By John Brackett, founder of Smash Balloon, the world's leading social media feed plug-ins for WordPress.
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Are you looking for a way to reduce shopping cart abandonment and boost sales? If so, you’re not alone. Business owners across all industries are constantly looking for ways to keep visitors engaged with their brand.
If you don’t know, shopping cart abandonment is when consumers add items to their cart but leave before they complete their order. You may be shocked to learn that the average abandonment rate in select industries is a whopping 88.05%!
The good news is there are plenty of innovative ways you can bring these folks back to your website to complete their orders. Let's look at several strategies you can use to not only reduce cart abandonment but also to convince customers to complete their order the first time they add an item to their cart.
1. Keep Pricing Simple
First, if you want to keep people on your website, simple pricing is vital. Consumers often leave checkout pages due to unexpected costs. You’ll dramatically reduce abandonment by simplifying your checkout page and ordering process.
Consider including a shopping cart icon on your website’s overlay that users can click on whenever they want. At the bottom of the cart, they should see their exact total. This one small change will lead to more people following through with their purchases.
You can also incentivize people to order by offering free delivery. Include a banner at the top of your product page that lets users know how much they need to spend to get free shipping. Not only will this lead to more completed purchases, but it can also boost the price of your average order value.
2. Send Personalized Emails
If a consumer adds a product to their cart, there’s a good chance they are subscribed to your email list. Instead of letting them leave for good, you could send out a personalized marketing email.
Use what you know about your customers to create eye-catching recovery emails. For instance, you could include the name of the product or customer in the subject line of your message.
My team sends out three "abandonment emails" within one week of a customer leaving their shopping cart behind. If they don’t come back by the second message, we send a discount along with a reminder to encourage them to complete their order.
Use your audience segments to create personalized campaigns for specific users. For example, a clothing company would create multiple email drips for users based on customers’ style preferences, budget and on-site behavior.
3. Show That You’re Trustworthy
We’ve all visited an online store that didn’t look or feel trustworthy. People are unwilling to put sensitive information like their email addresses and bank information on websites that don’t appear reputable.
Online shopping has made it so we can’t talk to visitors face-to-face, which makes it hard to show that you can be trusted. Instead, you have to rely on social proof tools and practices to show visitors that your brand is honest and puts customers first.
Reviews and testimonials are an excellent way to show new visitors that you’re trustworthy. Encourage customers to leave reviews after they’ve spent some time with your product or service. When new visitors find your website and see that other people had positive experiences in the past, they are more likely to complete the checkout process.
You can also build social proof by including trust seals on your checkout forms. Consumers are more likely to give you their information if they see that your brand is endorsed by a high-profile security company like McAfee or Norton.
4. Use FOMO Marketing
Finally, you can prevent people from leaving and bring them back through fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) marketing. As the name implies, FOMO is when a consumer worries about missing out on a deal or experience and makes a purchase.
There are several ways you can add FOMO marketing to your strategy. If you decide to host a flash sale, add a countdown timer to the top of your screen so users can see how long they have to take advantage of your deal. This small addition could nudge potential customers who are on the fence to finalize their orders.
You can also include elements of FOMO in your social media and email marketing. When you reach out to users and ask them to come back, include a time-sensitive offer so subscribers don’t have a long time to think about whether they should return. You don’t want to rush them, but at the same time, you don’t want them to forget that they added items to their cart in the first place.
Back To You
As you can see, there are plenty of clever ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment. You may have to experiment with some of these strategies to find what works for you, but this is one marketing effort worth pursuing.
