eCommerce Analytics

Last time we talked a bit about the reasons behind abandoned carts and realized that there aren’t many weapons available to combat most of its causes. Even potential solutions that look tantalizing (showing S&H and tax on product pages) will likely just push abandonment to an earlier pre-cart point in the process.

If Nothing Else, Read These Two Stats

All is not lost, however. It turns out that remarketing to shoppers who have left full carts behind really can make a difference. Check out these two stats, pulled from the Experian CheetahMail report:

Even the most basic [remarketing] emails (even those that simply link to a website home page) pull in over 31% higher transaction rates compared to bulk promotions — a number that senior management will find difficult to ignore.

Yowza. That fact alone should should make you want to drop everything and put a remarketing program together today. But maybe you’re still skeptical. After all, won’t a remarketing email with a discount offer simply train shoppers to abandon the cart in hopes of a better deal?

Not to worry (from the same report):

Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.

We don’t even have to include a discount offer in the remarketing email to reap its rewards. Not bad.

I’m Convinced. What Else Should I Know?

Before you get started, keep these tips in mind when sending your remarketing emails:

Create a sense of urgency. Subject lines mentioning that an item is about to be out of stock or that the basket is about to expire is likely to garner a better response rate than one simply reminding the user that items are left in his or her cart.

Time it to hit the sweet spot. When is the sweet spot? Conventional wisdom says one  to seven days after the user abandoned the cart. Start by sending it two days after abandonment and then test random groups using different timing to find optimal response rates.

Link directly to the cart. From the report:

The quicker a customer can access their own cart and view the actual products they were interested in, the higher the returns.

How Much Time Will It Take?

Implementing a remarketing program is one of those best practices that can yield great results without much investment. If you’re ready to dip your toes in check out our next post. We provide, in usable form, the world’s simplest php email remarketing script that will get you a functioning remarketing program in a few minutes.

Looking a report of abandoned shopping carts can be frustrating. All those carts stocked full of high margin items just waiting to be checked out. But the shopper bailed just before pulling the trigger. Was it something you said?

There two recent studies that examined reasons online shoppers fail to purchase after adding items to their carts. CheetahMail published statistics as part of a whitepaper in January 2010 as did Forrester in late 2009 (link to summary blog post). Both largely agree with each other. Let’s combine them and see what they tell us:

Biggest Reasons Shoppers Abandon Carts

(40-60% respondents citing as important)

• Didn’t want to pay shipping costs/High shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase was more than expected (read: tax + S&H)
• Was doing research/wanted to compare price on other sites

Less Important Reasons

(10-30% respondents citing as important)

• Wanted to look for coupon
• Wanted to buy offline instead
• Checkout was too complicated
• Security concerns

No Silver Bullet Here

While it’s tempting to think that a streamlined checkout process can make big improvements in cart abandonment rates the data doesn’t seem to bear that out. Instead, the biggest source of control we have in getting a customer to complete a purchase is letting them know as early in the process as possible what the total price after tax and shipping and handling will be.

But won’t this just shift abandonment from the cart to an earlier point in the process when the full tax + S&H total is displayed? Unfortunately, it probably will. So we need to look at other ways to address the abandonment problem.

Remarketing to the Rescue?

Let’s take a look at how to do email remarketing — the process of sending follow-up emails to customers who left the site with a full cart. Remarketing produces surprisingly good conversion rates and can be a valuable tool in the fight against cart abandonment.

Ready to get started? Here’s a PHP email remarketing script to jump start your efforts.