Remarketing For E-Commerce: Strategies To Recover Abandoned Carts

Abandoned carts are a real bugbear for e-commerce businesses, and sometimes it can be really hard to get to the bottom of why they keep happening. Someone visits your website, adds a product to their basket and then leaves without completing their purchase. Maybe they have become distracted and left the internet entirely, or maybe they have decided to find a better price elsewhere. Abandoned carts can lead to a huge loss in revenue, so let’s have a look at how remarketing can help with this.

Why Do Shoppers Abandon Their Carts?

Firstly it is important to establish the main reasons behind why your website visitors are abandoning their carts. Some of the common reasons include:

• They are simply browsing products and not looking to purchase (window shopping)
• They got to the checkout stage & realised the shipping costs were too high
• The checkout process was too lengthy
• There was no discount code to take some money off their order
• The page took too long to load
• The checkout page didn’t look secure enough for them to enter their details
• They had to add information more than once, due to technical issues

You need to conduct some research on your own website to establish exactly what is causing your cart abandonments. There are lots of different types of software you can install on your website to help with this, particularly things like HotJar which can record users as they enter the checkout.

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is all about reminding shoppers that they have left some items in their cart, and then encouraging them to complete the purchase. A customer will come across the remarketing ad, which then triggers the memory that they left an item in their shopping cart. This then catches their attention and encourages them to go back to your website.

Remarketing is important for abandoned cart recovery as these potential customers are already on their way to purchasing, they may just need a gentle nudge in the right direction to complete the sale. Most people who abandon their carts are your perfect target audience, so it is worth investing in them to bring them back to your website.

Remarketing Strategies For Abandoned Carts

There are so many different ways to remarket to abandoned cart shoppers, so let’s have a look at some of the main ones.

• Exit-intent pop-ups

Have you ever been on a website, gone to click the ‘X’ button to leave, and a pop-up suddenly appears? This is an example of an exit-intent pop-up, a.k.a. A company’s last-ditch attempt to try and convert you into a customer!

These pop-ups use a technology that tracks the mouse movement of your website visitors, and triggers a pop-up after detecting a user’s intention to leave. This technology is also aware that the visitor hasn’t purchased or left behind any contact details. Exit-intent pop-ups are great for not only catching the attention of website traffic, but you can also give them an amazing deal to encourage them to purchase.

• Remarketing email reminders

Abandoned cart recovery emails have an incredibly high open rate, so if these aren’t part of your e-commerce marketing strategy, start including them. The first abandoned cart email should be sent within an hour of the cart being abandoned, reminding customers that they have left items behind. A second email should be sent after 24 hours, and it is a great idea to include an exclusive discount code within this email to help ‘seal the deal’. Alternatively, offering free delivery if they complete the purchase is another great way to encourage them to check out.

• Remarketing adverts

You may find that rather than relying on one abandoned cart marketing strategy, you need to combine a couple. Remarketing adverts are a great way to increase brand awareness, as well as encouraging sales. This is where you target people who have visited certain pages on your website and show them adverts about the products they were browsing through. Alternatively, you can remarket to customers whose contact information is already saved in your email marketing software.

It is incredibly important to include a clear call to action (CTA) within remarketing ads in order to encourage customers to make that purchase. You could also add scarcity triggers (such as 20 people have purchased this product in the last 24 hours), to help speed up the decision-making process of your customers.

• Push notifications

Push notifications have a much higher open rate than emails, and as you are sending notifications directly to the device an abandoned cart user is on, they are more likely to click and see what you have to offer. When sending push notifications, make sure the messages are clear and concise, and try to use emotion to help engage with the user. Remind customers that they are missing out on an amazing offer, and give them a short timeframe to make the purchase too.

How To Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment

If you are noticing that your abandoned cart rates are getting higher and higher, you could end up spending a lot of money on additional marketing to generate these sales. Take the time to improve the user experience on your website, particularly focusing on the product and checkout pages. The key is to make the checkout experience as simple and clear as possible, so remove any extra charges, take away sign-in barriers, and remove any misleading links. The simpler the better!

If you would like any help with your e-commerce marketing strategy, the experts at DBS Digital are on hand to help – get in touch today.