As an e-commerce business, what’s the last thing you don’t want?
Hands down, it would be losing shoppers at the drop of a hat. You might be spending your hard-earned money to drive traffic to your website, but in the end, if revenue doesn’t follow, what’s the use. Incidentally, this has been the case for most e-commerce businesses, who are also struggling to curtail the leak in the sales and marketing funnel. This phenomenon is quite common and is only going to rise in the future.
Don’t believe us? Well, here’s some Stats Nama for you to judge.
“On average, 74.58% of online retail orders are abandoned, while the travel (81.31%) and airline (87.87%) sectors are the hardest hit. ”
Now, with the statistics at hand, can you combat shopping cart abandonment?
Well, the good news is yes! Even Shopify, big commerce, shift4shop have established a set of abandonment solutions to their services. Let’s suppose you are running an online store on Shift4Shop, and things aren’t going as you planned: you are losing a substantial revenue to cart abandonment.
However, the most effective strategy out there is sending out abandoned cart emails. Adding this to your marketing kitty not only has the potential to get your shopper’s attention back on track but also considerably increase your ROI for good.
Looks like a lot. Right? That’s why before we deep dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s quickly go through the basics.
What is an Abandoned Cart Email?
The abandoned shopping cart email acts like a follow-up email that is sent to a shopper who added items to their cart and left your e-commerce site without purchasing. Although shopping cart abandonment may look like an uphill task to curtail, however, with the right cart recovery email, you can convince your customers back.
If you have read till here, you are also probably facing the same issue. That’s why let us first break down the components that can help you nail your abandoned cart emails and harness its power.
“Shopping cart abandonment accounts for $18 billion in lost revenue each year.”
5 Secret Tips with Industry Examples For Abandoned Cart Emails
Let’s talk about what else you can do to send convincing emails. Theories are fun, but let’s look at some of the industry examples to understand how they came about in making their killer cart recovery emails.
Keep in mind, your emails need to capture the attention of your shopper and have the potential to turn the regular abandoners into end customers. So, let’s hop in and understand what step would help you reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Discount Vs. No Discount
If you are going through the same old drill of whether to discount or not, let me tell you, both just work fine in the long run. Not convinced?
Let’s just look at two scenarios and compare the results.
A Marketing Sherpa study revealed that 7% of consumers said they always complete their purchases if they get a discount or promotion with an abandoned cart email. While on the other hand, Smart Insights found out that almost $3000 of discounts offered for two straight months, didn’t uplift the sales.
Industry example: Use of tactical language like what Anese used can help you hit the ballpark to convince users to get back and complete their purchase cycle.
Best Practices if you use the ‘Discount’ strategy:
- Discounts work well to lure your customers to buy. However, you should be extra careful when you want to provide discounts to your customers and you should segment your email campaigns in such a way that only the first-timers get the discount offer after abandoning their cart.
- For all the customers who engage and decide to progress to purchase the item, adding the discount code automatically at the time of checkout would make it a more seamless process.
If you deep dive, discounts not only eat away your profit margins but can also lead to devaluation of our product prices. And that’s why although it is a fairly popular tactic, we would ask you to leverage your loyalty programs and rewards channel to recover more carts. Both the tips work well and probably testing the waters before jumping the gun will be a better approach to scale up your revenue.
Design that Stands Out
Your email should have a great design to be able to convince your customer. The right design with the right visuals and layouts can boost your conversion rates but also help you strengthen your core message. From including ‘Add to cart buttons’, prominent CTA’s, to create a sense of urgency alone can help you seize the sale.
This abandoned cart email by Sugarbearhear has used GIFs to spruce it up.
Industry example: Each email that you send to your customers should have a unique layout just like this one. It would only help you grab your consumer’s eyeball. So instead of sending the same 3d cart abandoned cart email, make it look interesting by adding details to it every time you send.
Best Practices:
- The layout of the email should be visually consistent.
- The CTA’s support, product details, should be displayed in a clean design to catch consumer’s attention.
- The emails should sound like a friendly reminder about what your consumers are missing out if they don’t buy your products.
Write Copies that Connect
Typically, designing your shift4shop abandoned Cart email templates should start with a concise and catchy subject line to convince your customers to return. Only 45% of customers open cart abandonment recovery emails, so you need to nail it before you lose them again. Make the copy interesting, convincing, and try to think out of the box to increase the personal appeal so that the consumer gets the space to connect and engage with your brand.
Industry Example: The sheer power of the copy “Is Your Wi-Fi Okay?” puts out an engaging yet quirky messaging that hooks the customer in a great way.
Moreover, it also shines the limelight just on a single product. Moreover, the way the next copies are written is like human conversations that add the humane touch and increases your chance of recovering an abandoned cart. However, the cherry-on-top is the last message that states: I NEED THESE GAZELLES FROM ADIDAS.
This not only just drives the message home, but is a great way to convince your customer time and again to go back and buy those GAZELLES FROM ADIDAS.
Best Practice:
- Besides including attractive images and prominent CTA buttons, you must write a customer-centric copy that helps push them towards an action that you want them to take.
- Just write copies that get straight to the point and are short and sweet.
Effective Follow-Up Email Chains
To convert some of the abandoners to your regular customers, you need to set up an effective follow-up email chain than isolated sendings. So, here’s an example of a perfect abandoned cart email timing:
Email 1: Within 20 Minutes
The first email should reach your customers within a few minutes offering them help to complete purchases.
Email 2: Within the next 24 Hours
The next email should act as a reminder to all the products they viewed and other alternatives, popular products, and customer reviews if any. Also, don’t forget to remind them about the other perks that they can enjoy with your business.
Email 3. In the next 2 Days
Now, it may look like the ship has sailed. Well, both yes and no! An enticing subject line along with a countdown and discount can eventually help you engage with your customers.
Industry Example: Google’s reminder email is a great example of how to remind your customers about what they are missing out and catch them off-guard.
Google’s abandoned cart email works the best as it not only reminds the customer what they left in the cart but also adds amazing visuals, multiple alternative product photos, to a clickable title, call to action button, all can work in your favor.
Best Practices:
- Try to structure your automated email sequences in a way so that you don’t keep sending the same email once the user has converted.
- Always use A/B testing to keep track of all the components of your abandoned cart that are most effective.
Nurture loyalty and trust with customers
A lot of consumers complain about the prevalence of fraudulent motives on various ecommerce sites. This has not only pushed consumers to be wary of buying anything online, but also has put them in a tough spot while entering their personal and payment details. Now, all consumers are looking for that trust quotient, thus if you want to increase your cart recoveries, try to develop a sense of trust and loyalty with your customers in the 3D cart abandonment cart email. You can do this by including various trust authority seals and badges to instill a sense of credibility through your recovery emails.
Industry Example: The Casper recovery email works wonderfully as they seem to have optimized their checkout process to give rise to a convenient checkout that gives you a competitive edge over others.
This type of recovery mail would not only help you make it through to the customers but also help them trust you as an eCommerce brand.
Best Practices:
- With the emails, try to remind your customers that they have left behind some highly-rated products in their shopping cart with a subject line that states the rating to boost your open rates.
- Including a good number of user reviews along with the average rating, can help you make a compelling pitch to your customers. Also, ratings irk FOMO which can drive the consumers to complete the purchase ASAP.
To Sum Up,
All the above tricks and hacks may look like a lot, but start by taking small steps and figure out what works best for you rather than going for the ones that your competitors seem to use
