How to Eliminate Abandoned Carts with Ecommerce Personalization

One of the most pervasive problems in all of ecommerce is abandoned carts. People visit websites and clearly have some intention to make a purchase, enough so they put at least one product in their cart. Before that final step, though – before they actually become a customer and add to the company’s revenue – they decide to leave.

So close.

Abandoned Cart Rates Are a Serious Problem

If you’re not tracking your website’s abandoned cart rates, you may not think this is much of a problem – or even one at all. However, 83% of eCommerce shoppers abandon their carts. That number comes from a study carried out by Aabaco Small Business, a subsidiary of Yahoo!.

The study wasn’t a small one, either. Aabaco Small Business reviewed the behavior of 250,000 shoppers. That means almost 208,000 of them added items to their cart but never followed through with a purchase. That’s a lot of shoppers and, as the study highlights, if each of their carts were worth just $30, the total loss from abandoned carts would be more than $6.2 million.

So if you haven’t begun tracking your website’s abandoned cart rates, that should become an immediate priority. Either way, your other focus should be on decreasing these instances as much as possible. You’ve probably invested a lot of money into SEO, CRO, and other essential website components designed to attract visitors and turn them into customers. As long as your abandoned cart rates remain high, your ROI on those elements will continue to suffer. They may even be costing you negative returns.

5 Ways eCommerce Personalization Decreases Abandoned Cart Rates

1. Encourage Customers to Pick the Products They’re Most Likely to Purchase

This is probably the most overlooked reason for shoppers leaving their carts. Customers are coming to your site because they want a solution to a challenge they’re facing. If you offer more than one, they might make a mistake with their choice.

Unfortunately, they’ll catch this mistake just in time to abandon your cart but not return for the appropriate product or service. This is why you should be investing in personalized product recommendations. Using special algorithms, your site can filter relevant information it collects about your customers to recommend items that are relevant to their needs. Personalized product recommendations are also a great way to increase cross- and upsells.

2. Offer Complimentary Products at the Checkout Success Page

Similarly, you can create a positive feedback loop for customers by offering them a complimentary product after they’ve successfully checked out. Once they know this type of reward is in place (or at least they know there’s a good chance that there is), customers will have one more reason to follow through with their orders.

3. Inspire a Sense of Urgency in Your Shoppers

Urgency is one of the most influential sales triggers, yet it’s also one of the easiest to use. All you need to do is let shoppers know that if they don’t buy now, they’ll be missing out. If you track customer behavior across your site as we mentioned earlier, you can easily express the urgency of your offers. Let them know that free shipping ends soon or that a certain offer is only available for a limited time. When people know that a good deal is fleeting, they’re far more likely to take advantage of it right away, instead of trying to do so later.

4. Send Personalized Emails

Just because someone abandons their cart doesn’t mean they don’t want to make a purchase. It could be that they became distracted. Maybe they were shopping on their phone and had to put it away.
Whatever the case, the answer is simple.

Use ecommerce personalization to send them a custom email specific to what they were interested in and reminding them that their cart is still ready. These personalized emails can be scheduled to go out or you can have them triggered by an abandoned cart. Either way, it’s an extremely cost-effective way to keep those carts from collecting dust.

5. Offer Better Customer Support

Another very common reason customers abandon their carts is because they find the checkout process to be far too complicated. That’s why it’s vital you constantly review yours to ensure you’ve optimized your checkout page. Simply fixing a confusing instruction or convoluted checkout box could instantly increase your profits.

Don’t forget about the importance of quality customer support, either. No matter how clear you try to make things, many shoppers are still going to have questions and they won’t buy anything until they get answers.

eCommerce personalization makes personalized customer support easy. Live chat will go a long way toward giving customers the opportunity to ask their specific questions the moment they have them, instead of letting them get in the way of their shopping experience.

You can also track your customer’s interactions with your site, aggregate them, and look for trends that eventually lead to carts being abandoned. Then, create customer-friendly solutions along the way that will address the issues influencing abandonments.

5. Just Ask

It can really be that simple. Every ecommerce company is different. You could be dealing with high cart abandonment rates for a completely different reason than one of your competitors. So while the above methods for using ecommerce personalization will definitely help decrease yours, do some research of your own. Use those personalized emails we mentioned earlier to survey shoppers who left their carts and you could be one very simple solution away from solving this extremely costly problem.

Do Not Settle for Staggering Abandoned Cart Rates

If your company is like most, the majority of shoppers who visit your eCommerce website are right on the cusp of buying before they leave. With eCommerce personalization, it couldn’t be easier to attack this problem. So don’t let it become one you simply accept. If all you do this year is half the number of customers who abandoned their carts, you’ll see a significant increase in profits.