If you’re in ecommerce, you know about the bane of every store owner’s existence: abandoned carts. Abandoned carts cost online merchants $4.6 trillion (yes, with a “T”) in 2016 alone. Shopify estimates over 67% of online carts are abandoned before a customer completes a sale.
But where there’s a problem, there is opportunity. Over the years, entrepreneurs have found clever solutions or built clever apps to solve the abandoned cart problem. Some of them you may already know, but new approaches have been developed in recent years to tackle the problem. By implementing these solutions, you can expect double-digit increase in your revenue.
Here, we are going to cover three proven methods for recovering abandoned carts.
1. Personalize Your Abandoned Cart Emails
Image courtesy of Store Growers
Email marketing feels as old as time, and abandoned cart emails have been around for over a decade. However, there has been a lot of innovation in this space in recent years.
Klaviyo, an email marketing platform for growing ecommerce merchants, focuses on using data to vastly improve the effectiveness of email campaigns. For example, it pulls in data from other apps you might be using (e.g. Smile.io and Shopify) to create emails with more relevant products and better segmentation.
This is where the magic happens. For example, Klaviyo’s pre-built abandoned cart campaigns let you create custom customer segments. That way you can, for example, send a more introductory email to a first-time customer or a more familiar-sounding letter to a repeat customer. Or you can change the copy based on a customer’s country of origin.
Even more, Klaviyo lets you A/B test different emails so you can choose winning copy and constantly optimize. Klaviyo has a great article on how to create an abandoned cart flow for Shopify.
2. Retargeting Cart Abandoners with Facebook and Instagram Ads
If you install a Facebook pixel, you can retarget customers with ads showing them the products they have yet to purchase. This kind of ad retargeting can be up to 76% more effective than traditional online ads, simply because your customers have shown an interest in your product.
RetargetApp, for example, excels at this kind of retargeting. It only shows your customers the products they’ve shown interest in or abandoned. This dramatically increases their ad conversion rates -- the average return on ad spend (ROAS) is about 500%! And the best part is that it’s completely automated.
Abandoned cart ad retargeting should be an important piece of your marketing arsenal, especially when a customer forgets to give you their email address. RetargetApp has written a quick 101 on retargeting to help you get started.
3. Automated Facebook Messages
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Did you know you can use Facebook Messenger to recover abandoned carts? Thousands of stores are already doing it, and for good reason: it’s super effective. On average, a store using a Facebook Messenger bot to send abandoned cart messages will see up to a 250% increase in abandoned cart revenue versus using only email or ad retargeting.
Why is Messenger such an effective channel for ecommerce?
1) Facebook messages have high open rates -- 75% or more in some cases.
2) Facebook messages have high conversion rates -- 1 out of 9 abandoned cart messages sent by an Octane AI bot converts into a sale.
And 3) You don’t need an email address to send a prospective customer an automated message, opening up a new group of customers you can recapture and retarget.
It’s also easier than ever to implement. Octane AI’s marketing automation software automatically adds Facebook Messenger abandoned cart recovery to your Shopify store with a few clicks. It takes less than three minutes.
One other cool trick: you can improve the effectiveness of both your email and Facebook Messenger campaigns by connecting the two! Octane AI is hosting a private beta of its Klaviyo integration that lets you create custom flows that combine emails and Facebook messages.
Check out Octane AI on the Shopify App Store.
What’s Next on Your Journey?
While these three strategies will help you tackle the abandoned cart problem, it isn’t the end. Now that you’ve connected with these customers, it’s time to turn them into repeat customer. In a future blog post, we’ll explore some strategies for engaging first-time customers via email and messaging.
In the meantime, get started with your abandoned cart campaigns ASAP -- each day you wait means more lost revenue.
