The following blog post was written by Brittani Martel, Content Manager at Smarter HQ and originally appeared on the SmarterHQ blog. You can see this post and more of the Smarter Spotlight series for all things real-time behavioral marketing here.
If you’re a retail marketer in a small or enterprise-level business, you’re probably using email marketing tactics to reach your consumers. But are you getting the best results possible? Or are your metrics pretty average?
I’m Brittani Martel, Content Manager for the leading behavioral marketing platform SmarterHQ, and I want to tell you more about how to use cart abandonment triggers in real-time to not only meet consumer demand, but also to maximize your ROI from email alone. You’re already doing it, why not optimize it with these tricks and get top-notch results? It’s a win-win!
Consumers are more distracted than ever thanks to availability of information directly at our fingertips. For the e-commerce industry, this means shoppers are doing more window shopping, price comparisons, wish-listing, and browsing gift options, all which decrease the likelihood of purchase completion in one session.
In fact, 58.6% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart within the last three months because they were “just browsing” or “not ready to buy.” Sure, this is the reality of online shopping in a hyper-connected world, but there are still several things marketers can do to save the sale by engaging customers in a personalized way to bring them back to you before it’s too late.
An estimated $4 trillion worth of merchandise is abandoned in online shopping carts per year, but 63% of this revenue has the potential to be recovered! That’s $252 million in potential sales: $252 million, all by including a streamlined cart abandonment series to your current marketing strategy. A cart abandonment series reminds preoccupied customers that they left items in the online shopping cart and offers them a critical, time-sensitive offer to entice a final purchase. Here are some tricks to maximize your messaging to consumers:
Identify shoppers who abandon online shopping carts
Often, retail brands send cart abandonment emails only to consumers who are logged in to their accounts, because it seems like the easiest group to message. It’s important to also extend that reach by capturing everyone who has abandoned a cart whether they are logged in or not. Doing so can extend your reach by a whopping 60%! A behavioral marketing platform can keep track of all your shoppers regardless of when, where, or how they shop with your brand.
Boost results with real-time response
You’ve heard quite a lot about the importance of real-time email triggers, but is it really that effective? We put it to the ultimate test — the A/B test. When is the best time to send emails to your customers? Read more about those A/B test results. If you want to do the same, make sure to include the items abandoned and direct consumers to the online shopping cart instead of the product page.
It can be challenging to send real-time triggers directly from your ESP. Frequently, there is a delay in aggregating data from your ESP. And, sometimes ESPs don’t recognize customers are on your website unless they have logged in to an account with your brand.
Here’s where behavioral marketing comes to save you. A behavioral marketing platform can not only integrate with your current ESP, but it can also give you powerful analytics and data that allows you to segment audiences in a highly targeted way, in real-time. Beyond cart abandonment, access to customer behaviors and predictive marketing can empower marketers to really understand and cater to customers based on any real-time behavior.
Dive deeper into the funnel and target checkouts
Knowing precisely the location on your website where a customer abandons can help you target them in a more effective way. For example, minimizing the checkout process to reduce distractions gets a consumer to final purchase faster. And, allowing a guest checkout instead of a required login. According to eConsultancy, 1 in 4 customers abandon online purchases because they were forced to register while purchasing.
Finally, remind customers of what it was they abandoned in the first place and call it out directly in the email’s hero image. Finish up with a strong, relevant call-to-action with a polite option to walk away before buying.
For more results that blow away the average cart abandonment emails, check out our success stories with Value City Furniture and Boston Proper. Brands like these have seen a 345% increase in cart abandonment revenue using these types of campaigns.
See more in the Smarter Spotlight series for all things real-time behavioral marketing.