Reducing the shopping cart abandonment made easy with personalization

Cart abandonment is, sadly, a fact of life for many online retailers. We have discussed in an earlier blog article the high percentage of 69,57 of the average online shopping cart abandonment rate recorded in 2019, as well as the approximate 15 billion euro loss in annual sales revenue that eCommerce brands experience worldwide. The challenge is real, out there, and pretty hard to overcome, or maybe not?

Content is king, but personalization is the salt and pepper for any eCommerce business that wishes to move forward and beat its shopping cart abandonment rates. Being able to transcend from generic to micro-segmented marketing tactics with minimum effort in terms of resources and time is the intelligent way to successful shopping cart recovery.

Providing a personalized customer experience means that an eCommerce business can offer the right product at the right time to the right customer. Preventive marketing tactics come to the rescue.

Here is a comparative example of how personalization can contribute to the entire communication mix of an eCommerce business.

Generic Message:

A generic email message from a retail store is sent in bulk to all the retail store’s subscribers, informing them about the extra discount provided by the retail store. The email is nicely designed, attractive to the eye, rich in visuals and product suggestions, and even has an important notification offering free delivery highlighted on top of the email.

However, it does miss the most vital ingredient that will make more people click on the “Shop Now” button and actually complete the checkout process, and that ingredient is the relevance. With all these amazing templates and tools for email design currently available online, most e-shops can now create beautiful, eye-catching emails. But how many of these online tools and e-shops offer the proper functionality to add the right relevance to their emails through personalization? This generic email clearly lacks the extra mile that the retail store could have taken to make the email relevant to its subscribers’ needs and preferences.

Personalized Message:

Now, this email example depicts proper personalization in action. And by personalization, we do not mean the “Hey, Tim” introduction. Ok, addressing your customers by their first name is pretty cool, but pretty basic as well. Personalization goes further beyond a first-name basis. It’s all about being able to segment your audience into target groups, smaller niche groups, that share similar traits, preferences, and many more measurable attributes, and address these groups with products or services that your e-shop offers, that these groups of people will find interesting and relevant to them. This micro-segmented email example addresses Tim and people like Tim, who belong to a target group of men who like Nike sports shoes, live in the UK, are a shoe size 44, like to dress casually, and care for their image. Chances are that, when this email is sent to this specific group of people, they will be prompted to complete the checkout process, as the content is very relevant to their needs.

The basis for successful personalization is the segmentation of your audience into target groups with similar traits, preferences, and other measurable attributes. No, you do not have to manually handle a bunch of spreadsheets that later on you will have to input in your e-shop or the communication channel you will use to contact your audience. Luckily, technology has advanced and businesses in eCommerce now have access to innovative and easy-to-use communication and automation tools that will do all the hard labor automatically. Such an innovative and user-friendly tool is the WayMore eCommerce Omnichannel Automation.

WayMore eCommerce Omnichannel Automation comprises rich functionality -in terms of segmentation and personalization- that an eCommerce business can leverage for any communication channel (Email, SMS, Push notifications, Viber, etc.) to automatically segment and easily create customized messages. Here are some indicative examples:

-Create automated personalized bulk promotional messages to motivate groups of customers to complete a purchase

-Create an automated welcome email flow with product recommendations relevant to the customers’ preferences for upselling and cross-selling

-Based on previous orders, create automated stock notifications and new product suggestions

-All sorts of customized and personalized notifications that can be dispatched through email, Viber, WhatsApp, and SMS automation

Apart from being a stand-alone platform, WayMore eCommerce Omnichannel Automation integrates with any third-party software (ERP, CRM, eCommerce, etc) through a simple and powerful API. There is also an extension for Magento 2 available for free download in the Magento marketplace.

A properly segmented audience enables the creation and bulk dispatching of automated personalized messages. Combine with compelling content, remarketing tactics, and a fluid checkout process, and you have set in motion a successful strategy for shopping cart recovery. The added benefit for your eCommerce business is that you have also formed a great customer experience for your audience, building trust and loyalty for your eCommerce business.