We’ve all heard the staggering statistics around shopping cart abandonment, high abandonment rates, billions in lost revenue, etc., etc. The most recent statistic I’ve seen was published in January 2016 by The Baymard Institute, which stated that the average abandonment rate was 68.63%. That’s a lot of abandoned carts!
What does that mean to your bottom line? Let’s put that into perspective. If you drive 100,000 visitors to your website in a given month and let’s say you get 5% of them to cart an item, that’s 5,000 carts! If 69% of them are abandoning, you’ve lost 3,450 of those 5,000 carts. Assuming your AOV is $100, that’s $345,000 in potentially lost revenue!
Let’s face it, we know we’ll never get all 3,450 of those consumers to complete their cart, but what if you could get 5% of them back, that’s $17,250!
With consumers, how are we going to get those carts to convert?
For years, email strategists have been touting the importance of cart abandonment emails. If you aren’t currently sending cart abandonment emails, here is a guide, and I would highly recommend making that a priority before this upcoming holiday season. If you’re already sending cart abandonment emails, what else can you do to recapture those lost carts?
One strategy you can implement is a proactive (rather than reactive) approach to resolving the cart abandonment issue. Enter the Save and Email My Cart approach. With just a couple of quick clicks, your shoppers have the ability to save their cart for future access and send themselves an email with a link to their own cart. The best part, this strategy gives the consumer more control over their cart by giving them the ability to complete their purchase at another time and on a device that’s more convenient for them, like say their desktop computer over their mobile device.
Having an abandoned cart program in place is great, and shouldn’t be discounted. However, to help you stand out from the competition, give this additional email feature some consideration. Especially during the increased shopping in the holiday months. Because let’s be honest, keeping track of all of those carts during the holidays isn’t something we are all good at doing.
