Can You Really Turn Cart & Browse Abandonment into Profit? (Part 1)

(This blog post is Part 1 of our upcoming E-commerce Recovery series - stay tuned for more posts about getting e-commerce recovery right, e-commerce and marketing automation and much more!)

Did you know that 76% of your website visitors put items in their carts without finalising the purchase?

It’s true. But there are solutions to awaken your lost customers’ interests and make them return to check-out. A lost visitor doesn’t necessarily have to translate into lost business, and we’re here to tell you how.

Only have a few minutes? Here’s what we’re talking about in this blog post:

• Cart (and browse) abandonment happens on all e-commerce sites...

• … but you can easily turn this revenue loss into potential profit with recovery tactics!

• You need to have a data collection system in place to do this well

• Product recommendations will also boost your results - provided you personalise them based on deep data analysis

Do You Suffer From Abandonment Issues?

We’re sure you’ve done this before: you’ve browsed a website, and put special items that spark your interest into your shopping cart. Then, for whatever reason, you left the site without that final click on the “purchase” button. The reasons why you skipped your end purchase could be tenfold: your reaction to shipping costs, the fact that you were just browsing for fun, perhaps you had to run to catch a bus...

The point is, cart abandonment doesn’t always have to be a symptom of a lack of interest. As a matter of fact, 75% of shoppers who abandon their carts say that they (originally) plan to revisit the sites to finalise their purchase. Now, there’s quite an opportunity for you to influence the timeline between the abandonment and the potential return, wouldn’t you say?

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Increase Your Conversion Rates By Using Abandoned Cart Tactics

For an e-commerce business, a loss of purchase is always bad. Especially since we now know that cart abandonment accounts for millions in lost revenues.

But there’s a way to turn all this loss into potential profit: abandoned cart recovery tactics. These basically cover any and all automated and triggered email responses with the end goal of re-engaging visitors.

Like I said before, if a consumer doesn’t finalise a purchase, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she dislikes your products. Here’s where you come in: you can create the nudge that rekindles the interest of the visitors and redirects them back to your site and towards check-out.

By engaging them with friendly abandoned cart emails, you’re essentially giving your potential consumers a little nudge along the decision-making process. The direct effect of these email reminders is a customer recovery rate of an astonishing 10%.  That surely makes a difference in your quarterly budget!

What About the Curious Browsers?

Cart abandonment tactics are great if you’d like to initiate a conversation between your business and your potential customers. However, even though cart abandonment emails are effective at re-engaging purchasers, they only cover visitors who actually took time to browse your offering until they felt inclined to put interesting objects into their carts.

Whereas some visitors reach your site, browse and then leave without any specific purchase activity. This is called browse abandonment, since the purchase process ends before a single item has reached the cart. These leisurely shoppers surely put an unsavoury dent in your conversion rate.

What’s the Fix?

There is a remedy, a magic, technical elixir, that affects browse abandonment the same way as cart abandonment tactics target cart abandonment. With the same type of automated response, you can send triggered emails to consumers based on their behaviour on your website.

As you’ve probably realised, this requires a data-collecting system. In order to bring browsing visitors back to your site, you need data collection that traces the very steps the prospective customer makes. When did the visit end? How many items did the visitor click on? And in which product category?

To get the most accurate insight into each customer’s behaviour towards the purchase (or lack thereof), the base for data collection needs to be advanced and integrated over several channels. The reason for this is that you have to understand the mindsets of the customers. And customers today demand personalisation - in any and all channels.

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Sending a generic and non-personal automated email will not re-engage them. However, an email based on logged data to accommodate your preferences for a personalised touch definitely will. It greatly increases the likelihood of customer retention and elevates your conversion rate. Your customers expect you to be relevant, which you can become through the sophisticated intelligence of data-driven email marketing.

The Power Of Product Recommendations…

Like I’ve said above, cart abandonment tactics and methods to combat browse abandonment will make a difference in your conversion rates, sales and order values.

However, there’s a complementary strategy that can boost and enhance the chances of rekindling the interest towards the purchase: product recommendations. As a matter of fact, personalised product recommendations can add up to 31% of your total website revenues.

… Turns Data into Action

Too good to be true? There are some things to keep in mind before you head down the rabbit hole of product recommendations: every action and every step your potential customers make on your website creates a clue as to who your customer is and what he or she likes. It’s comparable to a little piece of the persona-puzzle.

So you can see that product recommendations are, technically, an analysis of a deep data network in order to target your consumer’s (probable) product preferences. Each product recommendation is based on the data drawn from your customer’s online history, and what he or she browsed, carted or purchased.

(Feel free to also take advantage of the analysed data from your abandoned cart tactics and browse abandonment emails and ensure a higher click-through rate as well!)

And if you want to create an even wider and more targeted picture that’ll increase the impact of your personalised product recommendations, you should try mixing the personal data with the data retrieved from your entire customer base. And if it works, use the data from your cart and browse abandonment emails to create more targeted and effective personalised product recommendations by driving sales of certain featured products, bestsellers and relevant deals!

As you can see: even if the percentage of abandonment on e-commerce sites is too high to be comfortable, you can easily turn it around with personalised data and targeted emails into a profit number instead. Because if you rekindle the interest of lost consumers, you’ll say hello to increased revenues!

So to sum up:

• Cart (and browse) abandonment happens on all e-commerce sites...

• … but you can easily turn this revenue loss into potential profit with recovery tactics!

• You need to have a data collection system in place to do this well

• Product recommendations will also boost your results - provided you personalise them based on deep data analysis

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