Shopping cart abandonment is a major issue to battle for any online store. On average, 69.57% of all shopping carts are abandoned, meaning that over two out of three people who add items to their shopping cart will leave without finishing the purchase. That is a lot of missed opportunities and lost revenue.

The shopping cart abandonment rate is a critical metric for online stores to keep track of, as a high abandonment rate could also indicate a bad user experience or a weak sales funnel. Decreasing shopping cart abandonment drives more sales and profits, so optimizing the checkout process is very important for many online retailers.

How can you reduce shopping cart abandonment and why customers abandon their carts?

There are a lot of reasons why online buyers abandon their carts. A good place to start looking is at your eshop’s analytics to identify dropoff points. You can also conduct user research and surveys, or compare your checkout flow to competing sites. Once you start identifying the problems, then different solutions can be tested on the site through A/B testing to conclude whether a recommended solution will help improve the shopping cart abandonment rate.

The most popular reasons that online buyers abandon their carts are the following:

• they do not see trust badges on an eshop
• they are forced to create an account to complete their purchase
• they see unexpected costs (shipping, taxes, fees)

We have put together a set of pro tips that any eCommerce business can put in action and boost its shopping cart recovery strategy.

Pro tips for reducing shopping cart abandonment

1. Send an Abandoned Cart Email

When it comes to a cart abandonment message, you use both SMS and email. There is no need to choose one over the opposite. On the contrary, you’ll use email and SMS in priority order. For instance, you can send out an email two hours after someone abandoned their cart, and if they didn’t open the email, you should follow with a text message to be dispatched after 24 hours. This way, you retain customers engaged and present them with the specified information just in case they continue with the procedure, no matter their location.

2. Be clear about pricing and costs

If you want to avoid cart abandonment you should start by showing the total cost with all fees like tax and shipping included, the earliest during the customer journey. That usually makes consumers not abandon their carts and go through the process. It is not always possible to show the all-in costs before someone logs in or provides the shipping address. Despite this, there are ways to keep the cost and cart contents at the forefront. Whether it is setting the details in a sidebar, at the top of the screen, or in another noticeable place, you can make it all easier for the customer.

3. Make the check-out process short and easy

If you have a complicated check-out process, it is more likely that consumers are not going to complete it. Three to five steps should be enough for the check-out process. The shorter, the better. Also, keep in mind that If you do try to shorten the process, make sure you do not use too many fields in a single step.

4. Offer free shipping

Shipping costs are one of the most popular reasons that lead to shopping cart abandonment. If it is possible for your business, you may consider covering the shipping cost yourself. This makes a big difference in customer psychology when your online visitors are viewing their checkout forms. A lot of successful online retailers use free shipping in order to reduce their cart abandonment rates.

5. Remember to place calls to action

Calls to Action (CTA) are critical to use in your shopping cart. They are as important as anything. Consumers want to know what is next, and it is up to you to tell them what to do. Create simple, step-by-step instructions for the whole checkout process.

6. Make guest checkout possible

The more you ask visitors during the checkout process to create an account before they check out on your order form, the more likely they are to abandon the shopping cart. Allowing customers to checkout also helps speed up the process. And, you can always ask people to register for an account after they have completed their purchase.

7. Give customers the option to continue later

A lot of people seem to abandon their carts, but what they are doing is using them as a wishlist for things they are interested in or they want to buy later. Give your customers the option to easily create a wishlist, so that they can come back and buy later. That way you get to lower your abandonment rates and they get the time they need.

Get Started!

There will always be customers that will abandon their carts, and you are going to have to accept it to some extent, but you can work to measure the impact and continuously refine to reduce shopping cart abandonment, starting by following these pro tips.

Email Marketing

Email isn’t a new technology. It is one of the very first digital communication channels. Email marketing celebrates its 50th birthday today and is more widely used than ever.

Email segmentation and personalization is what you need

To keep your subscribers engaged you need much more than just an efficient marketing plan. Εmail marketing is not as simple as merely collecting addresses, placing them on a list, then targeting that entire list with your marketing materials. One of the best ways to ensure that your email list is an effective marketing tool is by segmenting your contacts in terms of who your audience is (e.g., demographics, interests, online activity and purchases, and any other measurable trait your audience may have).

While email list segmentation can be used in a lot of ways, the goal is to personalize your emails. Personalization allows you to enhance your open and click-through rates, pushing towards your conversion goal.

In the context of email marketing, personalization is the process of targeting an email campaign to a specific set of subscribers that share common interests and traits. The data can be information like their first name, the last product they purchased, where they live, how many times they log into your app, the frequency they visit your website, several other touchpoints, and so on.

Personalization is all about building customized content for segmented lists. Ιt is better to send small, segmented email campaigns than blasting generic emails to large, untargeted groups of people.

Best practices for email segmentation and personalization

We have put together a list of the best segmentation and personalization practices that have proved to help companies send more relevant and successful marketing campaigns.

Personal demographics

If you want to segment your email list successfully, you can start by demographics — things like consumer age, gender, etc. Knowing basic facts about the person you are speaking to can help ensure you are speaking to them in a way that will elicit a positive response.

Location

Another way you could use to segment your contacts is based on the recipient’s geographic location. For example, brick-and-mortar businesses can send emails that are segmented to target audiences in specific locations to enhance their local in-store business. On the other hand, online businesses can use geographically segmented emails to send more relevant or seasonal information to consumers.

Level of interest

A strong segmentation strategy is to segment your list by where a possible client is in the sales funnel. Do not hesitate to ask your audience for information in regards to their interests. For example, you can do this during their sign-up on your website. This will enable you to provide them with more relevant information based on their expressed preferences and help you build an efficient engagement flow of information.

Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior patterns can be helpful in your segmentation strategy too. Consider creating lists of people who click (or do not click) links in email newsletters, people who abandon their shopping cart while browsing your online store, or inactive customers that haven not purchased from your eshop for a while. Identifying a customer’s browsing behavior enables your business to draft and send relevant messages and enhances the chances of this customer to interact with your brand.

Content consumption

Whatever business industry or niche your company belongs to, creating educational content is a proven effective way to create leads. Identifying the way leads and prospects consume content enables you to better understand your target groups and to craft more engaging content for these audiences.

Email activity

You must be careful and always track the long-term strength and sustainability of your email marketing program for many reasons. Take note that list segmentations are not just for contacts you want to send to, but also for email addresses that you want to avoid risking your email deliverability.

Are you ready to take the next step?

Email personalization and segmentation are a must if you want to have a successful email strategy, grow your sales, make brand connections, and to build better relationships with your contacts.

You can use a lot of ways to segment your list and personalize your email marketing campaigns. It is critical though that you have a clear picture of what your goal is, who your recipients are, and create email content that is highly valuable, relatable, and specific to their needs. Sign up for an email solution that works with segmentation, to get customers’ data automatically segmented, and send personalized messages to them. Show your customers how important they are and boost their loyalty.

Why does your business need digital marketing?

First things first, digital marketing is advertising delivered through digital communication channels, such as social media, mobile applications, email, web applications, search engines, websites, and so on, aiming to convert prospects to customers.

There are hundreds of ways to go about digital marketing, from focusing on organic traffic and SEO to using Facebook or Google ads to drive targeted traffic. You can mix and match paid strategies with organic strategies to figure out which communication mix converts the most.

To successfully start a digital marketing campaign for a new online store, you need to use the proper marketing channels, tactics, and tools to drive brand awareness and increase sales.

The top digital marketing channels list that you can use to drive traffic to your new online store

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

Give an additional boost to your organic traffic with PPC traffic to optimize your online store’s performance. You can select the right set of keywords to target by using suggestions from Keyword Planner (Google AdWords), peeking into keywords that your competition is bidding, or using any of the keyword suggestion tools available for free. Popular PPC platforms include Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, Bing, and LinkedIn Advertising.

2. Email Marketing

Build a strong email marketing strategy. Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels in eCommerce, so make sure that you keep collecting email addresses on your site. Some brands use pop-up boxes to prompt users to enter their email addresses in return for a small promotion, like 15% off their first purchase, or free shipping. You can use your email strategy to notify subscribers about new products, sales, promotions, store events, coupon offers, new blog posts, and so much more.

3. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Optimize your online store for search engines and benefit from free (organic) traffic from search engines. Optimization refers to the content structure and design of your website. It is also about how fast your website loads and the type of content you create (text, videos, and images). Meta tags and title tags are important as well. They are content elements that act as headlines and brief descriptions in the search engine results to help the search engine figure out what each page is about. Each page of your website should have its unique title tag and meta description.

4. Content marketing

These days good and relevant content is hard to find. Creating content for your audience that is both valuable and entertaining is one of the best investments you can make in your eCommerce business. Employ the right content marketing strategy and stick to a content calendar of activities to perform for a while (month, quarter, year). Persistence is key here. Many content marketing campaigns that did not work are attributed to a lack of effort and persistence over time. Apart from regularly creating content in a blog in your online store, you must also seed content elsewhere and gather important (and high-quality) backlinks to your online store.

5. Social media marketing

Social media is a quickly growing landscape of networks and platforms that constantly evolve and affect the way people communicate with brands online. Find the best methods and implement strategic campaigns that engage potential clients, create brand advocates, and eventually, fuel the bottom line.

6. Social influencers

There is nothing more convincing and a great boost to an online store than an endorsement from an influencer. Not only this gives you access to thousands of customers in a single go, but it also embeds an element of trust, not easily achieved through conventional mass-media advertising. You may select among a diverse set of influencer marketing tactics, such influencer blog post writing about your product, influencer posting social media content reviewing or demonstrating your product, or influencer talking about your product at an event.

7. Chatbots

Chatbots are software applications that online businesses use to communicate with their audience. The chatbot communication process is fully automated and usually employs a conversational AI to ensure a personalized customer experience. Chatbots are used quite a lot by companies in messaging apps (e.g., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber) to strengthen business conversations with prospects and customers.

Creating meaningful connections and keeping track of prospects and consumers is critical for customer acquisition and retention. You can manage customer relationships in a dashboard that can show you chat history, user public profiles, collected data, and more. But more importantly, you give people added value in a place they already are — and that is powerful.

8. SMS Marketing

SMS is such a trusted and widely used feature of the mobile device (smartphone or otherwise), boasting an incredible open rate of 98%, the large majority of which get opened within three minutes of being received! Beyond the open-rates, and unlike other marketing platforms, SMS does not require extensive ad copy, it does not present any design issues that delay its implementation, it is easy to track and measure, and is trusted by most mobile users. It can carve a direct pathway to your target market’s pockets.

Of course, text message marketing is not about just sending off a generic marketing message — there are several creative ways to use it, such as to offer coupons, deliver customer service or important updates, and send appointment reminders.

What’s next for your business?

Selling online for the first time can be overwhelming, but it does get better — especially if you take it one step at a time. Stay consistent, be patient, and use expert help, like Routee’s omnichannel platform that will guide you and give you a 360-solution to enhance your eshop’s digital marketing strategy.

Data and analytics alone can only get you so far in determining customer satisfaction. Yet, they will not tell you the whole truth. This is where customer feedback comes in. Your customers are best qualified to tell you about their needs and expectations.

Why is customer feedback important?

For your business to thrive, you need happy customers that return and -even better- that refer other people to your business as well. You need to occasionally check back with them using surveys to evaluate their level of customer satisfaction.

Customers can transform your business for the better if you listen to their feedback. Customer feedback is considered one of the quickest and most efficient ways to make improvements to your business. Many professionals even have gone so far as to call it business gold.

Collecting customer feedback enables you to identify the reasons behind your customer behaviors. When you can match customer feedback to what you see in your analytics, you will have a solid picture and you will know how to fix problems and go after the right opportunities.

In the past, when a customer had a question or issue, they would either call a hotline or write a letter. Nowadays, most marketers and business owners are interested in getting quick, detailed feedback from their customers online. Businesses can gather customer feedback using two different ways, prompted feedback (e.g., surveys, ratings, questionnaires, etc.) and unprompted feedback (e.g., client reviews, word of mouth, social media posts, etc.).

We will focus on how you can use different ways to collect prompted customer feedback and how to eventually use this feedback to optimize your business performance.

How can you collect customer feedback for your business?

Sending customer surveys is a popular approach to collecting feedback. The best surveys are easy to complete, relevant to the customer experience, and ask direct and reasonable questions.

SMS surveys

SMS is one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to reach out to your customers and collect their feedback about your products or services, customer service, and overall brand experience. While survey response rate is one of the biggest concerns for companies, surveys sent via text are more likely to attract participants. Considering that 98% of text messages are opened and there is an 80% response rate, we can assume that text messages are an effective way to collect customer feedback and understand your customers’ concerns.

Request quick feedback on recent purchases or services, or after a customer service session. Be sure that your text message survey is short, just like your SMS, but include a brief explanation to improve the chances of a click-through. Also, it is important to maintain a strong sense of branding and of course to proofread your feedback request extensively, checking for any errors.

Using Routee, you can easily create engaging SMS surveys and find out how your customers feel about your product or service.

Email surveys

If your goal is to get broader feedback about the entire customer experience, then email is the way to go. Consumers prefer using email to communicate with their favorite brands, making it one of the most commonly used digital customer service channels, with 54% of customers using it in the past year.

Survey emails allow you to send your questions to specific groups of customers who are already invested in your business. The customers on your email list have opted in to interact with you regularly—there's no doubt they'll have valuable insights for your business. By asking the right survey questions, you can gain knowledge about your target audience.

A good way to send your survey is through transactional emails, that are triggered by a certain interaction between the user and your business, such as a purchase, signing up for a new service, or upgrading to a new plan. Contrary to this popular practice, transactional emails can be used as a powerful weapon to foster a dialogue with customers and get their feedback, as they are emails that customers expect to receive and will most likely open.

With forms, you can easily create and customize your survey form and gather feedback reaching out to your customers via email.

Survey on-site

An on-site survey (also known as an on-page survey) is used to ask questions and collect feedback when people visit a specific website page. It is one of the easiest and most direct ways to ask the right visitors for feedback at the right time, while they are interacting with your website. They are a great tool in helping you identify and remove friction from the purchasing process, while also increasing conversion rates.

You can target your questions to pop-up on specific pages or after specific actions. On-site surveys are simple and short and should avoid disrupting your visitor’s journey. The questions can range from open-ended to close-ended questions, and they can also ask users to rate website experiences on a scale.

On-site surveys also enable visitors to feel engaged in shaping the future of your site, hence being acknowledged (bonus points!).

VoIP survey

Just like you can send out surveys and product feedback requests through SMS and emails, you can also use an IVR survey to collect customer feedback. Considered one of the most popular ways for collecting feedback, the IVR survey is a pre-recorded automated survey during which the customer responds to questions either by voice or by typing numerical responses using the telephone keypad.

The benefits of using IVR for gathering customer feedback are that there is no requirement for internet connectivity, as a simple telephone connection will do. Therefore, it allows your business to collect feedback from non-digital, non-tech savvy customers, guiding them through the process and providing them with clear, concise, and comprehensible answer options.

On top of that, it allows you to reach out to a larger audience, who are located in inaccessible geographical regions, ensuring that none of the customers are left out.

Make sure you select a cost-effective and feature-rich software solution, such as Routee’s Cloud IVR that can easily integrate into your business and will ensure that you will provide a seamless customer communication experience.

How can you use the customer feedback collected to benefit your business?

Now that you have collected valuable feedback from your customers, it is time to talk about putting these data to actual use.

Identify product improvement areas

It is crucial to use feedback to improve your product, your service, or even your customer service. Remember, that your customers have invested their time to give you feedback when they could have just switched to another product. Any feedback is a display of interest in your product. Be wise and use feedback to improve.

Contrary to what many believe, even negative feedback is an opportunity to prevent customer dissatisfaction and foster a long-term relationship with them.

Ensure that you check up on your customers regularly – make them feel appreciated.
Not only will they acknowledge your willingness to listen and implement their ideas, but you will set yourself apart from your competitors, as a business that genuinely cares.

Scale-up your business

As your business continues to grow, you will want to think about adding new products or services. It only makes sense to listen to what consumers expect from your business if you hope to gain their trust and turn them into lifelong customers.

Before every development plan, it is only proper to consider customer feedback. Their feedback can be used as a growth tool, since listening to your customers and creating a product or feature that is in demand can improve your retention rate and could boost your sales and conversion rates.

Build your testimonials

People are more likely to buy something if they see other people buying and using products from the same brand. That is why 58% of people look at online reviews at least weekly, while 93% agree that these reviews impact their purchasing decisions, according to research from Podium.

One of the best ways to show potential customers that other people are buying and using your products is by building testimonial pages with feedback provided by current customers.

This will enable you to portray your glowing reputation using the words of others but also serve as a reference to other customers. Besides, your customers can pick up a lot of handy tips from these testimonials, which can help them use your products better.

When building your testimonial page, make sure you add a layer of trust by adding both positive (and less positive) feedback, so you can help customers set realistic expectations and make informed purchases.

Improve customer service

Customer feedback can give you an excellent insight to improve the way you help future customers. You will be able to pinpoint common questions or concerns and serve your customers with speed and accuracy. According to Mckinsey, 75% of consumers expect a response to their question in five minutes or less.

Your customers’ feedback will give you crucial information on the areas you can educate your employees regarding common issues customers mention when they submit their surveys, helping them create a fast, helpful answer when a customer comes to them for assistance.

Reward customers

If you have used their feedback to map your product development, why not let customers know about it? This will boost their customer loyalty and engagement with your business. You can even offer them discounts or loyalty points, or a sneak-peek into something you are preparing. This is a great way to create a loyal community of customers and users eager to provide you with sound customer data.

What is important here is to make them understand that their feedback matters and that you value and acknowledge their opinion.

Listen and improve with customer feedback surveys

Consumers expect an exceptional experience from your company. Collecting feedback from your customers regularly, enables you to know whether or not you are providing them with the experience they expect.

Collecting customer feedback is one of the primary drivers of long-term growth. Whether negative or positive, it is valuable and can play an important role to stay ahead of the competition and develop.

Equip your business with a set of power tools for conducting your surveys and choose Routee’s SMS, Email, and IVR to fuel your long-term growth.

Why are pop-ups important for your business?

Let numbers speak out loudly:

• • Pop-ups can increase the email subscriber rate by 1,375%
  • Entrepreneur.com increased its sales by 162% and its subscriptions by 86 % with the help of pop-ups
  • Visual Website Optimizer upped sign-ups by 50% with a pop-up form on the site
  • Copyblogger found that implementing a pop-up strategy immediately boosted email list opt-ins
  • Pop-ups’ click-through rates are often around 2% – which is higher than other kinds of ads, as stated in the Blog Marketing Academy.

Nevertheless, pop-ups -when properly used- are successful in their purpose of existence. By “properly used,” we mainly mean that they do not abruptly interrupt the user experience. And here pops the next essential question up, “How can you implement successful pop-ups for your website or app?” So, let us move along and examine the most important elements that make for pop-up success.

9 elements that can make pop-ups successful

1. Choose timing wisely

Timing is not just money, time is everything. The same applies to pop-ups. Be sure they appear at the right time. There is a fine line between not interrupting your users’ browsing experience and your pop-ups appearing when it is most relevant.

The worst way to annoy your customers is to shove a pop-up in their face, right when they enter your website. It is the same as when you visit a physical retailer and someone asks if you need any assistance. The answer is most times, no! Even if you do need help, it is way too soon! Your potential customer needs some time to browse through your site before they make any commitments.

According to research, of the top 10% of pop-ups, only 8% appeared between 0-4 seconds. A case study published on MarketingSherpa indicates that 60 seconds is the most effective time lag to use.

The best way to test pop-up time periods on your site would be to check the average time-on-site in your website analytics.

2. Offer something relevant and of value

Always remember that your website visitors are in the middle of a paragraph when your pop-up may appear. The best case scenario is that they will be pleasantly surprised by your beautiful pop-up, most likely though, they will find it disrupting. You must offer something relevant and valuable so they do not get ticked off.

You can either choose to provide contextual value or inherent worth to your users through your pop-up. By contextual value, we mean that your pop-up builds on the value that is offered by your content. For example, a pop-up can appear on one of your helpful and unique articles, compelling users to get more similar info and asking them to sign up for it.

On the other hand, when we talk about inherent value, we mean value that only your pop-up can convey, such as content upgrades — videos, spreadsheets, infographics,etc.

3. Be clear with your call-to-action (CTA)

Getting your CTA right is a crucial part of creating your pop ups. Having a powerful CTA is essential when we talk about conversions. A better CTA indicates a higher click-through rate, and a higher click-through rate presents a higher possibility for conversions.

Whatever your service or offer is, you have to be clear. You might want to provide an ebook, a white paper or something else. Just tell them what it is! Do not just tell people “Sign up now.”

Also, make sure you have a simple but eye-catching design. Visually your CTA should be the centrepiece of your message. Place it above the fold for maximum visibility and give users a compelling reason to click.

4. Target using personalization

Segmentation and personalization are an important part of pop-up optimization. As online consumers are heavily bombarded with pop-ups, the main way to trigger users and convert them with your pop-up message is to make the message meaningful and specific to them. Create custom pop-ups for different audiences that land on your pages based on where they come from and based on the content of the pages per se.

The goal with segmentation and audience targeting is to create a seamless, frictionless, personalized experience for people as they travel from external sources (like a social media page or a specific email) to specific pages on your website.

5. Be creative

Try to catch your visitor’s eye to boost your conversions. Add animations, or experiment with pick attractive designs and colors.

Customize your pop-ups to fit the look and feel of your website, but keep in mind to make them stand out from the rest of your content in terms of design and content.

6. Keep it simple.

Avoid using many form fields. Most users know that the purpose of pop-ups is to sell them something or to collect their contact information. Having too much text or providing too many form fields is not very effective.

Asking for too much information is a pitfall. Users should not need and definitely do not want to spend more than a few seconds filling out any information. Make your request for data to the point and succinct.

7. Give users a way out

Being stuck with a pop-up which you cannot close is frustrating. It should not be difficult to find the “Close” button, nor should it be placed where the users do not expect it.

Your user should not have to circumvent your pop-up for the close button, as this will only further annoy them. Place the “close” button in a clear spot, clear enough for the user to see it without searching. Users naturally look to the corners for an exit, so it makes sense to place them there.

On that point, it is also important to not hide your content with your pop-up and optimize for all the devices it will appear on. Keep in mind that Google penalizes websites with mobile pop-ups that hide content. Make sure the pop-up properly shows on all devices.

8. Acknowledge your users

Users like to be acknowledged for their actions, so once they submit their details, take the time to thank them and let them know that you will be in touch. Let users know, right then and there, of the next steps they need to take. For example you can let them know if they need to confirm their email address, or provide them with the coupon code in case of an offer, or with the download link if it was a book download offer.

9. Use exit-intent pop ups

Engage a visitor through a pop-up before they leave your site. With an exit-intent pop-up, you can convince existing visitors that there is still something worth staying on your site. Exit-intent pop-ups have true conversion power and outperform traditional pop-ups by +5%. Use them in order to provide something of higher value to your users or to add some to your email subscription list.

To pop up or not to pop up?

Put some careful planning in the design and implementation of your pop-up campaign, as it will reflect on your business and your brand. Test what pop-up type works best for your business and “listen” to your audience.