Shopping cart abandonment is the bane of e-shops. Studies show that between half and three-quarters of Internet users abandon their shopping carts during the shopping process. These significant losses must be avoided.
Abandoned cart recovery is a typical e-commerce practice that consists of returning to a customer/prospect later to encourage them to complete an order when their cart was initially abandoned.
Incomaker goes further by offering various methods to get the customer to validate their initial cart.
The first two (and the best known) methods are email and SMS follow-ups.
According to research by SaleCycle on 200 global brands:
- Emails sent in 20 minutes achieve an average conversion rate of 5.2%.
- Emails sent within one hour achieve an average conversion rate of 4.5%.
- Emails sent more than 24 hours after a shopping cart has been abandoned achieve an average conversion rate of 2.6%.
It is, therefore, best to send the first email to the customer a few minutes or hours after they have left the site, and it is best not to wait more than 24 hours with it.
Generally, abandoned cart reminders work. The average open rate of such emails is constantly over 50% or higher, so they very likely reach their audience.
But overall, the timing of your reminder is subject to many variables (the price, the product you are selling, the urgency of the purchase, discounts, etc.). It must coincide with the time required for a purchase decision in your online shop's sector of activity. For example, if you are selling airline tickets, even if the price may be high, the reminder must be done very quickly because you must play on the urgency: "If you wait too long, there may be no more tickets available for you or at least at the same price."
In the content of your email reminder, the most important rule is to make your contact person feel that he or she is the only recipient of the reminder email. You should play with the fear of missing an opportunity. This is a good way of persuading your prospects to make a quick purchase. Your promotions should be limited in time or highlight a stock shortage. When you show your prospect that it is urgent, he will not lack the courage to buy your products.
There are also other channels how you can notify customers with Incomaker other than email and SMS. Incomaker can use custom audiences on social media to remind you of the abandoned cart automatically. This way, you can reach even the customers who do not receive or ignore emails or SMS.
With a proper abandoned carts strategy, up to 4-7% of abandoned carts could be recovered.