How does it feel when a person spends time on your website, explores the products, adds a few items in his cart, and then never places his order or exits the website? It is heart-wrenching for entrepreneurs to see the visitors leave without buying the things they added to their carts.
Cart abandonment is a severe issue for online sellers. If the website’s design and the product range have attracted the customers to add the products to their carts, watching them leave without finalizing their orders deprives the companies of profits that they could’ve earned.
According to recent studies, the cart abandonment rate is 74.52%. Many reasons are responsible for aggravating cart abandonment; a lengthy checkout process, creating a guest account, limited payment channels, high shipping charges, etc. are to list a few.
Entrepreneurs should ensure that the website’s checkout process is smooth and seamless for its customers so that there are fewer cart abandonments.
Optimizing the websites can surely minimize the rate of cart abandonment. However, it is not going to bring back the customers who abandoned their carts. Don’t worry; those customers can be brought back to the website to make them complete their orders.
Cart abandonment emails can recover the significant amount of the sales that a company loses due to the abandonment of carts.
Business Insider predicts that 63% of the $4 trillion revenue lost due to cart abandonment can be recovered by sending cart abandonment emails to the customers.
In today’s article, we have shared 16 effective abandoned cart email strategies that will help you retarget your customers and boost your eCommerce conversions.
16 Tips To Optimize Your Abandoned Cart Emails And Boost Conversions
1. Get The Timing Right
The first tip for optimizing your abandoned cart email is to send out the emails at the right time. As a simple rule of thumb, you should send your first email to the customers soon after they’ve abandoned their carts, i.e. after an hour, they have quitted your website.
If you do not send the email soon after they have exited your website, they will most probably forget about your websites and the items they added to their carts.
Do not sit back and relax after sending out your first email. You should make constant efforts to bring the person back to your website and make him finalize his order. For this purpose, send out two or three more emails to remind and lure him with his favorite products to make him visit the website.
2. Use High-Converting Subject Lines
If you want your customers to read the email content and take action, you first have to make sure they open the email.
Using a catchy and attention-grabbing subject line will increase the chances of emails being read by the customers.
You don’t have to get fancy with your subject lines or use click baits to make the customer open the email. For example, a business uses the subject line ‘Enjoy flat 50% today. The email doesn’t say anything about the discount. The customer will get irritated and unsubscribe from the mailing list, let alone coming to your website to make a purchase.
Your subject line should indicate to the customer what the email is about and makes them open it.
3. Personalization
Giving your emails a personalized touch is very effective to grab your customers’ attention and win their trust.
Use the customers’ names on the subject line and email body. Besides, include the details of the products that they have abandoned on the website. You can also provide them with product recommendations based on their previous purchases or the items they viewed on your website.
Providing a personalized experience makes the brand appear relevant and helpful to the customers.
4. Use The First email As A Reminder
Strike when the iron is hot! Send a reminder email to your customers about the goods they didn’t purchase; after a few minutes, they exit your website.
If you send them the email after a few days, chances are they would’ve forgotten the items that they added to their carts or might have lost interest in the products.
Do not let them forget about your products. Remind them as soon as they leave your website to keep them interested in your product and tempt them to revisit the website to get their hands on their desired articles.
5. Include Incentive In Subsequent Email
After sending the reminder email, check how many customers got back and purchased the goods. Sending out reminder emails doesn’t guarantee that all the abandoners will come back. Some of them will need a good reason to come back to the website.
Give a good reason to the customers to come back to your store and complete their purchase. You can provide a promotion offer, discount, gift, or even offer them free delivery to make them change their minds about buying the products.
Do not send out offers to your customers in reminder emails. A simple reminder is enough to entice them to go back to the store. Save the offers and discounts for the customers who are not convinced by the reminder emails.
Send the reminder emails on the first day.
Offer a discount, or deal in the second email, and then finally, send out your fantastic offer in the third email.
6. Be Mobile Friendly
In 2020, the total number of smartphone users worldwide was recorded to be 3.6 billion. This number is expected to rise to 4.3 billion in the year 2023.
The majority of people use their smartphones to access the internet, visit websites, shop online, and read and reply to their emails. If your users have abandoned the cart and you are sending them an email, ensure that it is optimized for mobile devices too.
If your email doesn’t display correctly or CTAs are not functioning, consider your customers gone. Before sending out the emails, make sure to check them on mobile devices. The content, images, links, and CTAs should appear according to the size of the screen.
7. Create Urgency
Nothing works best to speed up the customer’s decision process when he has to think and act in an emergency.
After the reminder and follow-up emails, send out emails to your customers that make them hurry up to complete their orders. Inform your customers that the goods they selected are in a limited quantity and will run out of stock soon. Another tactic that you can deploy to create urgency is by reducing the prices or offering deals and bundles for a limited time period; for example, the customer can avail of a discount for the next 24 hours.
If you cannot reduce the prices or offer deals, simply offer free delivery to your customers. The word FREE will work like a magnet to attract them to your website.
8. Segment Your Cart Abandoners
If your online store sells different types of products, you must segment your customers’ list to send out emails to them. For instance, some customers abandoned the lady’s items; some would have added bags, shoes, perfumes, etc.
Sending one type of email will not work for all the customers; for instance, designing an email for the customers who abandoned bags will not target the customers who abandoned apparel.
Segment your list according to the products and then design your emails and offers to target each segment.
9. Attach Appealing Pictures Of Abandoned Products
Do not only rely on the textual content to tempt your customer to come back to your website. Remember the famous saying a picture is worth a thousand words? Always attach appealing images of the products that your customer has abandoned.
By looking at the pictures of their favorite articles, it will be hard for the customers to resist their temptation.
10. Use Persuasive Text
The content of your email shouldn’t like a newspaper article. If you want to convince your customers into buying from you, make sure you use powerful words to persuade your customers.
Use a friendly and persuasive tone. Make the customer believe that the product he didn’t purchase at the store is still waiting for him and will prove to be a good investment.
However, do not use complex vocabulary or technical words that will be hard for the general audience to comprehend. Use simple, straightforward, friendly, and convincing language.
11. Provide Customer Support
Another abandoned cart email strategy is to provide the contact details so that the customers can connect with you if they have any queries or concerns regarding the product.
Many businesses enable the feature of directly relying on their cart abandonment emails to welcome the customers to ask any question related to the product or service provided by the company.
By providing opportunities to your customers to connect with the business, you will leave a good impression on your customers. They will think of your brand as the one that provides excellent customer care service.
Moreover, the buyers who are serious about purchasing from you can also clear their doubts and queries before finalizing their purchases.
12. Design An Eye-Popping Email Template
A good design and layout of the website are mandatory to provide a good user experience to the visitors and convert them into customers. Abandoned cart emails are no different. These emails have a clear objective to bring the customer back on the website and boost eCommerce conversions.
An attractive design of the cart email grabs and holds the customers’ attention and makes them read the contents of the email.
Jazz up your cart abandonment emails with appealing graphics or product images. The vibrant and colorful photos will spice up your emails and derive more effective results from them.
13. Product Recommendation
Suppose you are unable to convince your customer to purchase the items he was originally interested in. In that case, you can tempt them to buy the alternative products available on the website.
Hence, it is a good idea to provide the product recommendation section in cart abandonment emails.
If the customer didn’t buy the item he was initially interested in due to its high price; then you can show them the products which are similar to the goods they liked and lesser in price. By looking at the cheap alternative of his desired goods, the customer will be inclined to visit your store.
14. Include Clear CTAs
CTAs are an essential part of the cart abandonment email. Failure to include effective CTAs will render the entire campaign or retargeting emails void.
Ensure to attach the CTAs in your emails that take your customers to their abandoned carts. Make sure to link clear and prominent call-to-actions (CTAs). Select attractive colors for CTAs that contrast with the background of the email’s template.
15. Testimonials
Testimonials and customer reviews are a free yet highly effective way to convince your potential customers to add products to their carts and share their credit card details with the business.
Did you know that 56% of people read a minimum of 4 reviews before finalizing their orders?
Including testimonials below the email’s main body can give your customers a push to complete their orders. When people see that your product is benefitting other buyers and providing a good value of money, they will want to get their hands on that product.
Integrate textual and video testimonials to let people know what buyers have to say about your products.
16. Keep It Simple
Abandoned cart emails are designed to retarget your potential customers and make them complete their purchase. Make sure that your email doesn’t sound overly promotional or forcing the customer to buy the things. The email should focus on the customer benefit and not on yours.
Refrain from adding long blocks of text, multiple colors, numerous CTAs, or hundreds of pictures. Adding too many elements will distract the customer from the main idea of the email.
Keep your emails simple, clear, and short for achieving the desired results.
Wrapping Up
Designing and sending cart abandonment emails can save your hard-earned money to launch expensive campaigns to retarget your potential customers.
Integrate cart abandonment email is your retargeting marketing strategy to attract more customers and boost your eCommerce conversions. By successfully executing the cart abandonment emails, your website will quickly get numerous shoppers to complete the checkout process.
