Episode 014: Tackling High Abandoned Cart Rates   Episode Summary:  A high rate of abandoned shopping carts on an ecommerce website is so frustrating! In this episode, Julie walks through how to get the abandoned cart rate down as well as strategies for getting customers who abandoned their cart to return and make a purchase.   Episode Links: https://www.adroll.com/ https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript:   Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello, and welcome to episode 14 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.   Okay, quick reminder, there is a full transcript of the show in the show notes, along with any links for any resources I talk about. I want to be sure that you are in a good position to go back and quickly and easily find what you need, because this is an important topic today.   Today we're going to talk about how to tackle high abandoned cart rates. Now, abandoned shopping carts are probably one of the most frustrating issues we deal with as ecommerce website owners. This is where people add items to their shopping cart, and then they don't complete the checkout process. And I think it's really frustrating because we've managed to get traffic to our website, we've managed to get them to add something to their shopping cart, but for some reason they're not making it to that last important step of actually purchasing the item. That's a terrible place to be failing, right?   So let's dive in by first asking ourselves if we actually have a problem. Okay, so that might seem like an odd thing to say, and I get it. Anyone abandoning their shopping cart is a problem. Even after all these years, I go in every couple days to my ecommerce system and look specifically at how many people have abandoned carts on my website. And the number always makes me cringe. So here's the thing. Running a successful ecommerce website means that we all have a lot of competing priorities, right? So one of our biggest challenges is to prioritize the things we need to work on. And so this idea of abandoned shopping carts becomes a prime example because while the number makes all of us cringe, and we would definitely like to have our abandoned cart rate be zero or near zero, that isn't realistic.   So here's the deal. The average ecommerce site has about a 75% abandoned cart rate. Seriously, out of every 100 customers who place something in their shopping cart, on average only 25% of them are going to complete that purchase. The other 75 are going to walk away. I mean, how frustrating is that? But I wanted to start off this discussion today by giving you some perspective, and especially if you're new to ecommerce, so that you can be thoughtful about what you're getting upset over and what you're deciding to put time and resources into.   So here's the deal. As a general rule, if your website's abandoned cart rate is higher than 75%, then I would absolutely agree that you need to work on that ASAP. You're leaving money on the table, and it's going to be a matter of figuring out what is going wrong and why that rate is so high. But if your site's abandoned cart rate is lower than 75%, I'm not telling you not to work on it, of course you should always try to improve that number. But I would encourage you to consider if that's the best use of your time right now. So if your rate's under 75%, your odds of improving it significantly honestly are probably not that great. You can probably nudge it down a little bit, but you're not going to get, make some huge impact on it.   So this is when we need to kinda step back and think about a few things. If you aren't happy with your sales numbers right now and your abandoned cart rate is at 75% or lower, honestly your time is probably better spent working on getting more traffic to your website than it is trying to make a dent in that abandoned cart rate. Hopefully that makes sense. So this is about how we spend our time and understanding what is normal and where we need to stop and take a deep breath and understand that our time is spent better elsewhere.   Now, don't get me wrong. Once you have better traffic numbers and your traffic numbers are closer to what would be your goal or your ideal, you can absolutely circle back around and start nudging that abandoned cart rate down. But you need to be thoughtful about whether you actually have a problem and whether it's something you need to prioritize.   Okay, so let's assume that you have gone into your ecommerce platform, you looked at your abandoned shopping cart rate, and it's higher than 75%. And so this means that your priority does need to be bringing that down. Let's dive in and talk through specifically how you do that. All right, first step, you need to thoroughly evaluate your cart and your checkout process, since this seems to be the part of your website that's hanging people up or is causing people to stop this process. If they were abandoning on the product page, we would go to the product page and look. But they're abandoning on the cart or the checkout page. And so going through both of those with a fine-toothed comb is really important. And yes, you should go through them with a fine-toothed comb. But I'm going to tell you, really you need to get three or five people to do the same, ideally people who can give you some honest feedback. So if you have experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs in your life, that would be a good person to ask. I would also suggest you ask maybe some friends who are not in the ecommerce business but who shop online, and ask them if anything makes them nervous or causes them pause.   The goal with both your cart and your checkout is to have a super slick process where the customer doesn't stop to reconsider their purchase. We want them just to slide on through to checkout. Now, we had a pretty thorough discussion about this back a couple episodes ago where we talked about the 11 pages every ecommerce site needs, and I talked about the different parts of a cart page and a checkout page and how we have to be really careful that we're keeping those slick, that we're not creating distractions. We want people to slide right to the end and press the place order button.   Okay, so as you're going through and looking, there are some things that you specifically should be looking at. Number one, is something in the process too complicated or just too much? Okay, what do I mean by too much? All right, so things to ask yourself, is it simple for the customer to see what they're ordering, like how many they're ordering, the price, the discounts that are applied, the shipping, et cetera? If people can't see clearly what they're getting and what they're going to pay for it, that's a really big reason to start being mistrustful and to walk away from a website.   Another thing to consider is whether you are potentially asking for too much information. It's really important to keep the checkout process quick, and so you only want to ask for information you absolutely need. So for example, you need their name, their email address, and where you're shipping this thing, right? You don't need to ask them their birthday. So just going through and double checking that you don't have any extra questions in there that might be causing people to take longer to go through the process, giving them more time to potentially change their mind.   All right, another thing to consider is whether there are too many choices in either your cart or your checkout process. So yes, in the cart we often want to do upsells or try to push complementary items. But if those are getting to be too distracting, you might need to tone them down or remove them to see if you can improve the number of people who are making it all the way to the end of the checkout process. Also, look at how many shipping choices you have or how many payment options you have. It's easy to think, oh, I'll present my customers with as many options I possibly can. But we do know from research that there's that paralysis of choice, right? When we're presented with too many options, it is easy to stop and not make the decision at all. So sometimes having two or three payment or shipping options can actually be superior to having four, five, six, okay? Just something to think about.   Finally, if you have any customization in your product process, that can throw a massive uncertainty wrench into your checkout process and create doubt in people's minds. So just again, something to think about. All of these choices, payment, shipping, customization, it can just get to be too much for people.   All right, next step, you need to ask yourself if your customers are facing any shipping surprises when they get to the cart or the checkout page. Now, what do I mean by that? Nobody likes to be surprised that they're either going to have to pay for shipping when they didn't expect to or that the shipping charges are going to be higher than they expected to pay. And this is tricky, right, for website owners. I'm actually going to do an episode a few podcasts from now specifically about the challenges around pricing our shipping, what the deal is with free shipping, that sort of thing. But in the meantime, this is just something you need to think through. In a perfect world, you really need to have, say, free shipping or flat rate shipping that's clear on the site prior to them getting to checkout so there's no question. They know for sure that if they order more than $40 in product, they're going to get free shipping. So there's no surprise at checkout. Maybe you have a banner or something on your website. Or they know that the flat rate shipping option is 2.99 or something like that, right? So it's not surprising them and causing them to change their mind once they get to the cart or the checkout page.   Now, if that, having free or flat rate shipping isn't an option for whatever reason, you do need to start thinking about how your shipping needs to be perceived as being reasonable to your customer. And this could mean, if your shipping's too high, you're going to need to figure out a way to bring it down. It could be adding maybe some slower shipping options that people can choose or working part of the price of the shipping into the product itself. Another thing you need to look at with shipping, and we can talk more about this in a couple episodes, but if you are adding surcharges to your shipping, you may need to get rid of those, as well.   All right, almost as annoying to customers as shipping surprises are probably payment issues. Be sure when you are going through your checkout carefully that you are running test orders for each of your payment options and making sure that each is working perfectly. When people are putting their credit cards into a website is the wrong time to have any glitches or odd behavior. Also make sure you're testing realistic scenarios. So you're putting items in your cart, you're removing them, you're adding a coupon code, so on and so forth. Think of all of the really ridiculous things that someone might try on your website, and then try running those scenarios through with each of your payment providers. And again, if you have friends who could do this, have them do it. Just obviously cancel and refund those orders. But have them go through the payment process, because this can be a place that we have a lot of hidden problems that can cause heartburn for our customers.   All right, so going through this process of evaluating your cart and your checkout and making them as slick as possible and making sure there are no hangups or odd behavior or anything going on that can trip up a customer is ultimately how we bring our abandoned cart rate down to an average level, hopefully to right around that 75%. Okay, so that's the goal. This is where we're bringing it down.   Now, having said that, as I talked about earlier, everyone has an abandoned cart rate. And it's generally 75%, maybe a little more or a little less, depending on your industry. All right, so let's shift the discussion, then, to talking about how we take these people who abandon the shopping carts and get them back on our website to purchase these products, because this is something anyone with any shopping cart abandonment rate should be using, the strategy of getting people back on the website. And the reason we want to put effort into this is because people who made it all the way to the shopping cart, I mean, they liked an item enough to put it in their shopping cart, these are are warmest leads, right? They're going to be the easiest for us to convert if we can get them back on the next visit. And so you need to have a strategy in place to reach out to them in as many ways as possible and then be providing them an incentive to come back and make that purchase.   Okay, so let's start by talking about the ways that we can reach out to them, and then we'll move on and talk about incentives that you can use, all right? So option number one, all of us with ecommerce sites should be using remarketing. This is where we show ads specifically to people who have visited our website. Now, if you go back to episode three of this podcast, you can check out the remarketing episode. I did kind of a deep dive into what are remarketing systems and how they're set up and all of that. There's also a YouTube video, which is a much shorter summary that you can check out, as well.   Now, with remarketing, you're showing ads to people who visited your website. But specifically when we're talking about abandoned shopping carts, what we want to do is create a segment in our remarketing system, so this is AdRoll, Facebook, something like that, where we are segmenting out people who have abandoned their shopping carts. And then we can run a specific ad campaign to those people. And that allows us to really control that conversation and potentially put some promotions out there for them. So maybe could offer them a coupon or free shipping or a bonus in an ad to help encourage them to return and make that purchase.   Now, the nice thing about remarketing is you can generally run a remarketing campaign to almost anyone who visits your website. People with popup blockers are going to be a little hard to get a hold of. But hey, they're probably on Facebook. So you'll get them there. But even if you don't have someone's email address, even if they didn't sign up for your mailing list, you can still run effective remarketing campaigns. So these are really important to get set up. So go back and listen to episode three if you don't have a remarketing system set up so I can talk you through how to get the pixels set up, how to build your audiences, and how to get those ads up and running.   All right, next up, I would also recommend that you have an abandoned shopping cart email campaign running at all times. So if someone comes to your website and they opt into your email list, so you've got their email, right, and your site will be tracking that, and there'll be that little cookie attached to them that keeps track of what they put in their shopping carts. And then when they abandon the shopping cart, your email system will kick in and send them out an email that lists the products that were in their cart and asks them to come back. Now, abandoned cart email marketing is really effective. But you're always going to be running it in addition to your remarketing campaigns, okay? So it's not you run remarketing or email. You really want to be running both.   Now, in terms of your abandoned cart emails, these should be very simple. Your email service provider probably has an abandoned cart template available. I hope they do, because it's really hard to code one. Use that. This is not the time to do a major sales pitch or to talk about the wonder of your products. These need to be very simple. The products are there, the button to return to your cart. The only thing I would potentially recommend adding is simple messaging around an incentive. So come back and save 10% or get free shipping or something like that. Now, we'll talk about incentives in a few minutes, because incentives, especially in abandoned cart campaign, will work best if they are escalating incentives, okay? So we'll visit that in a moment.   But before that, I want to talk about your third option. Okay, so we've talked about remarketing, we talked about abandoned cart emails. Let's talk briefly about the idea of personalized follow up. And so this would be when you go into your system and you pull down people's information who have been on the site and abandoned a cart. I know, for example, I think you can do this in Shopify, where you are then able to personally, manually email or call the customer, asking them to return to the site and possibly offering them some sort of deal if they do.   Now, I'm going to say up front that this sort of follow up is not going to work well for most ecommerce companies, right, because it's generally not going to work well for a company that's doing a lot of volume. You'd have to be doing a fairly small amount of volume. Also, this would probably work better for items where the customer's expecting a much higher sense of customer service. So having somebody, if you're trying to buy a car, having somebody personally follow up with you makes sense. If you're trying to buy a five-pound bag of organic flour, probably not, right? So this is just something you need to think about. This doesn't necessarily work for every business. But if it would work for your business, if you are selling higher end products, if that personalized service would be perceived positively by your customers, this could be an awesome way, too, especially if you're a new business, to get feedback about why people are abandoning their shopping carts.   All right, but the overarching warning I want to put out here is that don't be creepy, really. If your customer answers the phone or answers their email and goes, oh my goodness, how do they know who I am? You're in trouble, okay? You're creating a sense of foreboding, of suspicion. Don't do that. So just be really thoughtful. If you're going to do personalized follow up, if it makes sense for your business, be thoughtful, don't be creepy. I think that could actually be a slogan for life, right? Be thoughtful, don't be creepy.   Okay, let's circle back to incentives. So whether you're running remarketing campaigns, abandoned cart emails, you're doing personalized follow up, you really need to think in advance about an incentive structure to bring these customers back. And incentives are going to look different depending on your market and your customers. So without, you don't necessarily need to offer a discount. You can. You can also use things like free shipping, bonuses, free gifts. But as I briefly mentioned a few minutes ago, incentives, especially in email, tend to work better if they escalate. So let me give you an example of a cadence I use quite frequently for like an abandoned cart email campaign. So the first email might go out two hours after they abandon their cart. And it might be as simple as just reminding them that they left items in their shopping cart, that they forgot to check out. And then the second email would go out two days later, and maybe that would offer them a discount, like a 10 or 15% discount, or maybe more, depending on your product and your branding. And then five days after they've abandoned their cart, they get a third email. That one would offer them a discount potentially plus free shipping. And then the fourth email goes out seven days after they've abandoned their cart, and that email is offering or letting them know, I should say, a last chance for the discount and free shipping, so creating that urgency. So you see how you're creating better and better offers the longer that they are away from their shopping cart. And then in the end there, you're trying to bring in that urgency factor, as well.   All right, so the good news is that all of these strategies I've talked about today, combing through your shopping cart and your checkout, putting in place remarketing and abandoned cart emails, even a personalized follow up system are actually all pretty easy to implement. Some of these can be pretty tedious, but none of them are particularly difficult or costly. And so there's really no reason you shouldn't be doing this. I will put out there, though, that if you do not have an email system in place that can do shopping cart abandonment or you don't have your remarketing pixel already set up, please take a couple hours this week to do those two things. They can make a really big difference in terms of your revenue numbers.   All right, well, that's it for today. I'll be back in your feed in a few days. And in the meantime, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this information will help you make better decisions for your own business and hopefully get that abandoned cart rate down and get more people who do abandon their carts coming back and making a purchase on that next visit.   If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, I would love to hear from you. You can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Be sure also to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher so that you will be notified each time a new episode comes out. I'm putting them out on Mondays and Thursdays, so lots of good episodes coming up. And of course I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes because it helps other people find it, and I love reading your reviews. It is so much fun. I will see you next time.   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method, with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com, Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 014: Tackling High Abandoned Cart Rates