Written by Paul Gordon, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Bubblebox.
As a business owner, I’m always looking for those elusive ‘quick-wins’. In helping many entrepreneurs expand their revenues using eCommerce, I’m always amazed to find so many not implementing a robust recovery mechanism. Aside from the revenues that are lost every second a visitor leaves your website, it simply improves a customer’s online perception and experience of their company. Alicia Dorion’s Shopping Cart Checklist (http://blog.lemonstand.com/shopping-cart-checklist/) offers some great guidelines to a successful recovery program. One facet of the services we deploy for our clients is cart and browse recovery initiatives and the platform used is equally important.
Simple Cart Abandonment Is Not Effective
As marketing cloud experts, we’re always asked to build the business case for implementing initiatives that drive revenues. It sounds like a simple task, however, the technology deployed will vary the success considerably. Just placing ‘simple’ cart abandonment – sending a single email to visitors asking them to come back to your site without any level of personalization can be counterproductive. Customers expect you to know what they want – especially with cart and browse recovery emails as – well – they’ve just told you. As customers, we want attention to detail. Simply saying ‘come back’ isn’t enough.
It Needs to be Real-time
Forester Research found that 90% of E-Commerce leads go cold within an hour. If your recovery emails are not deployed within 60 minutes of the visitor leaving your website, then you’ll likely not find any cart abandonment program successful. Many are likely to have either lost the impulse to buy or have bought from one of your competitors.
Collect All Relevant Data – Not Just That Displayed In Cart
Alison’s blog drew attention to the level of content that can be available in the cart. Thumbnails, description, SKU. Color, Size etc… are only some of the details that should be included. With ‘simple’ cart recovery tools, this may not be possible. Even if they can collect this data from the cart, what happens if that content simply isn’t displayed in the cart. It’s important to enable data collection at the product page. This way you are certain to have all the relevant data needed to include in any recovery program. We’re talking cart and browse recovery.
Ensure Emails Are Deployed Through Trusted Email Service Providers
Many E-Commerce owners use an Email Service Provider (ESP) to deploy their marketing emails. They are easy to use and generally have better inbox placement than sending through their own servers. However, when it comes to deploying triggered emails such as transactional emails, cart and browse recovery emails, often emails are NOT using the ESP.
With open and click-thru rates of 55%+ and 22%+ respectively, why not ensure your scheduled emails benefit from the high engagement of these emails. Engagement is an important measure for inbox placement and using a recovery and personalization platform that is fully integrated with leading ESP’s makes sense. Better reporting, better content and better inbox placement of scheduled emails means a higher ROI.
As a passionate advocate of improving the online experience for all, it is important to provide the best online experience possible for visitors. For that, it must be relevant, real-time and measurable.
About Paul:
Paul has been delivering marketing cloud services for over a decade. Passionate about using data to drive relevant and real-time online experiences, he has helped many well-known brands implement Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing solutions. Constantly reviewing the market for solution that helps online marketers deliver more initiatives with less resource, he provides and agnostic approach to finding the right technology tool set for each client.
