These days, almost anyone with a strong business acumen can open up their own online store. With just a few clicks and assistance from one of the many e-commerce hosting services, your online business can be up and be running in no time.
This, of course, means that independent online shop owners must be aware of the ever-growing competition in their marketplace.
The high price of competition means getting more quality leads and converting visitors into buyers is no easy feat. Even if you get visitors into the sales funnel, many will abandon their shopping carts. Indeed, research has shown that nearly 70 percent of potential e-commerce sales are lost to abandoned shopping carts.
Many factors play a role in why potential customers abandon their carts before purchase. Some reasons are listed below:
- Forcing customers to account creation
- Unexpected extra costs (namely delivery costs)
- Complex checkout processes
- The rise of cybersecurity concerns (credit card fraud or online scams)
So how can you retrieve some of those lost sales and reduce the incidence of cart abandonment while inducing a sales purchase?
The short answer: marketing automation.
Below, we examine five different ways by which automation can counteract cart abandonment.
1. Re-Engage with Triggered, Sequence Emails
Creating targeted emails aimed at cart abandoners is one of the most effective ways to employ marketing automation to dynamically adjust consumer behavior. Automated email campaigns can be fashioned to reinitiate customers who have abandoned their cart.
Marketing automation technology will enable you to run sequenced follow-up emails once a customer triggers the rules you’ve set up for your email campaign.
Automated email campaigns are one of the most effective vehicles to drive consumers back to your e-commerce site and resume their buyer’s journey to completion. Inserting customer-centric elements in your follow-up email campaigns such as incentives to complete their order (discounts on final costs) boosts return on investment.
Segmenting your consumer data according to your specific triggers and rules further enhances your automated email campaigns. Automation is able to send the right series of incentivizing emails to the right shoppers who have abandoned their carts at the right time.
2. Improve Timing
With the rise of mobile shopping, timing becomes all the more crucial for e-commerce sites to engage with potential customers. Being able to send push notifications or a friendly reminder at the right time can have a large effect on consumer behavior. Timing is everything when it comes to marketing new products or minimizing cart abandonment.
Strategies will differ according to the brand, so it’s important you experiment with what works for your brand’s target audience. Your data analytics can confirm the best times for re-engagement and can seamlessly integrate with additional marketing features.
Marketing automation features can be used to perfectly time cross- or up-sell, recommend products according to search/purchase history, and even optimally time push notifications or friendly reminders according to user behavior and time of engagement.
3. Conduct A/B Testing
When a marketing campaign is properly optimized to engage with audience segments, campaigns become more effective in increasing conversion, minimizing cart abandonment, and improving return on investment.
A/B testing is a simple yet effective tool for marketing automation to gain insights on the best way to target cart abandoners. This data-driven vehicle enables businesses to monitor every sale and engagement on their e-commerce site. This makes it crucial to implement A/B to drive conversion.
To incorporate and implement A/B testing brands can deploy split testing through various stage of their website. From landing pages and forms to marketing emails and content, A/B testing provides important metrics to enable your brand to identify processes in your sales journey that can be improved.
4. Convert by Remarketing Ads
When visitors come to your site, they come for a variety of reasons. And just as likely, they will leave for a variety of reasons. Some come for your site’s latest blog posts, others engage with current promotions and sales. Regardless of the reason, when visitors do leave your site, it’s essential to be prepared to recapture their attention.
This can be effectively done with retargeted display ads.
Retargeting gives your site the second chance it requires to convert visitors into buyers. Using marketing automation, your retargeted ads use data-driven insights from a consumer’s browsing behavior (time spent on page, scroll behavior, user path, and hyperlink clicks) to drive re-engagement. Retargeting can remind visitors with an expressed interest in your business to return to your site ready to buy.
5. Lead with Customer Service
It’s a known that fact that good customer service leads to increased conversions. A report from American Express found that outstanding customer service is rewarded by greater brand awareness, increased conversions, and the willingness to spend more.
And with marketing automation able to manage multiple platforms to drive customer engagement, even the most budget-starved startup is able to offer plenty of opportunities to deliver exceptional customer experience.
Social media, in particular, presents many opportunities to drive brand interactions and for brands to capitalize on customer queries. Live chats, messaging apps, SMS marketing and chatbots are just some of the tools automation can oversee to drive more sales and limit the shopping cart abandonment experience.
5 Ways to Reduce Abandoned Carts with Marketing Automation
" data-orig-size="649,390" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" aperture="aperture" />The Business Case for Automation
If your business is experiencing high rates of cart abandonment, it might be time to immediately employ the services and tools of marketing automation. Automation comes with a fully customizable dashboard to enable your company set it according to business needs.
With cart abandonment numbers remaining staggeringly high, automation may be the platform your marketing needs to win back consumers and regain some crucial revenue opportunities.
Reduce Abandoned Carts with Marketing Automation
