Did you know that 68.63% is the average shopping cart abandonment rate?!
That’s huge!
As a business owner, your thoughts would be to reduce this rate. And to make this happen, you’d need to know the underlying reasons for cart abandonment.
There could be several reasons:
- The checkout process being confusing or too lengthy
- An unexpected shipping cost added
- Insufficient payment options
- No guest checkout option… and so on.
While these are issues you can resolve by making a few changes on your WooCommerce site, they are techniques to reduce cart abandonment.
But say for example, the customer was just surveying different options, and abandons the cart to either purchase it at a later time or from a competitor. In such scenarios, you need to employ an abandoned cart recovery strategy.
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Abandoned Cart Recovery
Since the problem of cart abandonment is as old as online shopping itself, a lot of research has gone into perfecting abandoned cart recovery strategy.
The most popular being email campaigns.
Businesses have seen a 12-13% cart recovery rate within days of employing email retargeting campaigns.
Sending Customized Emails
Personalized emails can work wonders.
It’s not just the message which should be customized, the customer’s abandoned order should be mentioned as a reminder. There should also be a link to restore the abandoned cart.
You could experiment with the templates too, and analyse which template works best based on which template provides you the most response.
For multilingual sites, the email templates could be made compatible with multiple languages to cater to customers belonging to different regions.
Adding Coupons and Offers to Emails
Considering the stats that 75% of visitors who abandon their cart had the intent to make a purchase, the best way to compel them to buy the products would be to entice them with a discount or offer.
Free shipping works, as do coupon codes.
Coupons mentioned in follow up templates could offer customers a discount on the abandoned cart.
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Tying up with an email marketing service would be a great way to manage your email recovery campaign for WooCommerce. Alternatively, you could also take a look at plugins like Abandoned Cart Pro, or WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart.
Analyzing User Interaction Stats
Now, you can’t ignore user interaction analytics. Analytics for abandoned and recovered carts, help understand which products are being abandoned, and which recovery tactics are working.
Admin emails can help too.
If a user recovers a abandoned cart then a mail should go to the store owner to notify that the product has been purchased.
The Cart Reports extension by WooThemes can be used for detailed cart reports.
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Emptying Abandoned Carts
While abandoned carts are sometimes recovered by users, some might just show no response. In such a case, the cart needs to be emptied to ensure that the inventory tallies. This step is as important as your recovery efforts and cannot be ignored.
After all, you do not want interested customers to leave your WooCommerce store without making a purchase due to insufficient inventory.
The Empty Cart Timer solution can be used in this case.
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A lot of revenue is lost due to abandoned carts. Some of these steps can help recover such abandoned carts. If you’ve got any doubts or suggests, please feel free to share them as comments.
You may also like to read: The 7 Biggest E-commerce Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid
