to create dynamic emails that rely heavily on personalized content. For example, share up-to-date ratings and reviews in emails and offer personalized product recommendations based on past purchases. All of that can go a long way toward improving engagement and moving your customer to come back and complete their purchase. 

Focus on optimization

A key thing to remember with every email strategy is you can’t set it and forget it. Sure, what you’re doing right now may end up bringing in a much better conversion rate than in the past, but that doesn’t mean it will always work. 

You want to keep communicating with your customers and team about ways to optimize and improve. One approach can be to tap into Smart Banners. These banners sit at the top of every email you send and, using customer data, will automatically alert someone when they have items in their cart. 

With a tool like this, you’re getting increased message visibility, and built-in CTA functionality means your customer can complete their purchase in just a few clicks. Automation and technology can help you find ways to optimize for better results without a lot of time or effort on your end. 

You can improve your abandoned cart rates, it just takes some strategy and planning to get it right.