The Proven Tactic to Increase Sales That Your Competitors Aren’t Using

Over 300 billion dollars in e-commerce sales are lost annually due to visitors abandoning their shopping carts during the online purchasing process (Moz).

This means two thirds of the visitors to your ecommerce website who initiate an online transaction will not complete it. Now, with tools such as Email Remarketing, you have the ability to not only capitalise on these lost sales but develop lasting customer relationships and achieve repeat business time and time again.

Last week in our article 6 Ways To More eCommerce Sales, Right Now! we discussed shopping cart abandonment, and ways in which you could reduce abandonment rates by optimising your ecommerce checkout process.

As a quick refresher, shopping cart abandonment refers to when a potential customer has put an item in their shopping cart from your website, started the checkout process, and left before completing the transaction. Reducing cart abandonment before it happens by ensuring your checkout process is streamlined is only half of the answer, and today we are going to look at how Email Remarketing could help you recover some sales following cart abandonment.

What is Email Remarketing?

The most valuable prospects to you are those who have come close to buying from you already, and Email Remarketing enables you to stay connected with these prospects.

On average there are 1.3 cart abandons for every sale on your website (Practical eCommerce). Normally we would look at such a statistic in a negative light, but cart abandonment is actually a normal part of the buying process. Visitors will often put items in their shopping cart for more than one reason other than buying, for example some use it as a wish list to accumulate their favourite products, or as a calculator to estimate what the total cost of their items might come to. Email Remarketing enables you to encourage these visitors through the buying process by sending an immediate email, as well as follow-up emails over various time intervals, after they’ve abandoned their shopping cart. It is a highly effective tactic for increasing conversion rates as they’ve already shown interest in your products, making it a lot easier than trying to entice a brand new customer.

Obviously remarketing to every visitor to your website would not be profitable, you wouldn’t bother sending emails to visitors who arrived on your homepage and left instantly as they were never really engaged to start with. The objective is to reconnect with those visitors who were fully engaged with your website and almost made a purchase, and for these qualified prospects Email Remarketing can help speed up a sale that may have gone to a competitor.

3 Most Common Types of Email Remarketing Campaigns

1. Abandoned Shopping cart ‐ This is easily the most common type of remarketing email it is sent to visitors to your website after they’ve almost completed a transaction. For how effective this email is, it is extremely underused by online retailers. Fab gets in touch with their customers who have almost completed a transaction by sending the email below. It’s simple, tells the recipient exactly what the email is about and has a clear ‘Buy Now’ button. The tone of the email stays in line with the tone of the brand, and ‘Limited Quantities’ adds a slight sense of urgency. A study by SeeWhy showed that 90% of eCommerce prospects go cold within one hour, but if remarked to spend 55% more!
2. Last chance to buy an item, it’s on sale or it’s back in stock ‐ This a great way to stay connected to your prospects and delight them by letting them know when their favourite items are on sale, nearly out of stock or even back in stock! Sometimes the thought of missing out on an item, or knowing it is on sale is all that a customer needs to hear to entice them to purchase. ModCloth does exactly that with this example below. Not only would this email drive sales but it would also bring repeat business and reactivate customers who may not have purchased in a while.
3. Buyer Behaviour ‐ Personalising your email campaigns based on buyer behavior is a fantastic remarketing technique for businesses who deal with periodic type purchases ‐ for example those made once or twice annually, or during specific holidays during the year. 1-800-Flowers show a perfect example of this with their Mothers days email campaign. This was sent out to anyone who had previously purchased a bouquet from them during a holiday period, putting themselves front of mind should the customer be inclined to purchase flowers for this holiday, too.

Get Started using Email Remarketing for Shopping Cart Abandonment

1. Capture visitors’ emails early ‐ This is the most important step or there will be no Email Remarketing Campaign! The best place to start is on your homepage, before the visitor initiates the order. You can ask for their email address via a pop-up window or even by asking them to create an account with you.

2. The first hour is the most important with shopping cart abandonment ‐ the sooner you send an email in response to abandonment the better. Remember, they nearly bought from you so sending the email within an hour of the abandonment is important to keep your brand front of mind.

3. Show the items they nearly purchased within the email ‐ Provide clear images of the items and if possible support it with customer reviews or even related items the recipient might also be interested in.

4. Make your call-to-action as obvious as possible ‐ it must stand out among everything else within the email and link directly to the abandoned cart.

5. Personalize your campaigns ‐ Address the emails to the recipient directly and offer further support in case it was a technical error that caused them to abandon the transaction.

Conclusion

Remarketing via email is among the best ways to recapture lost sales and improve your return on investment. With the average conversion rate for eCommerce websites sitting at 2-3%, there is huge room for improvement and Email Remarketing could be your key to achieving this. For more information on Email Remarketing, or other remarketing strategies, please don’t hesitate to contact one of our experts for a chat about how it could work for your business.