Benchmarks
Cart Abandonment messages are typically among a retailer's best-performing email campaign, as they bring in the highest amount of total email revenue and target the highest level of customer intent-to-buy. Cart Abandonment campaigns are a tried and true money maker, but you must be strategic in your execution in order to beat the benchmarks.
Contact your Account Manager for a breakdown of Listrak's benchmarks for all cart abandonment campaigns and benchmarks by industry.
Beat the Benchmarks
Below are some of the features and optimizations that can help you increase your cart abandonment performance and beat the benchmarks.
Leverage Social Proof: Use ratings and reviews to help shoppers make purchase decisions. Showing your customer their abandoned cart items, along with positive feedback from real people about those same products will make them more likely to pull the trigger and feel confident about their purchases. This is also a great tactic for encouraging a purchase without utilizing incentives and discounts.
Keep Creative Fresh: Cart Abandonment emails shouldn't be stale and invoice-esque. You don't necessarily even need to include the item quantity or price. You can, however, let the customer know if the items in their cart have low inventory levels in order to create a sense of urgency. Because of the high conversion rate of these messages, it's important to use your best creative.
Add More Messages: If your Cart Abandonment campaign is performing well, you may be missing out on generating even more revenue. A good rule of thumb to follow is: If the last message in your series is performing with conversion rates in the double digits (10% and up), add another message. You can add another message to your conversation on your own. Simply follow the instructions in Adding a Message to Your Shopping Cart Abandonment Campaign.
Test out Recommendations: Try recommendations in your Cart Abandonment messages and monitor their impact on conversions, items ordered, and AOV.
The SCA Dashboard
You can track the details of your Shopping Cart Abandonment campaigns using the SCA Dashboard. This dashboard can be accessed under Solutions > Abandonment SCA Dashboard.
Performance Metrics
Performance metrics allow you to identify how many carts were abandoned in a date range and which carts fall into different groupings.
Total Carts: Total carts include all carts, including carts where the customer completed a purchase.
Abandoned Carts: On average, retailers experience approximately a 75% abandoned cart rate. These are all carts where the contact did not complete the purchase.
Reachable Carts: The reachable rate should hover around 30%. This represents those customers you have an email address for and can market to after the abandonment.
Recovered Carts: Your recovered rate should hover around 4–6%, which represents customers who returned and made a purchase.
Understanding Products and Customers
Within the SCA Dashboard, you'll find blocks of information including product information that details the product name, quantity, price, and value. Additionally, customer information including email address, number of items in the cart, and the cart value are displayed.
Top Products Recovered: These are the products that contacts retuned and purchased. These products may be valuable to include in a marketing campaign because some contacts determined they were valuable enough to return and purchase.
Top Products Not Recovered: These products are the ones contacts did not return and purchase from their cart. Evaluating these items against other products currently on the market could identify barriers to purchase, such as price or even shipping costs.
Top Customer Carts Recovered: This shows you values of some of the carts contacts have come back and purchased. Identifying commonalities between these contacts may influence other aspects of your marketing program. For example, if all of these contacts are also subscribers to your loyalty program, you can see the value of this program.
Top Customer Carts Not Recovered: Top carts that a contact has not returned to purchase may identify important details about your customer base, such as price sensitivity. You can add a notification to your conversation that will trigger an email to your customer service team when high-value carts are abandoned to provide a more customized experience for these contacts to convert them to purchasers. Learn how to set this up in Setting Up Notifications for High-Value Carts.
How to Improve Reachable Rates
Reachable carts truly represent the available opportunity you have at any given time to encourage customers to convert. So if this number is low, your opportunity may suffer. You can increase reachable carts by capturing new contacts. Several suggestions for improving your number of reachable carts.
Add On-site Acquisition: We know that a modal provides the opportunity to capture new contacts. But, what's even more interesting is the fact that the Shopping Cart Abandonment capture code allows the JavaScript to collect the customer's email address when they enter it in the modal field, even if they don't click submit.
Add an Additional SCA Capture Point: Cart Abandonment capture points allow you to collect the customer's email address and add them to your Cart Abandonment list. You should put these capture points anywhere on your site that a customer might enter their email address. Some location include the header, footer, account sign-up, check out, log in, and more.
Improving ROI
Your Business Model Matters: Do you subscribe to the "fast fashion" business model, or something entirely different? If you tend to burn through inventory quickly, your Cart Abandonment messages should have a shorter cadence. Products that have a longer purchase process can afford more spaced out messages. For example, if someone is shopping for furniture, they may take weeks or months to decide on the products they ultimately purchase.
Timing is Everything: Your timing could be off. Typically, a Cart Abandonment campaign will contain messages sent three hours after the cart is abandoned, then two days after the first message is sent, and finally five days after the second message is sent. You can, of course, add additional messages if those first three prove to be high converting. Modify the timing and even conduct a split test to discover what timing works best for your customer base. Instructions are documented in Modifying Shopping Cart Abandonment Timing and Cadence.
Get the Right Information: Are you letting customers walk away without capturing their email address? The critical piece of information in the world of e-commerce retailers is the email address. Set up your checkout page so that the email address is the first field the customer is asked to fill out.