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We have worked our way towards making the Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin a well recognised and successful solution, than merely a standard tool to curb cart abandonment.
There are many big names in the market that have undertaken best practices to get rid of abandoned carts, out of which BigCommerce is one such player that has influenced us quite a lot.
Nigel from BigCommerce shared an article with me after learning about our Abandoned Cart plugin for WooCommerce. I was quite impressed after reading it. I liked it enough to share it with my team & asked them to know their thoughts and they were delighted!
So the 3 main highlights from the article that left a mark on our minds and have driven us to follow their footsteps are as below:
- Analysis Of Target Audience
- Science Behind Sending Abandoned Cart Reminder Emails
- Abandoned Cart Calculator
Let’s elaborate on these points for better understanding.
Analysis Of Target Audience
According to BigCommerce, 69.23% of visitors add items to the cart and then leave without completing their transaction. There are 58.6% of shoppers who abandon carts simply because they are not ready to buy and the remaining 41. 6% of them have a other reasons for not making the purchase.
Therefore they say, ideally our target audience are these 41.6% of visitors who would show interest in initiating the checkout flow. Let us understand this with an instance as shown below:
This graph states 59% of visitors abandon carts and are not ready to buy whereas 41% of them abandon but are ready to complete the purchase. Therefore let’s say we have 100 abandoned carts out of which 41 carts are abandoned due to reasons other than not ready to buy. So considering the 61% abandonment due to final price as per Baymard Institute’s breakdown, 25 out of 41 carts were abandoned after seeing the final price.
Therefore we can estimate triggering reminder emails to those 25 visitors as per the final price and 16 visitors according to other reasons. Cart which are 51 of them that are not ready to buy should not be targeted as they would not turn into customers.
Science Behind Sending Abandoned Cart Reminder Emails
Another concept that actually got our attention was the way abandoned cart emails were lined up to be sent to target audience in order to convert them from visitors to customers. BigCommerce looks at a logical 3-part progression for sending these reminder emails which includes the following:
a. Reminder Email
b. Email with Discount Code and Deadline
c. Email for Discount Code Deadline Reminder
Let us learn about the above three emails separately for better insight.
a. Reminder Email
This is the first email that is sent to potential customers to draw their attention to the items they have left in the cart. Here you can either send a plain text email with a personal touch or have pictures of items that were left in the cart along with persuasive content.
A/B testing could be the best way to decide what kind of email suits the situation and consider sending the version that gives highest performance. You could also provide contact details or live support to help resolve their concerns and aid them in completing their transaction.
Remember not to shower the email with discount codes if it is not required to close the deal in the first email. This is because many online shoppers get habituated with this approach and wait for the discount code for completing their purchase.
b. Email with Discount Code and Deadline
This is the second email which is shooted after a specified period of time, if the visitor does not respond to the first email. Here it is vital to entice the potential customer by sending a discount code in the email, to push them towards completing the checkout process.
Along with a discount code, it is also imperative to send a deadline of this code. This is because if the visitor feels this code would last forever, they would not bother to complete the transaction immediately. So it is important to increase the sense of urgency in them to help achieve our target of converting them to customers.
c. Email for Discount Code Deadline Reminder
The second email with a discount code deadline serves as a reason for sending the third and final email to these potential customers. The main purpose for triggering the email at this stage is to remind them of the deadline that is coming closer for using the discount code.
Such emails are especially designed for those customers who tend to forget or who work best in the nick of time. You are also aiming those 61% of abandoners who leave because of the final price issue, as offering them a discount would help pull them back to get converted.
Abandoned Cart Calculator
An Abandoned Cart Calculator is a tool developed by BigCommerce to accurately calculate your abandoned revenue based on your monthly revenue and profit margin.
Thus it gives you an insight into how much additional revenue you can recover using the abandoned cart solutions that can lead to overall boost in business growth.
The above image shows what all parameters are required to calculate the abandoned revenue. Enter your monthly revenue, cart recovery rate that you estimate for your business and the profit margin for the same.
Consider the below instance:
When you say your monthly revenue is $10,000, cart recovery is 10% and profit margin is 70%, then the calculator shows $1400 can be made additionally every month.
Conclusion
In all 3 points above, we had new insights. Like leaving out a percentage of users who abandoned because they were never looking to shop. The 2 email sequence with a reminder for the coupon code as the 3rd email also caught us surprised. That sounds like a good strategy instead of sending another coupon code in the 3rd email.
And lastly, the Abandoned Cart calculator. That’s the first time we have seen an Abandoned Cart Calculator, which tells you not just how much money you will recover with abandoned cart reminder emails, but based on your profit margin, it gives a more closer approximation of the actual profits you will generate with it.
I would encourage our readers to have a look at this BigCommerce article titled “The Math Behind Abandoned Cart Email Success“.
