Are You Letting Sales Slip Through Your Fingers?
Have you ever received an email from one of your favorite stores a few days after you did some online shopping to remind you that you left a few items in your cart? Not a bad idea, right? So, are you doing this for your retail business?
An abandoned cart email is a technique you can use to capture more sales. It’s an email you send to those who put items in a shopping cart on your site and left without checking out. The reasons why customers don’t check out can vary from the website crashing to needing more time to think about whether they want to purchase the items.
We conducted a small study to see how many clothing stores would send abandoned cart emails to capture more sales. In this article, we’ll discuss our findings along with key features you should include in a well-constructed abandoned cart email.
In our study, we went to the 10 stores listed below and placed jeans in a shopping cart. We then waited for emails reminding us about the items we left behind. After a few days, we went back to visit each cart and abandoned them for a second time in hopes that this would trigger a response from those companies who had yet to send an email.
- Forever 21
- H&M
- Pacsun
- Target
- Loft
- New York & Company
- Express
- Zappos
- Old Navy
- Threadsence
Much to our surprise, the only store to send an email was Zappos.
Let’s take a closer look at this email. Zappos included 5 features that are important to constructing an effective abandoned cart email.
- The first, and most noticeable, is the attention getter: Don’t miss out! Attention grabbers such as this instill some sense of urgency in customers. Nobody likes the feeling of going back to a website to purchase an item only to find out that it’s out of stock. Saying something along the lines of what Zappos says may motivate customers to complete their purchases.
- Next, Zappos included not one, but two “Proceed to Checkout” buttons that will conveniently take potential customers directly to their cart.
- Zappos includes the items that are in the cart in case a customer forgets what he or she was looking at. In this case, Zappos even let us know that there is only one of these pairs of jeans left. This ties into the sense of urgency we discussed a moment ago.
- On the top of the email and under “Don’t miss out!”, you’ll see that Zappos included important information about its shipping and return policy. If you offer free shipping on all orders, orders over a certain amount, or return orders, knowing this may make customers feel more willing to complete a purchase about items they’re not sure about.
- The last key feature we’d like to point out is the contact information. Zappos provides multiple methods for customers to get answers for any questions they may have including an FAQ page, email address and phone number with 24/7 customer service.
Using abandoned cart emails is such an easy way to capture sales that it’s bewildering why more stores – such as the major brands we used in our study – don’t use them. The Baymard Institute averaged the findings of 29 studies on abandoned shopping cart rates and found that the average abandonment rate is 68.07%. We researched more statistics and found the following:
- According to SaleCycle, companies globally are project to have missed out on $3 trillion in revenue from abandoned shopping carts in 2014.
- Some of the top reasons why consumers leave their carts are:
- The shipping costs were too high
- The order didn’t qualify for free shipping
- They’re not ready to purchase the items yet
- 46% of abandoned cart emails are opened and 13% are clicked on to go to the cart.
- The average order value of purchases made from abandoned cart emails is 19% greater than that of ordinary purchases.
Don’t miss out on sales that you could easily make. With email marketing services from Boomtown, we can help you create a well-constructed abandoned shopping cart email to help your e-commerce website bring in more revenue. For more questions, please contact us.