Marketers have found that on average, 67.45% of online shopping carts are abandoned before customers check out. That’s a huge number of missed sales, and that’s why abandoned cart remarketing was developed.
Traditional abandoned cart platforms operate on a simple logic: Set a trigger when customers leave your website without finishing their purchase. Trigger an email with product info. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum. This basic trigger is pretty much a ground floor requirement for eCommerce websites, but most of them are highly limited in their logic and don’t don’t utilize data from CRMs or Customer Data Management Platforms. They’re missing out on valuable opportunities to reach customers with compelling reasons to revisit their abandoned carts.
Here are three ways you can reconnect your customers with their carts by tapping into your customer data sources:
1. Trigger messages on previously abandoned items that go on sale.
Surveys report that the top 3 most common reasons for shoppers to abandon their cart are related to the price of their items. When you let your customers see an item that they’ve previously considered has gone on sale, it’s just another reason for them to reconsider their purchase.
Example: Trisha abandoned a pair of blue suede shoes 3 months ago, but now these shoes are on sale. We’ll send her a triggered message alerting Trisha that her shoes are on sale.
Requirements: customer purchase/abandon history integration, sales category for products for trigger
2. Product recommendations in abandoned cart emails
Example: Jasmine purchased a grey backless dress and abandoned her cart before checking out. Our software will send her a triggered message with her abandoned item along with additional products that may interest her, just in case she’s decided that the dress didn’t match her needs.
Requirements: depends on the complexity of recommendations…simple recommendations can simply be built from product hierarchy modeling (grey dress is in same category as several other dresses), more complex variations will need software capable of predicting customer needs by combining lifecycle, purchase, lifestyle, clicks, etc
3. Trigger abandoned cart emails to users that are anonymous
Example: Sarah has made an account before, but is browsing the website anonymously. She puts an item in the basket and abandons the cart. The system recognizes her unique ID and triggers an email.
Requirements: 1:1 digital tracking service required to attach unique id to known profiles, automation system to connect the dots, validate confidence, and fire message.
With a powerful enough system, you could probably pull off all 3 mentioned abandoned cart strategies for increased ROI. There’s still time for brands to utilize abandoned cart remarketing to the fullest, and newer, tested technology enables companies like NectarOM to build the capabilities needed for marketing personalization across the omnichannel frontier.
