OK, it doesn't just kind of suck. It sucks big time. Did you know that according to Shopify, out of every 10 customers that add a product to cart, 7 will abandon the purchase?!

The thing about cart abandonment, however, is that it's the lowest hanging fruit — these shoppers have demonstrated high intent to purchase, and they just haven't followed through with the transaction yet.

So as a store owner, you need every tactic in your toolkit to farm these sales opportunities.

Here are a few of our top-performing recommendations:

1) Hidden gift with purchase offer that only appears when you add a product to cart. 

Our team over at Social Lite, which is Merchant Mastery's sister agency, helped a brand called Hellbent implement a Privy “Free Gift with Purchase” display banner promotion in January 2020, which helped increase their month-over-month revenue by over 1,000%.

Here's how it shook down:

When any website visitor added any item to cart, a Privy display banner popped up offering a free, limited edition Hellbent lapel pin as a gift with purchase. We know that users adding items to cart have a high interest and desire to at least explore the product further, so understanding this, we offered an incentive to solidify their commitment to buy, today.

The thing that worked so well is that the surprise immediate gift (free lapel pin) catches the customer while he / she is already interested, and provides that extra little incentive to complete the purchase. 

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL CASE STUDY

2) Exit-intent cart savers.

In last week's newsletter we talked about the four best type of website display banners to improve your website conversions, and boost sales. 

One of the top four was our good friend, the exit-intent cart saver. The way this one works is that a display will pop up with a special offer for visitors only when they have items in their cart. So if their cart value is greater than $1, for example, that could trigger a display banner to show up providing a special offer; for example, free shipping with your purchase today.

The best part is that you could also get really creative as a store owner and provide different offers to different shoppers based on their cart value. For example:

If the cart value is over $1, but less than $50, offer free shipping.

If the cart value is over $50, but less than $100, offer 10% off.

If the cart value is over $100, offer 20% off.

You get the idea, and the key is that you know what you're able to offer as a store owner based on purchase volume.

It's kind of nice that you don't have to offer this great deal to absolutely everyone, where in some cases you'd lose money.

3) Lower the risk to purchase.

Pre-empt your customers' pain points and lower the risk in advance of them adding to cart. You can do this on the product page with things like:

Payment instalments - You can use apps like Sezzle for this, where customers only pay 1/4 of the cost upfront, and they complete the remaining three payments on a schedule. Sezzle immediately pays you the full price of the product, where they take a percentage, but they handle all collections if needed. Added benefit: having a payment instalment option often increases AOV (average order value), because shoppers will buy more from you if they can "buy now, pay later."

Guarantees - Guarantees work incredibly well to lower risk, build safety, lower your abandoned cart rate, and increase sales. You should always include 3+ guarantees on your product pages to build trust. You can do things like money-back guarantees, where customers pay for an item in full, but they have the option to return it for a full refund if they're not satisfied. Store owners love these offers, because, yes, this offer removes risk and encourages shoppers to buy, but it’s also known that only a small percentage of people will take the time to ship back a return.

4) Abandoned cart emails.

To say that email is critical to your cart abandonment strategy would be an understatement. In fact, Salecycle reports that nearly half of all cart abandonment emails are opened, and over 30% of clicks on those emails lead to a completed purchase.

And Salesforce found that while the average revenue for promotional emails is $0.02 and welcome emails is $0.18, the average revenue for abandoned cart emails is $5.64.

 

Talk about an effective marketing tactic!

 

Here's an example of an Abandoned Cart email we use here at Merchant Mastery:

The Abandoned Cart flow is a big part of the Merchant Mastery Elite training, and we give you templates, just like the one above, plus lots of examples from other brands.

Got questions about your eCommerce website / strategy? Our team member Brandon LOVES to talk about this stuff! Schedule a free, 1-on-1 call with him below.

CLICK HERE TO SCHEDULE A 1-ON-1 STRATEGY CALL WITH BRANDON