Ask any ecommerce business about their biggest challenge they will say two words: Cart Abandonment. Imagine a buyer landing on your web store, browsing through the products, and adding them to their carts only to abandon them at checkout. This is a heavy leak in your sales funnels as up to 70% of shoppers abandon their carts. This costs the ecommerce industry a whopping $18 billion lost in revenue each year.
Thankfully, email marketing, the old guard of digital marketing can help recover 20.3% of the sales when the customer is approached in the first hour. Thus, cart abandonment emails are one of the most effective ways to fix your leaking funnel. Today, I will be sharing the updated list of things used by seasoned email marketing specialists and email developers that you should keep in mind for the 2021 cart abandonment email series. Get ready to get more insights into the topic:
Table Of Content
- 1 Try To Understand Why Your Customer Don’t Complete The Purchase In First Place
- 2 Don’t Start Sending Offers Right Away- Remind Them First
- 3 Offer Free Shipping To Tackle Cart Abandonment
- 4 Pour In The Offers If They Don’t Buy Despite Multiple Reminders
- 5 Don’t Forget To Use FOMO In 2021 Abandoned Cart Emails
- 6 Use Your Email Automation Solution To Segment, Personalize, And Complement It Using Other Tools
#1 Try To Understand Why Your Customer Don’t Complete The Purchase In First Place
Things are going to be different for ecommerce in 2021, making cart abandonment emails increasingly difficult to approach. I recommend understanding your customer’s demographics, spending capacity, and probable reasons behind incomplete purchases. This will allow you to select the best email copies, HTML email templates, campaign strategies. In the below infographic, we can see how the pandemic impacted the ecommerce industry:
It is advisable to consider consumer behaviour changes for your 2021 email campaign series instead of directly applying older tactics. This data will improve your odds of resonating with customer intent, rolling out relevant offers, and tracking shifts in preferences. Some best practices like focusing on one to three items (at max) remain constant though.
#2 Don’t Start Sending Offers Right Away- Remind Them First
We saw an unprecedented ecommerce boom where the industry made years worth of progress, but this is set to change. As the vaccination drives and unlocks process starts, people may consider in-store purchases more often as compared to last year. All of us know this, but many online retailers will start flooding their potential customers with offers.
It is in your best interest to send a reminder first as window shoppers tend to compare many sellers before making a purchase or not buying at all. As mentioned earlier, you should send the first email within 1 hour, and the next two by 24 and 48 hours to convert as many abandoned carts into orders as possible. If your industry has a longer sales cycle, you can also send reminders like these after a suitable period:
#3 Offer Free Shipping To Tackle Cart Abandonment
Shoppers often cite delivery costs and other hidden charges as the number one reason for abandoning their carts. If your customers didn’t respond to the reminders in your initial cart abandonment emails, you could send them a free shipping offer. This works wonders even if the other store is offering those items cheaper than you since total cost works in your favour. Have a look at this example from Brooklinen:
#4 Pour In The Offers If They Don’t Buy Despite Multiple Reminders
If your customers don’t grab the free shipping offer, you can now send them discounts. Sending discounted prices early will only dent your bottomline and lower your brand reputation. Mention the discounts explicitly in the subject line and email headline as shown in the below example. I also recommend using a ladder discount tactic as it discards any ‘discount hunters’ that go inactive only to get offers.
#5 Don’t Forget To Use FOMO In 2021 Abandoned Cart Emails
FOMO is arguably the biggest purchase motivator for online sales, and it will become even more important in 2021. Reopening of economies will improve the customer intent, and you should make it a point to include FOMO in your email copies. Big brands like Google use cart abandonment email copies with embedded FOMO to drive sales since long:
#6 Use Your Email Automation Solution To Segment, Personalize, And Complement It Using Other Tools
As an email marketer, I often find that businesses fail to leverage automation workflows. Cart abandonment email campaigns can be much more than merely triggered messages scheduled over a timespan. You should include personalization, segmentation, and purchase intent as major goals for building these emails. You can use their recent activity insights as well as their social media preferences data to run a full-fledged abandoned cart email series.
Modern email marketing tools allow you to integrate them with social media, CRM, and your website to gather 360-degree information. This aids at multiple levels ranging from subject line optimization to ideal time for sending the message. Using data from other tools to complement your mailing efforts is no longer an option in 2021.
Summing Up
Ecommerce brands spend a fortune to generate traffic through both inbound marketing and paid search but skipping cart abandonment emails equals leaving a lot of money on the table. These are high-quality leads, and conversion becomes comparatively easier. Emails are the most common connecting link you have with your customers, and almost everyone checks their inbox at least once a day. It will all help abandoned cart emails to continue delivering incredible results in 2021 and beyond.
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Author Bio
Kevin, the Head of Marketing at Email Uplers – full-service email marketing agency that specializes in crafting beautiful email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and Mailchimp email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes email marketing. He is a brand magician who loves to engage & share insights with fellow marketers.
