How to Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts with Email Marketing

This article was last updated on October 20, 2021

We’ve all been there: we fill our online shopping cart with everything we want, then navigate away and never checkout. But why do we do this?

Globally, the average shopping cart abandonment rate has reached a whopping 75.6%. Several variables come into play when customers leave before checkout, including anything from a time-consuming checkout process to sky-high shipping costs.

Shopping cart abandonment costs e-commerce stores $18 billion a year in sales revenue, but you don’t have to leave money on the table. Email marketing is, without a doubt, the best way to reel your customers back in.

What are Abandoned Shopping Carts?

Shopping cart abandonment is when customers fill their online shopping cart with products but neglect to complete the purchase. It is a critical metric for e-commerce shop owners and marketers to track.

Your shopping cart abandonment rate can offer valuable insight into what your customers expect out of the checkout experience and why they avoid completing purchases in the first place. If your customers are consistently failing to complete purchases, it could also indicate a broken sales funnel.

To measure your shopping cart abandonment rate, divide the total number of completed transactions by the total number of incomplete transactions. You can easily track this by integrating Google Analytics with your website and enabling e-commerce tracking.

Why Customers Abandon Shopping Carts

Everyone in the e-commerce industry struggles with shopping cart abandonment for different reasons. To determine why you’re having cart abandonment issues, take a look at your data. With a tool like Google Analytics, you can obtain a deeper understanding of your customers’ dropoff points and checkout flow.

After you synthesize your data, form a hypothesis as to why customers aren’t completing the checkout process. Consider these most common reasons for shopping abandonment:

• High Shipping Costs: Potential customers begin their checkout journey with excitement to purchase, but high shipping costs can dampen that enthusiasm. Studies show that 44% of customers abandon their shopping carts due to shipping costs alone.
• Requiring a New User Account: Consumers love instant gratification, and a lengthy checkout process doesn’t meet this requirement. Creating a new user account simply to checkout is enough of a time-consuming hassle to make 27% of shoppers forgo checking out altogether.
• Lack of Shipping Information: 22% of customers abandon their cart due to lack of shipping information. Be sure to include adequate shipping information with your checkout process.
• Untrustworthy Website: Does your website appear safe? Customers are cautious about giving out their financial information to just anybody. Include reviews and invest in professional design services to improve your company’s trustworthiness.
• Long Checkout Process: If your checkout process includes more than a few quick pages or requires customers to enter too much personal information, they’ll lose patience with the process. Consider implementing features like Apple Paystrongfor a seamless and efficient checkout process.

Using Email Marketing to Convert Abandoned Shopping Carts

Lucky for you, an abandoned cart doesn’t mean that all is lost! With the right strategy, you can close the sale. These trusty email marketing tips will inspire customers to make a purchase and boost your conversion rate.

Build Trust and Credibility with Your Customers

These days, internet scams and identity theft are rampant, making consumers wary of trusting an online shop with their hard-earned money. It’s essential to show customers that your brand is trustworthy. No matter what industry you’re in, competition is fierce in every marketplace on the internet, and trust can make or break your path to success.

The top way to prove your credibility is through reviews. 88% of consumers say that reviews influenced their decision to make a purchase. When a customer abandons their cart, there are various ways that you can lure them back by partnering email marketing with credibility-building reviews. For example:

• Show potential customers that the item they abandoned has high ratings. This one’s pretty simple. Put the product rating in your subject line to increase open rates.
• Include the product ratings in the abandoned cart reminder email. Most abandoned cart emails feature the products left in the cart and their price. Going the extra mile to add a quote from the reviews, or highlighting the rating and number of reviews, can help inspire your customers to complete their purchase.

Focus on a Single Product

We all know what it’s like to fill our shopping cart with 20 items we want but only end up purchasing a couple of things. Potential customers also partake in this form of virtual window shopping, so keep this in mind when you’re creating your email marketing campaign. Step into your customers’ shoes and use your critical thinking skills to determine which product they are most likely to come back and purchase.

You can increase your conversion rate with the following strategies:

• Feature your best-selling product. The simplest way to focus your email marketing campaign on a single product is to choose your highest-rated or best-selling products.
• After selecting a product to spotlight, focus on its best qualities. Rather than bore your customers with the same generic marketing tactics, draw attention to the elements that make your product unique.
• Highlight the customers’ opinions. In addition to showing the product, add quotes from reviews. New customers already trust previous customers more than they’ll trust you.

Offer a Discount Code

The vast majority of customers abandon their shopping carts due to the unexpectedly high cost of shipping. Potential customers don’t typically consider the cost of add-ons like shipping, and when they do, they underestimate the cost. To bring customers back to an abandoned cart, a one-time use discount code can be a tempting lure that offsets their hesitation on shipping.

Offering discounts is something to use sparingly, so you don’t miss out on profit. However, this tactic is a great way to close the sale. Use it with discretion.

Send Your Email Quickly

Studies from email marketing agency Rejoiner show that you’ll see better results sending an abandoned cart email sooner rather than later. Their analysis shows that sending a reminder email within one hour led to a 16% conversion rate. Your best bet is to utilize three steps for optimal conversion rates, which are:

1. Send the first email one hour after cart abandonment.
2. Send the second email one day after cart abandonment.
3. Send the third email three days after cart abandonment.

MailBakery

Even when your customers abandon carts, don’t abandon the customers. Use your stellar reputation to leverage your most popular products with a complimentary discount code and calculated timing. From there, MailBakery can help you seal the deal. Support your brand’s reputation with our eye-catching, custom email templates. Teaming up with us inspires your customers to engage with your content while increasing your brand awareness.

Let us deliver sleek, professional emails designs so that you can instead focus on growing your lucrative business. Working together, we can bring your visions to life to create stunning, brand-specific email templates that are sure to captivate and convert.

Ready to get started? Contact our team, and let’s get in the kitchen!