There are a variety of reasons why shoppers abandon their carts in the middle of a transaction. In many cases, shoppers get tempted by a Facebook review they see, or by a promotion for a new product that they receive in their email. They go to the retailer’s website and put the item in their cart, and then they get pre-purchase remorse. Sometimes, site visitors have no intention of buying on their first visit. Or, perhaps they get turned off by the cost of shipping, or the length of time it will take to receive the product. Whatever the reason, cart abandonment is not all that unusual.
Nearly 80% of shoppers abandon a site without completing the transaction, and while this varies depending on the product or service being sold, or even the site experience itself, there are a variety of methods that retail marketers can engage in getting that customer to return and convert. Abandoned cart emails are one of those strategies.
Abandoned cart emails require effective email marketing software
Retail marketers leverage abandoned cart emails to reach customers who have added products to their cart, but then never completed the transaction. It’s exceptionally effective as a sales recovery strategy. Almost 50% of abandoned cart emails are opened by the intended recipient, and over 30% of clicks lead to a purchase on the retailer’s website. Those statistics make for a pretty solid argument that email is a great strategy to get prospective customers to re-engage.
However, before you can start sending out emails to your customers, you need to invest in email marketing software. Using your email program, such as what is used in your office for your employees to conduct business, will not suffice as a marketing tool. Email marketing software is designed by marketers and for marketers, and often provided advanced tools such as audience segmentation, geo-targeted delivery, designed templates, and marketing effectiveness dashboards. Software programs such as those offered by Mailerlite provide an exceptionally cost-effective solution that allows you to create amazing campaigns, grow your subscriber list, deliver the right message, optimize your campaigns, and track your results.
Mailerlite provides a very competitive pricing model that allows marketers of all sizes to pick the solution that best works for them, based on their subscriber count and the number of emails that the organization wishes to send per month. Monthly and annual plans are available, which ensure that the marketing team can spend against the marketing budget at the time that is best for them.
Rules for creating effective abandoned cart emails
As with any marketing program that you execute, abandoned cart emails require some thought before just any message is sent out to these potentially valuable customers. What makes abandoned cart emails different from strategies such as cold emailing or even generic promotional emails, is that these particular customers have already indicated an interest in your product. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll respond to any old email.
To ensure the most effective abandoned cart email, follow these critical rules.
- Create a strong email design. Your email needs a strong subject line, compelling content, and a powerful, if not personalized, call to action. It is estimated that the average office worker received 90 or more emails per day. So, you need to make sure that your email cuts through the noise of all of those other emails and doesn’t just make its way to the trash bin without getting attention.
- Create a sense of urgency. Even though the customer abandoned the cart, they were in consideration mode at the time they placed your product in their cart. So you need to capitalize on that behavior. Including a while supplies last, or we can’t hold the product for you too much longer, or even a discount code (to be used in extreme cases) can help get the customer to take action.
- Send the email immediately. If you wait even 24 hours to send an abandoned cart email to a customer, the chances are that they have moved on and are no longer interested, or perhaps worse; they bought the product from one of your competitors. Ideally, abandoned cart emails should be sent within 30 minutes of the time the customer left your site.
- Make your customer support information easy to find. No matter how hard we try, sometimes technology doesn’t work as it should. Website errors are yet another critical reason that customers abandon the site. So, if something goes wrong, make it easy for the customer to contact you for help.
- Capture the email address. You can’t send a customer an email if you don’t have their email address. But, requiring a customer to sign up for an account on your site can turn customers away. So, allow a guest checkout process, but in the least, capture their email address as part of the process.
- Leverage a segmentation strategy. Not all customers are the same. So, pay attention to the type of product the customer had in their cart, the number of products in the cart, the value of those items, and whether or not the customer was new or returning. Design your email campaign based on the segmentation initiative so that you send the right messages to the right customer.
Abandoned cart emails are as much of an art as they are a science
If you are not quite sure how to get started on your email marketing strategy, contact Shop Style Design for help. Our professionals consist of skilled designers and developers who have been in your shoes. At Shop Style Design, we are focused on using a relationship-centric approach in our work and will ensure that you never feel like just a number. Every customer is a partner, and we are here to assist you every step of the way in helping you to improve the eCommerce experience for your customers. Contact Us to connect and receive your free consultation.
