Abandoned cart and abandoned checkout: recover revenue automatically.

This means that out of every 100 people who add one of our products to the cart, 70 leave without making a purchase. A real shame. And truth be told, after working with over 30 Italian e-commerce sites, I can say that this estimate is even optimistic.

 The good news is that we can improve in two ways: working on the actual checkout flow (Conversion Rate Optimization on-site) and implementing effective sequences to bring back those users with a high interest in our products to the site.

First of all, it is important to clarify that cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are two distinct phenomena that we place in the Sand-Mill Model at the Moment of Purchase.

Let's give a definition.

Cart abandonment occurs when a user adds a product to the cart but then leaves the site. This can be due to various factors, such as prices being too high, navigation issues, or lack of trust in the site.

Checkout abandonment, on the other hand, occurs when a user has added a product to the cart and has already started the checkout process but then leaves the site before completing the purchase.

This could be due, for example, to a too complex purchasing process, the presence of hidden costs, payment issues, or the lack of a payment option (e.g. PayPal or cash on delivery).

Preventing cart abandonment is better than curing it

The first step is to identify the step in the purchase path where the biggest bottleneck occurs.

As you may guess, visit abandonment, cart abandonment, and checkout abandonment are distinct phenomena that require different approaches to be effectively addressed. I have already covered topics related to visit abandonment in this article.

To prevent cart abandonment, it is important to offer competitive prices, have comprehensive and effective product pages, easy site navigation, and a solid Advocacy Base to increase customer trust.

To prevent checkout abandonment, on the other hand, it is important to offer a simple and transparent purchasing process, as well as different payment options to meet customer needs. As a basic rule, minimize the number of clicks required to complete a purchase for a user and you will see that the path will be smoother.

For example, you can provide quick registration for a new user by integrating login with Facebook or Google.
Here I leave you some useful examples to help you optimize the account creation step collected by the Baymand Institute.

These general precautions will allow you at the very least to reduce the percentage incidence of abandonment in these two critical phases of what we identify in the Sand-Mill as the Moment of Purchase. You can carry out Conversion Rate Optimization tests to optimize your result even more in this phase.

But there will always be some leads and customers who abandon your site at one of these two crucial points. What can we do then to get them back on track?
In this case, we have our aces up our sleeves for revenue recovery: automations!

Automations for recovery

There are mainly three different automations for recovery that can be triggered by the visit of a monitored contact in our e-commerce.

We have dedicated an in-depth article to Browse Abandonment, so today we continue with Cart Recovery and Checkout Recovery.

Cart Recovery Abandoned

Most abandonments occur even before the checkout begins.

One reason could be that many customers use the cart as a "wishlist" and the user at that moment was not yet ready to make a purchase.

For this reason, it is important to immediately plan an email that simply "reminds" the product they left pending: create a personalized and relevant touchpoint to bring back an interested customer to our site. Magical.

Users at this stage often conduct a search in the Sea of Micro-Moments, comparing us with competitors and looking for alternatives on Amazon. The first email should therefore reinforce our USP and aim to reduce perceived risk by increasing user safety. It's time to showcase elements of the Advocacy Base, such as reviews and ratings.

We can also highlight other benefits (guarantees, free shipping if available, etc.) and leverage social proof (over 187,928 customers similar to you have trusted us by already purchasing our products).

Remember that even a simple automatic reminder, from the start, yields results compared to a situation where we have no recovery communication.

But it won't be enough.

This is not the only reason why users may abandon a cart, and we want to recover as many sales as possible.

An abandoned cart may also be due to a crucial factor in every purchase journey: the price. If what we are trying to convert is a lead (a user of the Funnel who has never made a purchase), it is worth using an incentive, such as an absolute or percentage discount.

Let's remember that every discount is a cost: when monitoring performance, this cost will be added to the expenses incurred to acquire the lead in calculating the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Let it be clear, this should never be done in the first email for recovering the abandoned cart and I advise against doing it with acquired customers.

If after a few days (at least 5) the user has not converted, they may not be convinced that the product is exactly what they are looking for or even have bought somewhere else. It's time to send another personalized and relevant email.

Here we can introduce similar products and/or products purchased together with the one added to the cart, in order to find a solution

Checkout Recovery

The goal of this flow is to overcome the objections of those who have reached the finish line (the purchase), but stopped.

To make messages relevant, my main advice is to make the most of segmentation.

For example, we can initially set up a reminder email, perhaps segmented based on the cart value.
Every e-commerce should indeed have a spending threshold that triggers free shipping.
It will be important to send a different message to those above this threshold and those below, leveraging this factor.

These are things that have a high impact on conversion rates. Really.

Sometimes I find it useful to test a third, central threshold, in which to offer the code for free shipping as an incentive. Alternatively, we can suggest adding a product to the cart to exceed the threshold and consequently qualify for free shipping.

Finally, it is essential to remember to treat users differently based on the stage of the life cycle they are in.

To do this, a strategic framework like Sand-Mill comes to our aid.

• Leads who have not purchased (in the Funnel)

Not all contacts are equal and, as in any flow, we must remember to use the Sand-Mill Model to understand where our users are in their relationship with our company.

For leads, we can think of a system of increasing incentives in a sequence of multiple emails.
Not just discounts: if users have reached the checkout but stopped, the hurdle may probably be the shipping costs.
However, my advice is to not make the discount a habit: we can't let them get used to receiving a discount by leaving a product in the cart on purpose.

• Returning customers (in the Wheel): number of purchases

By using the Sand-Mill Model and specifically segmenting by number of rotations, we can consider sending different messages to users who have already purchased from us a certain number of times.

Should someone who has bought from us 3 times become a VIP user?

So if a user who has made 2 purchases stops at checkout, why not inform them about this and the benefits they will get by becoming a VIP?

This way we can make purchasing from us more interesting, not with a discount today, but by opening the doors to a system of future incentives that will further increase the turnover of our Rebuy Wheel.

Finally, remember that segmenting, in addition to maximizing relevance, has another great advantage.

It allows us to have more accurate data and to understand, for example, how click and open rates vary between leads and customers, between those who started checkout and those who did not. If you still use a single flow the same in all cases, it's time to take this extra step and recover a large part of the profits that, as Americans say, you are "leaving on the table".

Conclusion

As we have seen, cart abandonment and checkout abandonment are two distinct phenomena that require different approaches to be effectively addressed. There are some strategies that can be used to tackle them:

1. Prevent abandonment at the source, by improving User Experience and the checkout process, avoiding hiding extra costs such as shipping costs and offering different payment options (such as PayPal or credit cards).
2. Use different email sequences for recovering abandoned carts and checkouts: different triggers should initiate different sequences. This way you can test and experiment on both, to see which variants perform better at each step of your audience's journey.
3. Offer different incentives to leads and customers: use the Sand-Mill Model to understand how to effectively segment your contacts and ensure you send the right message to the right contact. Offer incentives to leads to turn them into customers, personalize communication with returning users by anticipating the benefits they will receive with their loyalty.

Emails for cart recovery and checkout recovery are undoubtedly the most performing for an e-commerce. They can really bring in a lot of additional revenue and there is continuous room for improvement through a process of testing and continuous optimization.

If you want to improve the performance of your automations contact me, I will help you identify opportunities for improvement for your marketing activities.