By Whenever you’ve gone to order something online, do you always checkout immediately? Or do you often find yourself getting distracted, leaving items sitting in your cart, and say to yourself ‘I’ll come back to it later’?
Almost guaranteed to be the second option, right?
Abandoned carts are hugely common. And, most of the time, it’s totally unintentional!
It’s not that potential customers have changed their minds about buying something—they either get distracted or simply don’t have time to complete the full checkout process there and then.
Due to the unintentional nature of this abandonment, one very effective email strategy can be used to ensure you don’t lose out on sales because of it. And that strategy is a cart abandonment email campaign.
When done right, these campaigns can draw in almost $40,000 in extra revenue. But, when done wrong, you could find yourself annoying your list and even encouraging them to remove all items from their cart altogether—resulting in a total lost sale.
But to make sure that doesn’t happen, here’s precisely how to execute a cart abandonment campaign which will not only improve your relationship with your customers, but will also maximize revenue to its highest potential!
1. Give a Reminder of What’s in Their Cart
Whilst this may seem obvious, simply giving customers a reminder of the exact items they’ve left in their cart is the first essential step to any successful cart abandonment campaign.
As earlier mentioned, the vast majority of abandoned carts are unintentional due to distraction. So, by sending a quick email reminder of what’s still waiting for them is guaranteed to trigger their memory and encourage them to click-through and complete the checkout process.
By simply sending an email reminding them of their abandoned cart without actually stating the specific items, you’re creating more work for the customer as they’ll have to log back in to discover what they’ve left—which, quite often, people won’t want to waste time doing!
You can use NiftyImages to go a step further and create dynamic Photoshop Images that not only are personalized with text, but also with images of the product they purchased.
2. Reserve the Items for Limited Time
As with any email campaign, cart abandonment or not, creating urgency is essential to encourage the reader to complete the desired action as quickly as possible.
And, when it comes to an online cart, sending an email stressing a limited time their items will be reserved for is a sure-fire method to encourage them to check out.
After all, if they really want the items and only ended up abandoning their cart through being busy or distracted, they won’t want to run the risk of leaving it too late and their items no longer being in stock.
A hugely effective way of doing this is to include a countdown timer, the NiftyImages countdown timer tool being a great resource to use. Not only will this get the point of urgency across, but will also be dynamic and eye-catching for the reader to guarantee they pay attention.
3. Offer a Discount
Whilst we’ve already established a lot of cart abandonment cases are unintentional, there are some situations in which a customer will suddenly change their mind and decide not to go through with the purchase at all.
Typically, this almost always comes down to price. If the final total of their cart is higher than expected, they may simply decide not to spend their money and will just leave the site—and their cart.
In order to counteract this problem yet still make sure you receive some form of sale, offering a discount directly corresponding to the items they abandoned is a brilliant incentive to make them reconsider the purchase.
After all, if they’re being handed a discount for an item they really want with price being the only thing standing in their way, it’s highly likely this will boost their motivation to complete the purchase.
Offering a discount is a great tool to use in the third email of the campaign. If the earlier reminder and sense of urgency still hasn’t encouraged the customer to complete the checkout, a discount is definitely worth sending their way if nothing else has worked so far.
4. Bring it All Together
Hopefully by this point, all abandoned carts will have been successfully checked-out and sales made. But, even after using all the above techniques you still find customers that haven’t yet taken the desired action, one final email consolidating everything you’ve sent so far is the last step.
Including a countdown timer for urgency, a concise list of all the products they’ve abandoned AND some form of discount code they can use to get money-off, this email will contain literally everything necessary to stop a customer in their tracks, have them reconsider their cart, and click-through to complete the process.
One common mistake many companies make with cart abandonment campaigns is going overboard. Repeatedly sending emails with the exact same content over a long period of time is going to do nothing but annoy your list.
Once you’ve sent this final email with everything pulled together, that should be the end of the campaign.
So, now you know the key features you should be including in your cart abandonment campaigns, you have everything needed to ensure you never lose out on a sale for this reason again!
Abandoned carts are hugely common but, with the right campaign in place, you can guarantee your revenue doesn’t suffer.