Cart abandonments can feel personal! Your business, your team, has spent countless hours optimizing content, creating high-quality products, and building the ideal customer funnel.
But imagine this: customers are visiting your site, and a significant number of them aren’t completing their order. What happened and how can you better guide users through the entire funnel?
Luckily, there are some tools and techniques that e-commerce retailers can use to maximize order completion rates.
Start with analyzing how your products and categories are presented on your site. Clear and frictionless product pages help users find what they want fast and that in turn boosts order completion rates. Product pages are a great way to pre-emptively answer questions and build trust. Display relevant product reviews, gather and record FAQ’s, and have a compelling product description. This ensures that your users will know exactly what they’re buying before they add to cart.
Audit Your Checkout Process
Make sure your site has competitive shipping times and accepts popular payment methods. It’s possible that your site has too many shipping options, and users can’t easily determine which method is best for them. Use session recording or heat mapping software to confirm where customers are getting stuck. You can use this data to better direct your team towards a fix. Reducing your purchase process by a step, or two makes it that much easier and likely for a customer to complete their order.
Follow up with Users
Investing in product pages and shortening checkout length will reduce your site’s cart abandonment rate, but it’s best practice to have a win-back process.
If your checkout process requires a login, you can now retarget cart abandoners via email. Create a compelling and automated message program to let customers know that their favorite items are still in stock. If your products sell out quickly, then look for integrations that can illustrate tangible urgency: “Only 4 [abandoned item] left in stock”, “[favorite item] is expected to sell out soon” or "order soon to have delivery by [insert date]”. These messages are tailored to your brand, your value propositions, and the customer's goals.
You can also retarget cart abandoners via Google Display, YouTube, or Facebook. Create audiences in those tools (or your BI tool) that accurately capture recent cart abandoners. Show them a compelling ad, image, or video to entice them to return to your site and complete their purchase. Refine your messaging via testing to find the right technique (email, display or social) and media (image, video, and/or text) that resonates with your customers and ultimately drives conversions.
Follow the Data
Be sure to track your efforts in your BI tool. Try to quantify how each change impacts order completion rates. A sustainable and recurring purchase process audit is the best way to increase customer engagement and improve conversion rates. Be wary of throwing coupons and incentives at this problem. Couponing is the most expensive solution for your business, and can lead to a catch-22 situation: Customers can love your products and brand, but begin to gamify your coupon process.
Understand your users, create engaging content and utilize all available data. Keep these things in mind and you will see a significant improvement to your user experience and overall conversions.
