Dealing with cart abandonments

Do you have a cart abandonment strategy for your Website? and it was surprising to see the survey that close to 70% of the Indian Retail sites didn't have one. They assume that the customer just decided to drop off on his own and never consider the fact that they could have had a connection failure ( which is a very common thing here in India). Websites also assume that they would have remembered their URL and will start the transaction all over again. Webmasters usually end-up thinking they need to increase the size of their buttons or change the color or reduce the number of steps, hence the ball goes to the UX team.


Here are a few points which will help you build your own strategy to reduce cart abandoners:-

Find out why they abandon

- Survey your abandoned customers
   - It could be a bad connection
   - Mis-communication of pricing- Your advert would have communicated a price excluding Shipping & taxes or you would have just over-promised and under-delivered
  -  Customers might decide to research more & wait for the prices to crash
  -  Deal sites often supply coupon-codes which might have expired and hence they couldn't get it at 10/20% cheaper
  - Only to get an automated emailer with a coupon code- some customers know that if they abandon, they will be sent a carrot emailer with a coupon code & a discount of additional 5%
  - Brand proposition- Customers are not very sure if you are just another seller from the flea market

Keep surveying your customers to find out why they abandon. You have to categorize/segment (use GA Custom variables or Marketing Automation forms) customers and run automated outbound programs to improve your conversion. The response rate to abandonment programs are very high and so are the order conversion rates. Here are a few ideas...

Sync your outbound program to manage abandonment
Capture your email early-
Most retail websites capture emails close to the end of their conversion funnel. Capture email early in the process and identify the session cookie with the visitor transaction. So you can be sure if the customer abandons you have an email id to communicate with your customer. Also when a customer returns after the order was abandoned keep the previous abandoned orders ready to continue with the transaction if he chooses to.

Triggering automated email drips
In a recent survey email conversions for abandonment programs can be as high as 60%. Plan an automated drip campaign for your abandoned customers. (here is an example) To understand this better here is sample abandonment plan.
  - 0,1,3,7
     > 0: Send a email immediately when an order is abandoned, with the order details & a survey link
     > 1: If the customer has not responded to the earlier email, plan an email campaign which will re-assure the customer of your brand & there is more to the product than just price. Also sync this with your CRM and make an outbound call for a voice survey or a phone assisted transaction
     > 3: Build credibility on the product which was abandoned: send reviews for the abandoned product or offer to join loyalty program where the purchase will be rewarded. Also, ask the customer to set a trigger price where he will be notified if the price drops below X
    > 7: send an Discount coupon code

Affirm your brand value proposition:
Most people wouldn't mind paying more if there is a credibility associated with the brand or assurance of on-time delivery. Automate an email program to constantly communicate via email & social channels.

Don't reward & encourage abandoners:
Some abandon only to receive a coupon code, you have to play this carefully. if you are going to make your visitors get used to this you might end up loosing your conversions when your discounts are out.

Intelligently reward cart abandonment:
Depending on how big is your brand, how much time you have been in the market, how much you have spent on branding/communication/paid ads, first-time visitor, first purchase, consecutive purchases, loyalty customer, affiliate tie-ups, source of referral you can choose to have multiple programs to look at visitors who are only looking to be rewarded. You can automate most of these in your marketing automation application  or have an intelligent database connected to your email marketing application.

If you have more ideas to improve conversions from your abandoned customers I would love to hear it.