Saving Sales: Abandoned Cart Recovery
What’s the most important thing for your business in 2010? I’m sure this question is heavy on the mind of many Ecommerce website owners in this still new year, and there’s certainly plenty of priorities you’ll come up against as your quarterly goals wax and wane. It’s no stretch to speculate that a lot of companies are going to be focused on (you guessed it) increasing revenue and cutting costs, but how many are actually going to get there? More importantly, how will they achieve their goals?
One inexpensive, effective method of increasing revenue without dilluting your web traffic by attracting a wider, less relevant audience is to implement an abandoned cart recovery process. By identifying the slice of traffic that started the purchasing process but failed to complete it, you can begin to analyze and get some insight as to why. Not only will you then have the opportunity to recover that specific sale, but you can potentially correct a problem in the checkout process that is causing other, non-identifiable visitors to leave you high and dry.
Abandoned Cart Recovery may seem like a really simple method, and it is. Despite that, many Ecommerce websites are losing out on the chance to gain upwards of 35% recovered abandoned carts which can result in a substantial chunk of your overhead. If your Ecommerce software doesn’t have the capability to give you information on your abandoned shopping carts, then ditch them and find a provider that does.
How Does Abandoned Cart Recovery Work?
To abandon a shopping cart on a website you need to first add an item or service to your cart. If you leave the website after adding an item to your cart but do not complete a purchase, then you have abandoned your shopping cart. Once you have done this, your visit will essentially be flagged to indicate that you’ve left without completing your purchase. The amount of information you leave behind can vary from none at all, to an email address, exact time of the abandoned cart and more.
Then What?
That all depends. If you’re not currently monitoring this important statistic, then you’re missing out on lost sales and should immediately put something in place. Write up a simple email letting the customer know that you noticed they left without completing their purchase, and you thought they might have a question you could help with. If you don’t see a purchase come through from that same account in a few days, it may be a good idea to send out a follow-up email. One strategy is to offer the customer an incentive to complete their purchase in the second email, and this has some merit. Keep this information on a spreadsheet so you can keep track of your recoveries over time and see exactly how much you’re snatching from the jaws of lost revenue.
All in all, implementing an effective abandoned cart recovery system takes little time and can potentially reap huge rewards. Once in place, the system becomes a 10-minute task that can be responsible for recovering tens of thousands of dollars year over year.
