Send WhatsApp messages in bulk
Automate your WhatsApp marketing
Collaborate on a shared inbox
Multiple chat apps on one website widget
Drive sales to your Shopify Store
Drive sales to your EasyStore site
Broadcast messages in bulk
Automate your WhatsApp marketing
Connect your chat apps in a shared inbox
Multiple chat apps on one website widget
Drive sales to your Shopify store
Drive sales to your EasyStore site
Customer Success Executive
Reading time: 5 minutes
The primary goal of every e-commerce business is to improve sales and revenue. To achieve it, they will have to turn visitors into buyers.
The thing is, not every visitor who comes to your website will buy. They might have found your page through a random search, social media ads, or even word of mouth. Nonetheless, there’s a critical step to help you qualify them: and that’s an add-to-cart rate!
Add-to-cart rates are useful to identify potential customers and project your business revenue.
In this article, we will walk through the 15 proven tactics to increase your add-to-cart rate. Read on to find out!
As mentioned, there will be a visitor who takes action to add something to their cart when they explore your website. This will determine the add-to-cart rate.
It is the ratio or percentage of visitors adding at least one product or item to the cart during their session on your website. So, you can determine the rate by the total number of sessions where people add items to their cart divided by the total number of sessions and multiply by 100.
Add-to-cart rates are important because they help you determine if the shopper is qualified. When a shopper adds a product to the cart, they have an interest and an intention to buy.
This helps you evaluate product pages and marketing campaigns to improve usability and user experience.
Although e-commerce stores aim to have the highest possible add-to-cart conversion rates, the reality is varied depending on the industry. According to the latest data on the average add-to-cart rate, the food and beverage industry has the highest add-to-cart conversion rate at 11%.
The second highest add-to-cart rate goes to the beauty and personal care industry, with about 10%. This also marks a significant increase of 27% from the previous month.
Following that, the fashion, accessories, and apparel industry comes with 8%, and the multi-brand retail with 7%. Subsequently, the home and furniture as well as the luxury and jewelry industry has the lowest add-to-cart rate of less than 4%.
Call-to-actions (CTA) should stand out and be eye-catching. Try to use specific colors that represent your brand and audience. A case study showed that creating CTAs that look like buttons increases click rates by 45%.
That said, you can adjust the color, shape, and size to make it highly visible and easy to find. Additionally, using straightforward verbs will provide even clearer action on what your customer should do.
It’s better to have one CTA button as the primary action to take when they visit your site or landing page. If you have multiple CTAs, be sure to organize them properly throughout your web page.
Naturally, if someone doesn’t know how something works or looks like, this lowers the chances of thinking of purchasing it.
That said, if you sell a complex product, adding a product demo in the form of a video to show how your product works can increase your add-to-cart rates. This will help visitors get a clearer idea through a demonstration of your product.
Lots of consumers like video content as it is easy to understand and more engaging. A study showed that a product video increased add-to-cart conversion rates by 37% and the probability of visitors purchasing after watching a product demo is up to 85%.
So, add helpful product demo videos that convert!
Craft powerful words to persuade your customer to take action. Writing a copy might be a bit challenging and grueling as you need to pay attention to every single word — but it can certainly convert! Ensure that you choose words that are enticing, descriptive, and convincing enough.
Also be sure to add information about your products using FAB (feature, advantage, and benefit). Also, don’t forget to add value to your copies to lead your visitors to click on the CTA. 😉
Further, a microcopy will help to clear their doubt too. You can add some text below headlines and CTAs to further encourage visitors to buy.
40% of visitors are more inclined to close a web page that loads for more than 3 seconds. Moreover, dragging loading times can drive your visitors away and lead to low conversions. Hence, optimizing a website’s performance is important to improve customer experience.
To add, more than 65% of consumers around the world make use of mobile devices to browse through products before buying them.
Try to compress some images on your site and use a lightweight theme as well as reliable hosting with at least a 99% uptime server. Most importantly, make sure that your site is accessible on mobile too by using user-friendly UI and UX design.
Shipping costs can be a decisive factor for your customers to add items to their cart and complete the payment. In fact, high extra costs are one of the main reasons why shoppers abandon their carts.
Therefore, to prevent this from happening, you can offer free shipping or a discount upon a minimum order value.
This perk is one of the most powerful ways to drive more sales. According to statistics, 73% of consumers will decide to buy products and services if they don’t have to pay the shipping cost.
Besides, the 2021 Consumer Trends Report showed that 80% of people want free shipping when ordering a product for a certain amount.
Giving recommendations for a supplementary or higher value product is one of the proven tactics to increase your add-to-cart conversion rates. This is called upselling and cross-selling.
You can create an automated workflow to recommend shoppers when they decide to buy or choose a product. Try to offer another product to increase the value or a product with more benefits.
Amazon relied on this strategy using collaborative filtering and generated 35% of its sales from product recommendations. This method of selling will help increase your add-to-cart rate as long as it makes sense and is realistic.
Statistics show that the average pop-up conversion rate is 11%. Hence, making use of an exit-intent pop-up is vital to track and analyze user behavior on your site. Then, you can trigger a pop-up message about discounted items or product recommendations.
Exit-intent pop-ups work with the help of predictive analytics and machine learning. Also, it has algorithms and data so that it knows when to pop up and tell customers what to do.
Try to use exit-intent pop-ups on your product or landing pages to make an offer. This can stop customers from leaving your site and hook them in with a special offer.
Reviews play a major role in the customer’s buying intent. The more reviews your product has, the easier the purchase decision. A study showed that nearly 88% of customers reassure themselves by reading reviews about the item they are going to buy.
Therefore, you can add product reviews, ratings, or testimonials as social proof and a testament to your products.
This will help increase add-to-cart rates and instill trust because people know about the quality of your product and services.
If there are no reviews yet about your store’s product, do not forget to ask your customers to leave a review. To encourage them to leave reviews, you can give them an incentive.
A research study stated that 87% of customers think that product content is very important in their purchasing decisions.
Furthermore, the same study showed that 50% of customers have returned the item they bought as it didn’t match the product description. This is why optimizing your product pages is a must.
There are several ways to do this, such as:
That way, your product pages will have be more enticing and convince shoppers to add products to the cart.
Do you want to attract customers to complete the purchase and maintain their lifetime value? Product bundling is a great way to boost add-to-cart rates as well as your sales!
Besides, customers are more interested in buying a package while also saving their money. A case study from Doe Lashes and HVMN showed that the average order value (AOV) stepped up to 86% and 111% respectively when they started introducing product bundles.
This tactic sounds like a win-win solution for both store owners and customers, right? You can offer 2 products at a single price, mix and match bundles from high-priced and low-priced products, and offer Buy One Get One (BOGO) as well 😉
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can influence about 60% of people to make purchases within 24 hours. FOMO is another way to make customers take action and add items to their carts. This is how you can create a sense of scarcity and encourage shoppers to purchase so they don’t miss the special offer.
This strategy will help you encourage customers to act subconsciously by sending an update about discounted and limited stock products within a short timeframe.
As a result, people will feel a sense of urgency and add products to their carts and complete the purchase before they miss out on the product they want.
Tactics to create FOMO:
The add-to-cart cart icon is quite vital to delivering a better user experience for your e-commerce website. Whether it’s a cart or shopping bag icon, make sure it remains accessible and visible on every single page. It should always appear even when customers scroll up and down your web pages.
Redirecting customers to the cart page every time they add a product can lead to a bad user experience, especially for mobile users. Therefore, the cart icon should stay on the page and update automatically when a shopper adds or removes items.
When the shopper is ready to check out, they can simply click the cart button and complete the transaction.
Keep in mind that as an e-commerce business, you’re opening your doors to international shoppers as well. This means that you have to present more options for payment as not every shopper uses your common local payment methods.
Unfortunately, the lack of payment methods is one of the top reasons why shoppers choose to abandon their carts. Moreover, customers are 70% more likely to buy if there’s flexibility to pay using their preferred payment method. That means payment options also determine the purchase decision.
Hence, offering more payment methods is a great way to boost your add-to-cart conversion rates. Aside from credit card payments, offer options like PayPal, bank transfers, and even buy now pay later payments.
Providing chat assistance is quite useful to build trust and increase conversion rates. That’s because shoppers sometimes do need more information or clear their doubts about a product before they are ready to buy.
According to research, 44% of online shoppers would prefer to have a live chat while purchasing something online.
That said, by offering real-time chat, whether it’s through a chat widget or live chat, shoppers can reach out to you and have their inquiries answered quickly. That way, customers will feel comfortable and convinced to purchase the product.
For example, using a chat marketing tool like NovoChat allows you to connect and communicate with shoppers on multiple platforms. You can install multiple apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Telegram to one chat widget so your customers can choose where and when to chat with you.
To add on, you can set up auto-replies and templated messages to make replying a breeze.
According to research by Baymont Institute, mobile users have the highest cart abandonment rate of 86%. That’s a quite big percentage! 😮
But fret not! Not all hope is lost.
Automated message campaigns can definitely help increase add-to-cart rates and drive more conversions. You can automatically send SMSes and even WhatsApp messages to remind shoppers about cart abandonment. Moreover, you can include coupons or special offers to push them to complete the purchase.
Besides, there are a myriad of apps to help you send cart abandonment reminders, so you can set up automatic reminders and send bulk messages.
As you already learned the 15 tactics above, it’s time to implement them to grow your e-commerce business and compete in the e-commerce universe.
You can start by making small tweaks to your website and the flow of the purchasing process to create a better customer experience.
Analyzing add-to-cart rates is indeed critical to identifying prospective customers and trending products, as well as helping to improve conversions and revenue. However, delivering a pleasant experience that alleviates the predicaments during the checkout is one of the keys to increasing add-to-cart rates as well.
For more of such tips and advice, check out these resources! 👇👇👇
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