What’s a major challenge facing online retailers today? Two words, abandoned carts. Abandoned carts are the result of customers who add items to their online shopping carts but leave before making a purchase.
There are many reasons why a customer may wait to make a final purchase, even with a cart full of items. Capturing their business is essential to maintaining sales success.
What Are Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails?
An abandoned cart recovery email is designed to encourage or remind customers to complete their purchases. Abandoned cart recovery emails are essential to streamlining the customer buying journey. They can help grow the sales side of your parts business and customer relationships at the dealership.
Why Are They Important?
Abandoned cart recovery emails are your gateway to building consumer trust, growing sales, and establishing customer loyalty. From a sales perspective, they’re an obvious way to close on sales opportunities. They’re also an effective way to show your customers that you’re committed to simplifying their buying experience.
How They Contribute To Sales
Abandoned cart emails are excellent sales tools for two reasons. First, as we’ve already stated, they can help close sales opportunities for new customers at the dealership. Second, and most importantly, they can help salvage potential sales losses of returning customers, turning returning customers that are on the fence about making a final purchase into loyal repeat buyers.
How They Contribute To Customer Retention
These kinds of emails also help improve customer retention rates. They act as reminders for both new and returning customers. This helps them pick up where they left off in their buying journey, especially if they have multiple or large orders in their online shopping cart.
Steps to a Successful Abandoned Cart Email
Setting up an abandoned cart email can be broken down into five simple steps. These steps can be modified, tested, and re-run to help you tailor your campaign strategy.
Step 1: Identify Your Send Time
Knowing when to send an abandoned cart email is the first and most important step besides getting an email address. Obviously, you should send it to customers who have abandoned items in their shopping carts. However, identifying when to send it to customers on your email list is just as important.
How much time has to elapse before you send them the email, one hour, two hours, or 24 hours? Once you’ve determined your send time, it’s time to move on to step two.
Step 2: Craft Your Email Copy
A well-crafted email goes a long way. The right messaging can be the difference between a customer opening an email and putting it in the spam folder. Your email copy should be clear, concise, and attention-grabbing.
Use compelling email subject lines and be personable. The more personalized the experience, the more likely your customer is going to remind themselves to complete their purchase.
Step 3: Have a Clear Call-to-Action
Make their next step obvious. Ensure they can easily access the purchase page from the email copy. Include a “buy now” or “complete your purchase” button in the email copy. Make sure it stands out in the email. If the CTA isn’t obvious, your customer will ignore the email entirely.
Step 4: Provide Your Contact Information
What if your customers need more information before they buy? They need to be able to get answers to those questions quickly. Give them contact information that will get them in touch with your parts department quickly.
Ideally, you should give both an email address and a phone number that they can call. Some online retailers include a link to a live chat where they can talk to a customer service representative within minutes. It’s important to give them as many communication options as possible.
Step 5: Add An Incentive
Sometimes the clincher for a customer is a good deal. Make them an offer they can’t refuse that helps them make a purchase decision. If they’re a repeat buyer with multiple items in their cart, offering them free shipping on their order is a good idea.
You might offer a 20% discount on certain items in their shopping cart if it’s a new customer. There are many ways to set up a good sales offer, and you can offer different ones to different customer types.
Measure Your Success
An abandoned cart email strategy is ultimately a sales strategy. Understanding how it contributes to your sales growth is key. To do this, you need to identify your key metrics and define your campaign goals. Once you have an idea of how you want your campaign to perform, you can adjust them when you run them again.
Key Metrics
In order to set up your north-star goals for your abandoned cart recovery email campaigns, you need to have a base understanding of your email metrics and how you want to measure them.
There are a few standard metrics you should use to measure the success of your campaign:
- Open Rate: The percentage of people that open the email.
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The percentage of people that click through the email to their shopping cart.
- Recovery Rate: The percentage of people who complete their checkout purchase after receiving an abandoned cart email.
Create Your Target Goals
With these metrics in mind, you should create your target goals to measure the success of your campaign. If this campaign aims to turn 10% of abandoned carts into final sales, figure out how your email metrics can help reach that goal. You might need a 0.75% CTR or higher to get customers to complete their purchases and reach that 10% goal.
Bottom Line
Starting an abandoned cart recovery campaign from scratch is a pain. However, if you follow these abandoned cart email best practices, you can set up successful campaigns time and time again.
Click here for a free downloadable guide with abandoned cart email templates. It’ll help you get a baseline for what your emails can look like and how to use them effectively.
