How to formulate your abandoned cart strategy for 2020

Spend any time in eCommerce, and you’ll know there’s one indisputable fact: abandoned carts are a way of life. 

But, what you shouldn’t do is ignore the potential opportunity that abandoned carts present for your company. In fact, in 2020 and beyond, you need to have an abandoned cart strategy, period. 

It’s just good business sense. 

So here, we’re going to help you figure out how to formulate your abandoned cart strategy to help you not only for the coming year but into the future. 

Let’s do this.

Get your data in order

The first thing you want to do is start working with the right data. If you haven’t already, start monitoring and collecting information on abandoned carts. 

That’s going to give you a good baseline to start working a strategy around — after all, if you don’t know which customers are abandoning their carts or why then it’s pretty hard to get them back. 

Also, take a look at your current stats, too, especially if you have been sending out abandoned cart notifications. Make a note of what has moved the needle and what hasn’t; you can put that to good use later. 

Answer the why’s 

There are a lot of reasons why consumers abandon carts. These aren’t limited to things like:

• High shipping costs
• A confusing check out process
• Making customers create an account to buy
• Coupons that don’t work
• Concerns about payment security

All of these are very valid reasons for why your customers don’t complete the check out process. But, to know which are the most prevalent on your site, you need to get to the why. 

One way to do that is to ask. Send an email out to the people who have abandoned their carts and ask why they did. You can also use some customer service apps to help too. 

Also, test the process yourself and get people you know who might not be intimately familiar with your site, friends or even parents, to go through the checkout process. That’s an easy way to find some red flags that could slow people down and fix them.

Work on re-targeting

You can also set up some re-targeting campaigns to try to get people back as well. It’s relatively easy to set up browser cookies for your site that will then later populate in the social media feeds your customers use. 

With re-targeting, the people who have visited your site and done a bit of shopping can see those products pop up again dynamically, serving as a good reminder to get back to the cart and buy.

Send good abandoned cart emails

Not all abandoned cart emails are the same. Some are…ok while others really drive home results. 

It should be pretty clear which type of email you want to send. So, move beyond the generic, hey you’ve got something left in your cart, type of emails, and make them more targeted, specific, and interesting to your potential customers. 

There are also a few really important best practices you want to hit with your abandoned cart emails.

First, use the data you’ve got from your customers to make your emails specific to them. You can use geolocation, for example. This ensures you’re sending your email based on time zone; when you know they will be up versus picking a random time to send a generic email to everyone when half your list is asleep.

You should also include images and engaging copy. You can have pictures of the exact items they’ve left in the cart on display in the email. It can serve as a very subtle reminder of the cool stuff they wanted to buy.

Images can be used in another way too, and that’s to highlight other related products to those left in the cart. With information on the behavior of your customers, you can use your abandoned cart email for more than just asking people to come back and shop, but for other ways to entice them too.

Also, make it easy for customers to get back to their cart. The fewer steps and resistance points there are to getting your customer to buy, the better. Make it a no-brainer for them to get back to their cart.

Finally, think about adding some bonuses. This could be a coupon or free delivery or VIP points, anything that makes your customer feel a bit special. Here’s where having a strategy for list segmentation comes into play too, because you might be able to offer something to returning customers that will make them happy to keep buying from you.

Ready to start planning your abandoned cart strategy?