![They dropped the basket now what](https://www.striata.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/They-dropped-the-basket-now-what.jpg)
This is the statistic that really grabbed my attention: the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 67%! 1
Online store customers can be split into four groups:
- The 33% who have bought from you already
- New customers who have not yet visited your online store
- Those that have browsed but never check-out
- Those that reach checkout but abandon their baskets at the door, unpaid
They dropped the basket, now what?
Groups 1 and 4 are the customers who would benefit most from targeted email marketing.
Group 1 are your traditional eMarketing customers to whom you can legitimately send targeted marketing as part of a customer lifecycle program, provided it’s relevant and improves their experience with your brand.
Group 4 are customers with the highest chance of re-engaging if you act quickly and smartly. The action of re-engaging with a dropped basket customer is known as ‘Re-Marketing’.
Why do customers abandon their carts?
![Why Do Customers Abandon Their Charts Why Do Customers Abandon Their Charts](https://www.striata.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/why-do-customers-abandon-their-charts.png)
Forrester shows that the 2 primary reasons are: “I am not sure I want to pay that“; and “I am not sure I want that yet“, which tells us that abandonment doesn’t mean the end of a sale.
How will re-marketing help?
While some studies show that only 8% of abandoners will return to complete the purchase on their own, this number goes up to 26% with re-marketing according to SeeWhy.
Let’s take a step back and look at how online shoppers get to the cart originally. The SeeWhy graphs below show that 57% of traffic arrives at the shopping cart from an email; and 67% of cart conversions originate from an email.
![Percentage Of Traffic Arriving At The Shkopping Cart Percentage Of Traffic Arriving At The Shkopping Cart](https://www.striata.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/percentage-of-traffic-arriving-at-the-shkopping-cart.png)
![Percentage Of Conversion Percentage Of Conversion](https://www.striata.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/percentage-of-conversion.png)
It follows that if the majority of online shoppers get to the cart from an email, then email should also be the most effective channel to get them to re-engage. And it suggests that those that re-engage via an email are the most likely group to convert to purchase.
A report from Forrester Research stated that when re-marketed, customers were likely to spend up to 55% more. SeeWhy claims it is because of these 3 key factors:
- Re-marketing leverages off our emotions
- It induces a brand trust: because it’s fresh in our memory
- Users then start to use the cart as an offline shopping cart, filling it up with every return to the site
What can I do to re-market?
Group 4 customers have one massive advantage from a marketer’s point of view; they have registered and provided their email address (unless they are ‘guest’ customers). This is your chance to engage.
Once a customer has registered, there are a myriad of touch point and lifecycle communications that can be triggered. One of these could be a welcome series. This is the opportunity to educate them on your products and your processes. It also gives multiple opportunities to engage because as a ‘welcome series’ it can constitute more than one message.
Here are 5 key triggered communications to be used when a customer abandons their cart:
- An immediate trigger when their cart has been abandoned; ie within minutes send an email that reminds them that they have abandoned their cart. 2
- A second reminder a day or two later that references either the products they selected, or a key benefit of your site, like free delivery.
- A related [complementary] product mailer where you reference the product they had included in their cart and provide related or similar products that they may prefer.
- The consensus is that re-engagement will happen within 28 days, so within that time, a newsletter or a brief survey (2 – 3 questions) can be triggered that will speed up the re-engagement.
- Offer a discount or an incentive to return to the site.
Don’t be daunted by that massive 67% abandonment rate because you can assist your customers along their decision path. The email channel is the perfect vehicle to re-engage your customers with relevant, targeted content that will inspire them to pick up the basket and pay for their goods.
References:
- The value is an average calculated based on 19 different studies containing statistics on e-commerce shopping cart abandonment. 19 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
- In a SeeWhy conducted A/B split test where they measured the impact of the send time for just the first re-marketing email, there was a dramatic difference in the total revenue recovered by the two re-marketing campaigns. The real-time re-marketing campaign generated 105% more revenue than the same email sent only 24 hours later