One of the most frustrating things you’ll likely have to encounter as a business owner or marketer is a high cart abandonment rate. Cart abandonment occurs when a visitor lands on your site, adds an item to their virtual shopping cart but decides to leave before they complete their order.
This trend is a lot more common than you might think. Across desktop devices, the average cart abandonment rate is around 67%. It’s even higher on mobile, with about 77.8% of shoppers leaving after adding an item to their cart.
It feels terrible to know that over half of all of your potential customers will leave before they finalize their order. Despite this initially grim-looking reality, there are plenty of ways you can recover lost carts and dramatically increase your sales.
Today, I’d like to look at several strategies we use across our brands to improve our conversion rate while lowering our average cart abandonment rate.
Let’s begin!
Simplify Your Pricing Structure
The number one reason shoppers decide to leave a website without paying is unexpected costs. If you think back, you were probably in a similar situation at one point or another. You found a great website, added a few items to your cart, and suddenly, on the checkout page, the price nearly doubles. If you’re like most people, you leave the site and find a competitor that offers a streamlined pricing structure.
You’ll be happy to know that there are several ways you can simplify your pricing structure and reduce instances of cart abandonment. The first thing I suggest is including extra fees like taxes and shipping directly on the screen for visitors to see. You can do this by adding an “always-on” shopping cart that shows visitors their running total.
So, that’s enough to eliminate surprises, but you’re probably wondering how you lower costs and keep visitors long enough to turn them into customers. You can accomplish this task by creating a program that rewards visitors with a discount for subscribing or free shipping after spending a specified amount. These strategies will help reduce abandonment due to pricing and convince people to go through with their orders.
Create a Cart Recovery Email Campaign
Email marketing is a great way to engage with your subscribers and improve your sales, but it’s also the perfect way to recover lost shoppers. There are many reasons why someone might leave your site. Perhaps they were just window shopping. Maybe they thought they would wait for a deal. Who knows, maybe they were on their lunch break and had to go back to work! Whatever the reason, it’s vital that you reconnect with these people.
A cart recovery email campaign can help you connect with shoppers who left your site without completing their orders. Essentially, these emails are friendly reminders that the recipient left an item in their cart. Research shows that these types of emails are incredibly effective. In fact, it was shown that sending one email an hour after abandonment leads to businesses recovering 6.33% of shoppers.
But it gets better than that. Further data shows that sending 3 abandonment emails to shoppers within a week can lead to a jaw-dropping 69% more orders!
If you want to improve your odds, try including special promotions in your recovery emails. For instance, you could send subscribers a 15% discount if they use your email link to come back and complete their order. We’ve had tremendous success with this strategy, and I recommend all businesses develop a flexible cart recovery email campaign.
Redesign Your Checkout Page
Next, let’s talk about the benefits of redesigning your checkout page. Many shoppers will leave a site if the checkout page is complicated, clunky, or lacking trust signals. You’ll want to resolve all of these issues to the best of your ability during your redesign.
When it comes to contact and payment forms, short and sweet is the way to go. Most instances of form abandonment occur because people don’t want to endlessly answer questions when their goal is to simply pay for their order. In this instance, you could benefit from a guest checkout option or the ability to automatically fill in data for repeat customers.
Speaking of forms, your payment form and your entire checkout page should be optimized for mobile devices. In the United States, over 58% of all website traffic comes from smartphone users. If your page isn’t ready for mobile devices, you can guess what visitors will do when they can’t go through the ordering process. That’s right. They’ll abandon their shopping cart.
I also highly recommend showing trust signals on your checkout page. You can use reviews from other customers, trust seals from well-known brands like Norton and PayPal, or by showing endorsements from other popular brands in your industry. When visitors see that you’re trusted by your customers, other brands, and the community, they are less likely to leave without paying.
Highlight Customer Support Resources
Finally, I want to discuss the importance of highlighting customer support resources on your site. I want you to think about the last time you visited an online store and had a question about a product or service. Now, imagine how you would feel if you absolutely could not find the answer you were looking for. Even if you already had what you wanted in your cart, you would probably leave, right?
You can avoid putting your visitors in this situation by delivering a top-notch customer service experience, regardless of how or why someone needs your assistance.
The important thing to remember about customer service is there are layers to helping your visitors. I recommend using both live chat and chatbots to help users that want immediate help. Studies show that 63% of people are likely to return to a website if they offer live chat assistance. This is because they know if they run into an issue, there will be someone there to help them.
Chatbots can help your customers with common questions or concerns. I like using these handy little tools to deliver resources from our blog to customers when they have questions or concerns. Since most people read 3-5 blog posts before making a buying decision, this strategy makes sense. If your audience feels comfortable on your site, there’s a significantly lower chance that they will abandon their cart due to unanswered questions.
Wrapping Up
Despite your best efforts, you’ll never bring your cart abandonment rate down to zero. However, if you use some of the tips we’ve offered today, there’s an excellent chance you can win back a significant percentage of these users. The more people you convince to complete their order, the better chance you have at building a loyal fanbase that happily comes back to your online store to shop.
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