Set Up An Abandon Basket Drip Marketing Campaign

The internet has made it easier for consumers to window shop, they can visit a store, check out what they have to offer at their leisure and without being encouraged to purchase by an in-store salesperson.

This freedom and lack of urgency make it easy to leave your shopping cart behind without any remorse. This type of behaviour is why CRM strategies are essential to the success and longevity of an eCommerce site.

Let's face it the majority of your visitors will not buy on the first purchase; many will take two or 3 visits to feel comfortable with completing the sale. So instead of waiting on them, CRM offers subtle words of encouragement to keep your sale top of mind and get them coming back more often.

Statistics on abandon shopping carts?

According to baymard eCommerce sites average shopping cart abandonment rate is a whopping 69.23%. That's a large chunk of change you're letting slip through your figures. Also if they're abandoning your cart it only gives your competitor a chance to snatch that sale from under you, now isn't that a sobering thought?

Why customers abandon shopping carts?

So why do they these visitors have commitment issues? Like I mentioned earlier it's merely a natural consequence of how users browse e-commerce sites – many users will be doing window shopping, price comparison, saving items for later (Using it as a wishlist/shopping list function), exploring gift options, etc. These are a largely unavoidable cart and checkout abandonment. However, if we exclude the "just browsing" segment of abandon carts, some serious buyers jump ship with the following reasons being the most popular.

• Additional costs (shipping, taxes, fees) – 61%
• No guest checkout – 35%
• Complex/long checkout process – 27%
• Unclear order summary – 24%
• Website errors/crash – 22%

According to diligentcommerce

What can we do about customers abandon shopping carts?

When creating an abandoned cart strategy, the first thing to understand is that you are going to want to send multiple emails. 

A basic drip campaign would be about one email a day, for five days. E-commerce customers who receive numerous abandoned shopping cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete the purchase than those who receive only one follow up email. And customers who receive multiple abandoned cart emails have various transaction rates of 44% higher than those who didn’t. SO its safe to say that this strategy does work.

A basic drip marketing campaign to abandon shopping carts

The goal of every abandoned cart email is simple: Close the sale! To close a sale, you need to appeal to specific user behaviour. In this post, I'll lay out a basic drip marketing campaign which I've found works very well with your standard eCommerce retail site. But depending on your product or service, you may want to remove, add our swop around the order of these emails to suit your website or customer lifecycle.

Setting out your drip campaign

1. Urgency Send schedule: Four hours after abandoning the cart. Subject: Your order is still open, finish it now! Purpose: Close the sale. Communicate urgency.
2. Scarcity Send schedule: 24 hours after abandoning the cart. Subject: Last chance before your shopping cart expires. Purpose: Close the sale. Communicate urgency.
3. Ownership benefit content Send schedule: Two days after abandoning the cart. Subject: Check out our blog/product page on what our experts and customers say about a product. Purpose: Social proof, education about the brand, establish authority.
4. Brand value proposition content Send schedule: Four days after abandoning the cart. Subject: We've sold so many products and made many customers very happy. Be one of them Purpose: Story, social proof, educate on brand and establish authority.
5. Discount ladders Send schedule: Five days after abandoning the cart. Subject: Get 10% off your basket, if you order in the next 24 hours! Purpose: Convert non-buyers. Offer a discount.

If done correctly, the first email that goes out will always be the most profitable as it is sent out the most and has the broadest appeal. As users do progress through the funnel, you'll typically see smaller numbers regarding visits but a higher conversion rate as compared on the previous step.

Don't abandon potential profits

While many sites are entirely focused on acquiring more traffic as their primary source of increasing sales, it isn't always the best source of action especially if you have meagre conversion rates, chasing more traffic will only drive up your CPA. By using marketing automation with a drip marketing strategy you can focus on improving the conversion rate on the traffic you're already getting and extract more value from your visitors more often.

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Tags: CRM, drip marketing, email marketing