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Abandoned Cart Email Strategy Tips
Did you know that more than 70% of shoppers abandon their carts at checkout? This can be frustrating for anyone who runs an eCommerce business because it feels like you’re so close, and yet you don’t get to reap the benefits of an actual sale.
But there are ways to take that abandoned cart and turn it into a sale. One way to achieve this is to follow up with the customer after they have abandoned their cart with an email.
The abandoned cart email is a great way to remind customers that they left your website without completing the purchase. You then entice them to come back to your website and finish the sale.
But obviously, they left your website without purchasing for a reason, so it’s not enough to just say please do it! and then be done with it. You’re going to need an effective abandoned cart email strategy. So here at Website Tips & Tutorials, we want to provide you with tips on how to write an effective abandoned cart email.
1. Use the Right Tools
There are products and software that will greatly help you in an effective abandoned cart email strategy. In fact, some products will automatically send abandoned cart emails for you, which saves you a lot of time since, as I mentioned before, abandoned carts are fairly common.
A great solution for this if you use WooCommerce would be the Yith WooCommerce Recover Abandon Cart Plugin. They give you a lot of really great features like sending coupons to users, the ability to automatically send out emails on specific times you determine, the ability to customize the emails, the ability to make reports and analyze data about abandoned carts, etc. Some of these features we’ll go more into detail about later.
Another of these solutions is Jilt, which you can get to work with your eCommerce store if you use Shopify or WooCommerce (in fact, if you use LiquidWeb’s Managed WooCommerce, Jilt is included in your monthly hosting price!).
If you don’t use these tools and you are looking for a good email marketing company to create your emails, then I would check out Constant Contact – they are a great company, and they even offer free trials so you can try them out for yourself.
2. Send a Coupon
One of the reasons someone might not have followed through with the purchase is because perhaps they worried they were spending too much money on the item. One way to convince the customer to make the final sale is to send them a coupon. I know I have personally done this before. I have thought about buying a product, decided against it and upon getting a coupon, have gone ahead and made the purchase. There’s something about knowing that you’re getting a good deal that really motivates you to buy. As I mentioned earlier, if you use the Yith plugin for WooCommerce, you’ll be able to easily and automatically send out coupons to customers.
3. Leverage Your Rewards Program
Do you offer a rewards program to loyal customers? If so, remind them of what kind of rewards they’ll be missing out on if they don’t make a sale. Earning more reward points is often a great incentive to make a purchase, especially if someone is close to getting cashing out their points for money or a prize. You can even create a segment in your email marketing software if you use an email marketing program like Constant Contact for customers who have more than a certain number of Reward Points. Don’t have a rewards program yet? Well, if you use WooCommerce and want to add one, then you get WooCommerce Points and Rewards and start your new program!
4. Create a Sense of Urgency
One of the reasons people abandon their shopping carts is because something else comes up, which is understandable. After all, we all have busy lives. But one way to fight that is to make the customer feel there is a sense of urgency. If you are offering a physical product, you could send a message like “Hurry! These items are selling out!” This makes the customer feel like if they don’t finish their offer right now, they’ll miss out. No one likes missing out on something.
Another way to do would be if you were having a sale. You could say something like “Hurry! Act now before the price goes up!” or something more specific to whatever you are selling. The point is, you want to make the customer feel like they can’t wait any longer to go ahead and buy the item.
5. Send Your First Email Within 30 Minutes
Sometimes a customer abandons their cart because they have more questions. For that reason, it’s a good idea to email the customer within 30 minutes of abandoning their cart. This could encourage the customer to go ahead and contact you with their questions and you could resolve the issue and complete the sale.
6. Include Contact Information
In that vein, include contact information, such as a phone number, in your email so that the customer can contact you if they have more questions. You could even send the email using a real person’s name (rather than just, say, an “info” email) and include the sender’s picture. This way, the customer will really feel like they know you and can just ask you questions.
7. Personalize the Email
Really make your customer feel like you care about their business by customizing emails. You can easily do this with great email marketing companies like Constant Contact. By using, for example, their name in their email subject, it may make the customer feel like you care about their business. This makes them feel like you are someone therefore they should do business with. This could be enough to make them do business with you!
8. Don’t Spam The Customer
Let’s face it, no one wants their email inbox cluttered with ten emails in the same hour from the same company begging them for their business. Limit the number of emails you send out to around four emails at most. You want to pursue this customer but you do not want to harass them.
9. Use a Mobile Friendly Template
A lot more people use phone to access the internet these days, and they may open up your email on their phone. So keep that in mind when you create your emails. You’ll want your email to be mobile friendly, which can be easily achieved if you use an email marketing service like Constant Contact because they have mobile friendly templates.
10. Include in your Email a way to Sign up for Emails
Unfortunately, there are times a customer will never make the purchase for a variety of reasons that are out of control but do not mean the customer is completely uninterested in your brand.
For example, let’s say you have an online fitness store. You sell huge exercise equipment. Someone could put that in their cart but ultimately decide they did not have room for that in their home or apartment.
But what if you also sell smaller fitness equipment? When you send them an email offering a discount, you could also include in the email a way for someone to sign up for your email list. It is possible that the customer could open the email, consider it, but decide against the large equipment item. But they could still be intrigued to sign up for your email (especially if you give an incentive for opening your email, such as a PDF for fitness tips). Later, they could end up seeing an email about a smaller item on sale and then they would make the purchase. So maybe you didn’t get the initial sale, but you got a sale later on – and ultimately, you just want to make sales!
