Archive for the ‘Cart abandonment’ Category
10% Off or Free Shipping?
Everyone loves a good promotion. When we are in the customer’s role our decisions seem very simple: if an offer saves us money then it’s a good offer and we should act upon it; but as retailers things can become a lot more complicated. We have different goals than the customer and more often than not the long term value of a customer is much more important to us than a single specific sale. While two different promotions might leave us with a different bottom lines, the conclusion over which one was the better choice isn’t always obvious.
Many of our clients opt to try and recoup visitors who abandon the shopping cart by offering them a promotion. An interesting question came up over which promotion would entice more visitors to come back and complete their orders. Would a customer prefer to get a 10% discount of the total or would Free Shipping sound like a better proposition?
So we tested. Two different cart abandonment email templates were prepared and A/B testing was used to see what works best. 50% of abandoning visitors received an email alluring them to the charms of free shipping while the other 50% were put in the tough spot of saying no to 10% off.
It’s worth noting that this particular test was run on an online shop that sells a wide variety of consumer items but nothing that would be considered a high ticket item. The average order value hovers around $60.
It didn’t take long to see that the competition wasn’t fair and a winner was quickly announced. Free shipping performed 100% better than 10% off. Since the goal of this promotion was to convert people who abandoned the shopping cart, offering free shipping ended up doubling the conversion rate of the campaign.
Considering the items sold, average order value and the segment of visitors this promotion targeted; automatically going for the higher converting promotion was not a clear-cut choice. In some cases the discount was too steep to turn a profit or make the promotion worthwhile for the business. This time our cart abandonment segmenting features really came in handy so after calculating the right cutoff point the cart abandonment campaign was adjusted to offer the free shipping promotion only to customers whose cart total was above the cutoff point. The rest had to settle for a 10% discount. I think both groups ended up quite happy. That’s the important thing, no?
New features
We wanted to update you regarding new features we’ve recently added :
Send to Mobile using QR codes
This is our first experiment in the mobile space. The idea is to allow your customers to easily switch from their PC to their mobile using the barcode application on their phones. While on your website, customers can click on “Send to Mobile” tab, scan the code and continue browsing from their mobile devices.
Shopping cart abandonment
- User defined suppression value – you can limit the number of emails that will be sent to customers in a given period of time.
- More segmentation options – you can send different emails to different customer segments based on the content of their shopping cart. For example, you can exclude customers who abandoned products from a specific brand from getting an email with a coupon
- A/B testing – you can now test 2 versions of an email and see which works better for you
Behavioral Targeting
- You can target customers using iPads, iPhones and Android devices as well as target customers by screen size
- Quick access to reports
As always feedback is welcome!
“Saved shopping cart” banner increases conversion rates by 70%
Many prospects will visit your website at least twice before making a purchase. Some might have added products to the shopping cart. If they started the checkout process, you can send them automated cart reminders. But only a fraction of those shoppers who add products to the cart, will move down the funnel to the checkout pages. So most cart abandoners will leave the site without entering their email address.
It turns out that there is another effective technique to reduce cart abandonment rate. When cart abandoners come back to your website after a few hours or days , you can help them complete the order by showing them a “Welcome back, we saved the cart for you” type message. Here is a nice example from hello direct:
One of our customers who setup a similar campaign witnessed 70% increase in conversion rates when measured compared a control group which did not see the “welcome back” message. It’s not surprising. Usually finding the link to the shopping cart is hard, in some cases even very hard…
Thinking about what customers are trying to do next and segmenting them based on their most recent intent can help you win them as this example demonstrates.
As we get closer to the holidays season, marketers who can come up, launch and test these type of campaigns quickly and without IT support, are more likely to win new customers.
Cart abandonment emails, the feedback opportunity
Most merchants think about cart abandonment emails as an opportunity to recover lost sales and that is indeed the ultimate goal. But following up with this segment of visitors presents another opportunity: getting their feedback.
Shoppers who started the checkout process but and have not completed the order is one of the most lucrative segments for feedback solicitation. From this segment, you can understand if your checkout process is too long, or if you charge too much for delivery or if first time visitors don’t feel confident buying from you.
One of our customers used this verbiage in his cart abandonment emails: “We’ve noticed that you recently tried to purchase some items from our website but for some reasons you haven’t finished the purchase. If we’ve done anything wrong please let us know by replying to this email or by calling us on …”
Guess how customers responded? many of them replied saying that the customer did not do anything wrong and provided additional information about their situation. From these emails our customer started conversations with these prospects that either led to sales or provided important feedback.
So when you craft your remarketing emails, think about them also as an opportunity to start a conversation with your prospects/customers and use the right tone to spark such conversations.
shopping cart abandonment service released
Last week we released the latest member of our e-commerce personalization products suite: a shopping cart recovery tool that sends automated emails to shoppers who left the checkout process without making a purchase.
Of course we maintained our zero integration philosophy which means that online retailers can implement the service in a few minutes. Our code snippet reads the content of the shopping cart without special tags!
Currently we provide an end-to-end solution and our system sends out the emails but in the future we will add “connectors” to popular email marketing platforms.
If you are using our product recommendations or segmentation products, there are exciting synergies between the 3 products. For example if you offer a promotion in the email, you can upload a matching banner on the shopping cart page that will be served on for those customers who clicked on the link embedded in the cart abandonment email.
Drop us a line if you want to give it a try.