Let us for a moment step into the customer’s shoes. So, you are planning to buy a surprise gift for your spouse. You were doing your research on the online store of your choice, and you ultimately got to the right gift. You don’t want to spend any more time on gift-hunting, and want to get this product right away. Hence, you decide to place the product in the shopping cart. You enter your name, email i.d., and just when you were about to pay for it; your spouse walks in. Remember, this is a surprise gift? You fumble with your mouse, and quickly close the window. A prospective shopping cart was just abandoned, and the merchant lost a sale.
More about Cart Abandonment
There are various scenarios that can lead to cart abandonment. It could be because the customer’s boss walked in or that s/he was not very impressed by the shipping price for the product. A recent study by Baynard Institute suggests that 68% of the shopping carts online are abandoned. If you are an online merchant, this number might have just made you cringe. Imagine where your revenues will go if you could convert a part of this lost opportunity?
Cart Abandonment Email Strategy
You can hire expert Shopify development services in order to create an effective cart abandonment email strategy. Under this strategy, you send out well-planned emails at pre-decided intervals of time. By doing so, you can recover between 5 and 10% of the lost sales that are caused due to cart abandonment. If your strategy is exhaustive, you might even convert more.
Let us do a quick analysis. Let us assume that you do a business of $7,500 every day by selling 500 products at $15 each. At 68% lost sales, you can assume that you lost $15,000/day in sales to be able to get your $7,500. If you could recover just 5% of that lost sale, you will add $750 to your revenue each day. That translates into $22,500 every month and $270,000 every year in incremental sales. That’s why this strategy is so important.
Best Practices for your Email Strategy
Now, let us find out what are the best practices for your cart abandonment email strategy with Shopify. There are a couple of things that you should certainly do.
- Find out the Gaps: The first thing to do is a little bit of introspection. You need to find out why exactly are customers going away from your website. If many of your customers are leaving the website at the shopping cart stage, perhaps there is something wrong there. May be, your shipping charges are very high. If you like, you can even install a mouse tracking software that will help you visualize how your customers interact with the checkout process.
- # of Emails: So, how many emails should you exactly send? This depends on your strategy. An ideal strategy is to send 3 emails to your customers. The first one is 2 hours after abandonment. If it was an emergency because of which they had to abandon the cart, they will come back at this time. The second email can be 2 days later, and the third and the final one should be 4 days after abandonment.
- Discount: Some online merchants offer discount to get people back to the cart. However, your customers might not have left due to price reasons. Therefore, your first email should just talk about getting them back to the cart to let them continue shopping. The second and third emails, however, can talk about discount to get back those customers who left because of the price. You can give them some kind of incentive to return to the cart.
This way, you can ensure that you bring some valuable incremental business to your store.
About DIT India
At DIT India, we are expert Shopify developers. We have a team of skilled shopify designers and developers who ensure that our domestic & international clients receive exactly what they need. If you want to consult us about cart abandonment email strategy or want to know more about our Shopify services, you can visit us at our website: www.ditindia.com.
