Ecommerce store owners around the world are no strangers to the pain of cart abandonment.
After all, eCommerce brands lose up to $18 billion in sales revenue each year, because of this specific reason.
And since Valentine’s Day is the second most commercial sales-heavy celebration of the year ( next only to Thanksgiving!), the cart value and rates of cart abandonment tend to soar during the festival of love.
Don’t have a plan to curb the pesky cart abandonment rate for this special celebration?
Fret not! There is still time and there is still hope. With the right strategy and some simple tips and tricks, you can boost your sales by lowering the abandoned cart rate, this Valentine’s Day 2021.
Having a Strong Base
Competition is brutal during Valentine’s Day. With every single eCommerce store set on grabbing more eyeballs, it’s very easy to get lost in the crowd.
And it seems practical to launch headfirst into marketing campaigns as early as possible with maximum vigor.
But.
First things first.
It’s important to ensure that your base is strong. Take time and make sure that your website is spruced up and ready for the occasion.
As mentioned in our last blog – 8 ways to nail your Valentine’s Day email campaign – an ode to the festival of love can do no harm. Add a banner, pop-up, social media posts – anything that brings about the feeling of the occasion to your customer.
Now that we’ve got the UI portion of the website taken care of, here are a couple of other attributes that should be your prime focus:
Optimized loading time – This is one of the most important and non-negotiable attributes if you wish to ensure maximum gains during special occasions. Check out the statistics below:
About 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds and 40% of website visitors abandon the page if the loading takes more than 3 seconds. (Source).
This is a very heavy price to pay for a pretty simple lapse. So do optimize the page loading speed to prevent losing valuable customers.
Another important factor to consider is easy navigation.
Ensure that your products are displayed in the most intuitive and convenient way for the potential customer to browse through.
Your customers should not have to struggle to find what they are looking for. This can again lead them to abandon your site.
This drop-down creates zero confusion and frustration. The sitemap is bold and clear. Customers can easily navigate to what they want without a hitch. Lesser the confusion, lesser the drop off rate.
It’s also a great idea to add a separate segment for Valentine’s Day specific gifts. Adding links to gift guides and Valentine’s Day specific sales is also a good move.
Tackle Cart Abandonment Even Before It Happens
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This well-loved and oft-used proverb holds true even in the case of abandoned carts.
Now that we have worked on sprucing up the website, here are a few tips and tricks to tackle the factors that cause cart abandonment.
Did you know? About 70 to 96% of shoppers who exit a website don’t visit it again.
In this competitive digital era, it’s pretty hard to grab a potential customer’s attention and even harder to hold on to it.
There is a fairly straightforward way out to reduce this number – enabling pop-ups.
Snip the problem in the bud by enabling exit-intent popups.
But keep in mind that the pop-up barely has a second or two to catch the user’s attention before he/she exits. So make the pop-up prominent and the text catchy in order to make the user reconsider their decision to exit.
For e.g:
This pop up captures the essence of the celebration. The pretty design and apt text definitely catches the eye. But the discount code definitely creates a strong push to complete the transaction.
Focusing on the most important reasons for cart abandonment and having a game plan to tackle those issues is a good forethought and a great mindset to have.
As covered in our previous blogs, here are some of the major reasons behind cart abandonment:
Some of these issues can be resolved by focusing specifically on the customer’s pain points.
As discussed earlier, working on the page navigation and overall shopping experience cuts down a huge chunk of cart abandonment ( 63% in fact !!)
Focusing on other pain points will only improve this percentage.
As you can see, forced account creation leads to 34% of total cart abandonments. That’s the second major reason as to why customers are jumping ship.
Yes, account creation does play a major role in lead creation – but at what cost?
The best way to combat this will be to enable guest login (at least for special occasions) and ensure a seamless shopping experience.
Offer on-time delivery. Especially for time-bound celebrations such as Valentine’s Day.
There will always be procrastinators and last-minute shoppers.
These customers usually don’t end up making the purchase as they are unsure of the timely deliverability. The assurance of on-time delivery will definitely help you gain those last few sales.
A Valentine’s Day countdown on the webpage can also add a nice push.
Getting to the next attribute, About 23% of customers abandon their carts because of shipping costs.
Though it’s not practical to do away with these costs, It is definitely possible to display all costs up-front.
Customers sometimes feel duped when they see the final product price jacked up by shipping costs and taxes. This way there are no surprises at the checkout page.
The image above showcases a webpage that has the final cost of the product displayed right on the product page. A simple banner mentioning that the prices are inclusive of all taxes ensures the customer the price they see is the price they pay.
Additionally, having a good customer support team to help potential customers with their purchases is always a good idea. Add support details such as email ids and contact numbers and make them visible on your webpages.
It’s also advisable to set up your Valentine’s Day 2020 email campaign and launch it early.
It plays a valuable role in giving you a headstart over your competitors. Send out gift guides, coupon codes or start conversations and contests on your social media handles to pique interest about your brand and products.
Facing the Inevitable in the Best Way Possible
The aforementioned techniques are great at reducing abandoned cart rates, but not at eradicating the issue completely.
There will always be abandoned carts. It’s important to keep this in mind and have a solid game plan as to what needs to be done in these cases as well.
Abandoned cart emails and retargeting ads are the most commonly used methods to win back customers.
The Right Approach to Sending out Valentine’s Day Abandoned Cart Emails
The best way to convert cart abandonments is by sending out an abandoned cart email. It’s direct, fast, and provides in-depth statistics that can help amp up your email marketing game.
There is a science and technique behind sending abandoned cart emails to ensure further conversion.
After figuring out the content and imagery, the first step is to determine the right time to send out the emails.
Remember that Valentine’s Day is extremely time-bound. Your existing abandoned cart email campaign may not be feasible for such occasions. So experimenting and research is definitely recommended.
It’s usually a decent plan to send out a sequence of 3 Valentine’s Day emails for each cart abandonment. But this can change according to different business verticals and business needs.
A/B testing is a must to find out the sweet spot for your email campaigns.
Focus on creating Valentine’s Day themed subject lines. Subject lines are the sole reasons behind great open rates. Keep it short and powerful, it is also a good choice to add emojis to Valentine’s Day email subject lines to make it fun and stand out from the ordinary.
The graph below showcases statistics after sending out a series of emails:
As you can see, It’s the best choice to send out the first Valentine’s Day email the very first hour ( short time period the better) after the abandonment.
The product is still fresh on the customer’s mind and the conversion rate is at its best. It is most probably during this time that customers are looking at other alternatives, so this email sets off as a good reminder of your product.
An ideal time to send out the second email is usually 24 hours after the first email delivery. Too many reminders in a short period of time can come across as pushy and may put the customer off.
The third and last email ( if necessary) can be sent 48 hours from the time of cart abandonment.
This helps remind the customer of their earlier interest in the product and usage without being too in their face.
For example, TargetBay helped a leading vintage- inspired cosmetic brand to reduce their shopping cart abandonment rate from 65.36% to 51.63% in just 6 months using a similar strategy.
Valentine’s Day email, subject line, and content aside – it’s also important to focus on a great template.
This sample template is clear – with minimal but impactful text, a bold CTA, and an image of the product that they have abandoned. The addition of a coupon code will definitely sweeten the deal.
Are you a beginner and don’t have someone to make you a custom email template? don’t. Here are some free Valentine’s Day email templates to get you started.
Email segmentation is key. This can help you create an even more impactful Valentine’s Day email campaign.
You can segment your list according to geography, or even better – gender. Using Valentine’s Day’s momentum, maybe you can also cash on “Galentine’s day”. So think of innovative ways to target different demographics and ensure that you’ve covered all your bases.
Wrapping up
There is no doubt that sales scale new heights during Valentine’s Day. But on the downside, customers abandoning their shopping carts is inevitable.
But on a brighter note, it can be mitigated to a certain extent by reducing the customer’s pain points and following up after the actual cart abandonment.
Which of the aforementioned cart abandoned strategies does your business use? Do you have any unique strategies that helped you regain lost sales? Let us know in the comments.
