Are your customers taking extra time to finalize their purchases? Are they switching to better deals? Are they changing their minds? Are they waiting for more offers by keeping the products in the cart and then not buying?
These are some of the instances that could be occurring? So, what exactly does shopping cart abandonment mean? Let us explore what it is and how it can be reduced in this blog.
We all abandon our shopping carts from time to time. Shopping cart abandonment means adding products to your cart but not going through the purchase. There could be multiple reasons stopping you from clicking on the “Buy” button.
As a consumer, we do not give it a second thought and move on but for online retailers, shopping cart abandonment leads to missed opportunities in sales up to $18 billion a year. (Source: Martech)
Some shoppers abandon their carts because they are simply there for window shopping. Some shoppers are there to return later or complete the purchases after comparing and making an informed decision. And in some cases, abandoned carts also mean that there was poor user experience.
Have you as a consumer experienced irritation over having to register or sign up on websites to make purchases? 24% of the online customers abandon their shopping carts due to not wanting to register and sign up. The processes are long and complicated, be it signing up or checking out.
Another reason being the lack of super-fast delivery. One more being the limited options in payment gateways.
By improving on these pain points in the user experience, you can implement some recovery. This is where Customer Data Platforms (CDP) help.
What is a Customer Data Platform? It basically collects data, unifies it, structures it, analyzes it, and helps in activating personalized marketing campaigns. Through the customer data platforms, you get real-time insights into customer behavior especially whether your customers have abandoned their carts or not.
Apart from helping you identify customers with abandoned shopping carts, a CDP will also help you figure out why those customers bailed in the first place. A CDP will help you identify the exact point where the customers dropped off.
What else can you do using a CDP that will help you reduce the shopping cart abandonment?
Based on the data analysis, insights and reports generated by the CDP, first you must define where and why are the customers dropping out of the sessions. After that, steps must be taken to improve those pain points.
For example, scraping the extra registration steps, optimizing the process of checkout, and even better would be to remove the mandatory registration altogether and adding a guest checkout for the ease and convenience of the customers.
CDP also helps you in persuading your customers to finish their purchases by helping you run campaigns of retargeting. You can reach your customers through the right channels at the right time with the right form of content that will make them rethink their decisions.
This increases the likelihood of conversions, especially when the campaign is relevant and personalized and reflects the likes, desires and the preferences of the customers.
Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways of increasing conversions. A carefully crafted, well written cart abandonment email is very effective.
Another successful tactic for recovery is retargeting ads. By leveraging the customer data platform’s capabilities of segmentation and reliable real-time data, you can tailor make your ads to according to the customer preferences.
Create personalized offers, discount codes, bumper offers, no shipping fees, or any other preferred offers to the customers who are first-time shoppers or repeat, then you may be able to entice them.
The process of reducing the shopping cart abandonment is not something that happens overnight. You need A/B testing, you need multiple iterations of your personalized campaigns.
Through the Sitecore Customer Data Platform, you can allow your retailers to track the products that are abandoned in the carts and activate triggered experiences to bring those customers back. For example, giving out a highly personalized offer.
Based on the customers' history, there is always an opportunity to cross-sell other products which the customers might like to have.
Customers and their minds are always going to keep changing. Using a strategy to recover the abandoned carts is one of the ways to persuade the customers to come back and complete their purchases.
These strategies only work with the help of a powerful CDP like the Sitecore CDP as it helps you in delivering impactful and effective customer experiences.
As a Sitecore Development company, you can get the best Sitecore services from us. From marketing automation to CDP to eCommerce platform building, we provide the best of the best.