26 January 2022

Abandoned Cart Recovery: What It Is and How To Recover Abandoned Carts

Abandoned carts have plagued e-commerce businesses worldwide. Here’s all you need to know about abandoned cart recovery and how to improve your sales.

Faye Chong

Content Marketing Lead

Reading time: 4 minutes

The advent of the internet brought about many benefits — and one of them is online shopping.

Online shopping has become an indispensable part of everyday life, so much so that over two billion people purchased goods or services online in 2020. In addition to that, online retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.

However, with e-commerce comes about abandoned carts. Wishful thinking, not ready for a purchase, or simply forgetting about it — there are many reasons why customers place items in their cart and end up abandoning it.

In 2021, almost 80% of online shopping orders were abandoned — that’s every 8 out of 10 people dropping off! That’s a lot of revenue lost.

If you’re scrambling to find a solution now, we’re here to help! While you can’t completely eliminate abandoned carts, there are several strategies to recover them. Let’s take a look at what abandoned cart recovery is and how you can recover lost sales. 👇

What is abandoned cart recovery?

Abandoned carts refer to when an online shopper does not follow through with their purchase. They’ve added items to their online shopping cart, hence ‘cart’, and have essentially ‘abandoned’ them.

This is where e-commerce businesses come in to recover these abandoned carts and increase the likelihood of the customer coming back to pay for their items in the cart.

Some ways businesses have encouraged shoppers to checkout their abandoned carts include offering one-off discounts, free gifts, and many more which we’ll cover below.

However, this requires a lot of effort on the business’ part to properly understand their customers, change their website layout, and ramp up psychological factors to influence a customer’s purchase decision.

Why is shopping cart abandonment a problem for retailers?

As more and more shoppers start but don’t finish the transaction process, this can indicate a leaky sales funnel or poor customer satisfaction.

Of course, this makes it a problem for many e-commerce businesses because it ultimately results in a loss of sales.

And there’s no business out there that would operate at a loss.

Fortunately, there are many ways to recover abandoned carts so that businesses don’t face such issues in the future.

5 ways to recover abandoned carts

Segment your shoppers

This is the first and most important step you should take when recovering abandoned carts.

Sending the same cart recovery message to all shoppers won’t prove to be effective. After all, each shopper has different needs and isn’t there for the same reason.

That said, group your shoppers according to specific data such as their interests, shopping frequencies, cart values, and even website behaviors. All this information helps you to craft a personalized message and speak to your customers contextually, which increases the likelihood of them returning to your site and checking out.

Send automated abandoned cart recovery texts

Chat marketing is gaining popularity rapidly because of how effective it is. Here are some statistics to back up this claim:

82% of people open every text message they receive
Chat has a 10% conversion rate
43% of people said they have proactively texted a business
58% of people feel more confident to message a business than to make a call

That said, making use of chat marketing is a more personal and direct way to prompt your customers to cart out their items. There’s a higher chance they’d see your cart abandonment message reminder and ultimately, make a purchase.

An example of an abandoned cart recovery message. Source: NovoChat

You can even offer an exclusive discount code in the message to further encourage them to cart out their items.

Looking for a chat marketing platform to help with abandoned cart recovery?

NovoChat can help you with that! Automate abandoned cart recovery WhatsApp messages and use ready-made templates so you can get up and running in a few minutes.

Send cart recovery emails

Don’t just stop at sending them messages — email still plays a vital role in targeting cart abandoners, so don’t forego this.

Data from Salesforce shows that over 17.6% of shoppers who abandoned their shopping carts returned to make a purchase soon after receiving personalized follow-up emails.

Couple this with cart recovery messages and you could recover most of your lost revenue!

To make sure that your cart recovery emails don’t get drowned out by everything else, craft an eye-catching subject line, and preferably one that’s personalized with their name or the product they left in their cart.

You should also make sure to do lots of A/B testing to know what email copy works and send follow-up emails to improve the effectiveness of your abandoned cart recovery email.

Set-up retargeting ads

Retargeting ads refer to the process of targeting web visitors with digital advertising based on their past behavior on your website. This could be the amount of time they spent on your page, the number of pages visited, or in this case, not going through with their purchase.

Because of how highly targeted they are, remarketing ads are 76% more likely to be clicked as compared to regular display ads.

That said, you can use retargeting ads to present customers with the exact item (or items) they’ve abandoned. Make sure to craft the perfect call-to-action and link to the checkout page so your customer will be taken directly to the page to pay, instead of being brought to your homepage.

An example of a retargeted ad. Source: RealiseMarketing

Also, you want to make sure not to over-expose your retargeted ad too much. Mix it up and play around to find the optimal number of times you should be showing the ad per month.

Use web-push notifications

A web push notification is a message that gets displayed on a customer’s desktop or mobile phone in real-time.

To start sending push notifications to your customers, they first need to opt-in to receive your notifications. You can display an opt-in notification when they enter your website, after a few minutes of browsing, or when they attempt to exit the page.

Push notifications allow you to deliver personalized messages to customers who have abandoned their shopping carts and encourage them to complete the purchase.

Conclusion

Don’t let abandoned carts slip through the cracks — these are gold mines waiting to be discovered. Recovering these abandoned carts can certainly help improve your sales and build long-term relationships with your customers.

Implement any of these cart recovery methods to watch your sales improve!