4 Simple Tips for Optimizing Your Abandoned Cart Workflows

You’ve probably heard the expression “strike while the iron is hot” and this is especially true when marketing to customers who are in their buying mode. Most likely, when a customer is adding items to their cart they’re ready to buy, or at least in the final stages before conversion. But, this doesn’t mean that the conversion is set in stone — it’s far from it. The customer could be comparing prices and options across sites, they could be turned away by the checkout process, and many other factors that lead to a missed conversion when they’re ready to purchase.

When a customer navigates away from your site with items in their cart it is essential that your communications with that customer are timely. On the backend, this requires that you have solid data across an integrated platform and triggered workflows running to ensure those customers are being messaged promptly and accurately. Abandoned cart emails or push notifications should be sent no later than an hour after abandonment, but also not too soon — this gives customers who simply clicked away by accident or took a pause time to convert on their own.

When you do send that abandoned cart email or push notification, you only have a few chances to get it right. Given that your abandoned cart workflows should only be a few messages (1-3) long, you’ll want to make each message as impactful as possible to get that customer back onto your site.

A great way to make your abandoned cart messages or retargeting ads stand out is through personalization. In fact, personalizing retargeting ads has shown an ROI of over 1,300%. Our 2020 Benchmark Report found that campaigns that use predictive (AI-powered) recommendations see a 209% higher conversion rate. These recommendations can be items already in their cart, things that pair well with those items, and more. By adding in recommendations you can regain customers’ interest and inspire brand loyalty through delivering a truly 1:1 experience.

If customers don’t bite on the first round of communications, it’s a good idea to consider adding a special offer to subsequent messages. Not only does this drive engagement, click-thru, and conversions — it shows that your brand really cares about customers and are invested in their purchase4 experience, which ultimately promotes loyalty.

It’s important to add these offers to 2nd or 3rd emails within your abandoned cart workflows, so you can be sure you’re only offering discounts to the tougher wins. To simplify the discount process use evergreen, or static codes good for one-time use like “READY2CHECKOUT10”. This eliminates having to update your workflows with new season codes and allows the campaign to run in the background with minimal adjustments needed.

With any type of message you send, it’s paramount that the message makes it easy for customers to get back where they finished off in their checkout process. Lengthy, overcomplicated checkout processes with required registrations account for over ¼ of cart abandonments.

With accurate, real-time behavior tracking looped into a Single Customer View, it’s easy to help customers pick up where they left off and get their orders completed with a seamless checkout experience.