While the possibility of customers abandoning their carts is inevitable, it does not necessarily mean they are lost customers. View them as prospective customers you can recover over time and through several methods. Many of your first-time visitors are unlikely to buy. However, a good number of them will return if you target them correctly. Since abandoned carts provide great potential revenue, here are some of the ways you can turn their abandoned cart items into sales.
Optimize the shopping cart experience
One of the things that can make or break your ecommerce business is micro-interactions between your website and the visitors. Although your checkout process begins and ends with your shopping cart, not so many businesses have optimized it to provide a better checkout experience.
One of the shopping cart optimizations is offering visitors a chance to purchase a product immediately or add the item to the cart and continue shopping to explore other offerings. Another optimization is to allow customers to view the product they have added to the cart. This offers a great tactic by showing other recommended products if customers aren’t sure about the ones they have been looking at.
Ensure the site is welcoming and the cart is easy to recover
Encouraging your customers to recover abandoned cart items is vital when they return to your site. You can do this by creating emails that allow them to go straight to their cart so the checkout process is smooth, or you can create a pop-up to remind them the next time they visit. Personalizing the site and your email targeting efforts is more likely to bring people back to finish that final step.
Convert customers with exit incentives and emails
Exit offers provide retailers with an opportunity to convert customers before leaving their website. When it looks like your visitor is leaving the site, you’ll want to have an exit pop-up offering something valuable such as a discount, or a free shipping code. Offering them such offers a way of convincing them to finalize the purchase or to look around a little bit longer on your site.
One of the best ways to recover your lost sales is to use an abandoned cart email series. You have a great chance to complete a sale if you send a timely email to the customers abandoning carts to remind them about the items they are missing out on. Be clear by showing them an image of the products they forgot about, linking them directly to the products’ pages. If possible, personalizing these emails with the names of your customers can build trust, as well.
Offer low shipping costs
The main reason why customers abandon their cart items is higher shipping costs. They can be sure and confident they want to buy a particular item, however, the idea of paying high shipping fees tends to be such a turn off. To encourage them to finalize their purchase, offer low cost or free shipping for the products. You might also want to look into seeing whether you can offer reduced or free shipping costs for first-time customers to build trust and loyalty.
Allow guest checkout
Although having customers sign up for an account can benefit your online store, it can increase the rate of cart abandonment and decrease conversions. For this reason, giving customers a guest checkout option can be a great way to minimize abandoned carts. Try to keep things as much as possible to avoid customers feeling overwhelmed by long checkout steps. Also, you can have the option for customers to sign in with their social media accounts, which gives you contact information but makes it faster for them.