In the last decade, many researches were carried out by different companies in different years to find out cart abandonment rates. The results were between 55% and 81.40%. In any case, that’s huge.
Consider SaleCycle’s 2018 findings: the cart abandonment rate was around 79%. It is terrible, you lose your sales and potentially loyal customers, and your expected sales drastically drop. Imagine, if this 79% of consumers, well at least half of them completed the purchase, how the sales would escalate.
There is no way to prevent the customer abandonment rate fully, but you can reduce sales loss.
Many solutions are available to reduce leaving in the checkout process. In this article, we will look at these solutions, but first, let’s examine the reasons behind cart abandonment.
Why do users abandon their shopping carts?
Most of the time, consumers add interested products to their shopping cart but drop out of the process before completing the purchase.
Consumer behavior is complicated, and this can be difficult to draw a single conclusion of why consumers leave. There are many reasons why consumers leave in the middle of the checkout process, and this can be as simple as forgetting to complete the process or just browsing eCommerce stores in spare time.
Here are the global survey results by WorldPay about why shoppers abandon the shopping cart:
what they really, really want? Source: WorldPay
Added up costs
Consumers tend to abandon shopping carts when there are extra added charges like taxes, shipping costs, etc. According to WorldPay statistics, 56% of the abandonment occurs when there are unexpected costs.
Trust issues
When there is a lack of trust for eCommerce businesses, consumers find it hard to trust your company, and they become skeptical. Thus, they can change their minds in the checkout process. Also, concerns about payment security make consumers hesitant to complete the purchase.
Technical issues
Technical problems also result in uncompleted purchases. This can be problems with adding promo codes, adding addresses with automatic address finders, log in errors, etc. If your website requires you to log in or register before completing the checkout process, consumers may abandon their cart. It is highly suggested a website support a guest checkout process.
Also, when the checkout process is complicated and there is not enough information about how to run the checkout process, shoppers have no choice but leave.
Product presentation
Other than that, the reason customers leave can be that they did not like your product; in other words, the product isn’t presented well, or images and description isn’t appealing enough.
If your PDP is good to go, then optimize the product descriptions for the best SEO results.
No reason
As you can see from the survey results, a lot of visitors just leave shopping carts without any reason like are just browsing.
You might need to get detailed insight into customer behavior. Hotjar is an excellent tool for tracking customer behavior and drawing a conclusion on your own because you can understand your site better than others. Or, you can also get professional help for customer behavior analytics from Hotjar.
There is also a way to understand why visitors live which is directly asking why: feedback forms. WPForms is a great plugin for WordPress for creating surveys and forms. Or, if your store is built on Shopify, you can use Zigpoll or Survey & Form by POWr.
How to calculate conversion rates?
To calculate conversion rates, you need to use data from Google Analytics:
Divide the number of visitors reaching your “Thank You” or order confirmation page (Y) by the total number of visitors reaching the checkout page (X) and multiple by 100. Formula is: Y/X*100
Simply, (Thank You page / Visitors reaching your checkout page) * 100
You can also calculate the conversion rates in Google Analytics, but you may need to take its course for efficient use since there are some points to consider while creating the conversion goals. Otherwise, you may have a different result from your own calculations.
Checkout abandonment rate metrics help understand your customers’ and visitors’ shopping behaviors. It is also one of the indicators of how well your eCommerce business – including strategy, prices, offers, etc. is doing. However, it may be misleading. For the right insight, consider your website traffic before concluding.
Cart Recovery Solutions
Email Marketing
Email marketing is known as the ideal tool to retain customers and recover abandoned sales. Hubspot states that it is more likely to recover cart abandonment after a few hours of abandonment by the series of emails. Also, omnisend clearly suggests sending a series of emails works 63% better than the single ones to recover abandoned cart emails.
Brilliance shows us email open rates are getting higher since 2016:
The data draws that when you reach out to your customers with relevant emails, you get the results.
SMS Marketing Automation
SMS Marketing is one type of mobile digital marketing proven to be an ideal way and cost-effective to send a text message to a large volume of consumers within seconds. Compared with phone calls and emails, its response rate is 209% higher.
Bulk SMS has a huge potential and here are why:
- after opt-in, 75 % of the consumers don’t mind receiving text messages from brands. Thus, most of the SMS receivers are OK with your messages. (Source)
- Plus, the open rate for SMS messages is 98%
- and 90% of the messages opened within 3 minutes of receiving.
According to a Deloitte 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, an average American checks their phone 52 times a day, up from 47 times in 2017.
And, people’s phone addiction isn’t getting better; they see smartphones as extensions of themselves.
PS: I have good news: SMS Marketing automation is coming soon on Nextsale. Our new feature will allow you to recover abandoned carts, reactivate old customers, and upsell products. Stay in touch!
On page notifications & widgets
These are known to increase conversion rates while developing instant purchases by displaying special offers to consumers. Although some used to consider popups annoying, it turned out that it depends on the context and frequency. Another benefit of on-page messages is that they engage visitors with your website, which decreases the bounce rate.
On-page popups have several types regarding their trigger and role: we – Nextsale grouped notifications as social proof, activity, and promo popups.
Social proof. These notifications tend to help consumers overcome their skepticism about your online store or brand. You show the recent sales – the number of purchases to the visitors surfing on a relevant product page. Social proof pop ups working mechanism is based on the social psychology’s branch: conformity. It works like this: when a person is uncertain about his/her action in a given situation, they rely on the other’s knowledge – the ones with like-minded people.
By the way, you can ideally overcome trust issue as well while decreasing cart abandonment by social proof.
The next is activity notifications. This can also be a part of building trust for your brand. With activity notifications, you display how many people were visiting your eCommerce site recently.
What differs Nextsale’s Social Proof & Activity notifications from other on-site widget apps, you can fully optimize your notifications and make them more efficient. With localization and customization, you can show or hide the campaign to visitors from certain countries, IP addresses, etc. Also, other than the behaviors, you can show the characteristics of previous visitors like the same countries to the current viewers on your eCommerce site to create inclusion.
PS: You can read here – how to use social proof as a digital marketing strategy to hike sales and feel the consumers feel secure.
Another type of on-page notifications is sticky promo bars and promo popups. You might encounter promo bars a lot on online stores’ top headings offering discounts.
Promo popups, depending on their triggers, can be exit-intent and on-scroll popups.
Exit-intent popups are ideal for offering discounts and email address acquisitions. When visitors hover on the exit button, these notifications pop up and offer discounts. It is also a great idea to let the consumers feel the sense of missing out. You can offer a discount for a limited period of time.
On-scroll popups appear when a visitor scrolls a certain percentage of a specific page. You can fully optimize these popups for when and how to show, or on which page to display.
If you use an app that fully allows you to optimize your on-page messages, you will dramatically decrease cart abandonment and increase conversion rates while growing your customers.
Product description
Words are powerful and hugely affect consumers purchasing behavior. You may need to use selling words in your product description. If you search selling words on the internet, you can find tons of it to use as an emotional marketing strategy. Just in case, you can read ReferralCandy’s suggestions of selling words that increase purchases.
If your online store sells multiple products, you can offer alternatives before visitors leave your site and find another one. According to a research, 56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a site that recommends products (Elastic Path).
Wrap Up
If you think about eCommerce’s competitiveness for a minute, you can realize that it is so easy to lose your potential customers to other brands. Plus, unlike the land-based stores, you cannot follow visitors to ask what they like or what they are exactly looking for: visitors just come and go. Thus, you need to use digital marketing strategies to prevent at least half of them from leaving.
In short, try the following 8 solutions for the best results:
- Build brand trust
- Fix technical issues
- Welcome guest checkout process
- Pay attention to product description wording
- Cross sell and upsell
- Support no surprise added up charges
- Offer discounts
- Use email and SMS marketing
By practicing above-mentioned strategies, you can drastically reduce cart abandonment rates in your eCommerce store and even gain loyal customers.