5 Tips to Recapture Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is a sensitive topic for almost every online retailer. Many companies and universities are conducting research on the data behind abandonment to find what ultimately causes consumers to place an item in their cart and then leave a retailer’s website before executing a purchase. Forrester Research finds that roughly 38 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned, while other data sources put that figure as high as 70 percent.

While there are a million possible reasons why a consumer may walk away from a purchase, the real question should be how can you get those shoppers back? Here are five tips to help you recapture interested consumers after an abandoned cart:

1. Grab email addresses. Retailers need to make an effort to capture the consumer’s email address as early as possible within the checkout process. You can't eliminate cart abandonment altogether, but capturing email addressess at checkout allows you to proactively remarket products to consumers who have abandoned a cart.

2. Observe and capture data. Establish a mechanism to observe and capture the event (e.g., cart abandonment). Retailers can't do anything about abandoned carts if they don't know it’s occurring or don’t capture the necessary information when it does occur. You have several options available: work with a third-party analytics provider like Omniture or Coremetrics; work with a third-party personalization provider like iGoDigital; or create a home-grown process.

3. Learn from the past. View cart abandonment as part of a larger abandonment procedure. By studying user behavior across your site, you can often predict what visitors are going to abandon a cart long before they actually get to checkout. Users who are more apt to abandon a cart exhibit certain behaviors on product pages. For example, consumers are more likely to abandon a cart if they look at a high number of products before adding an item to the cart, if they do a price comparison between multiple products or if they look at a product multiple times. When a shopper exhibits one of these behaviors, consider showing an offer or changing the site experience to encourage conversion.

4. Timing is everything. Once cart abandonment occurs, send a timely automated remarketing message — usually within 24 hours. However, time frames depend in large part on the product category in question. For example, for apparel retailers, 24 hours is ideal; for book retailers, eight hours to 12 hours is best; and for sports teams, the best option is immediately after a game or major win.

5. Always sell. It's one thing to send automated remarketing messaging with the item that was left in the cart, but consider offering additional content recommendations (i.e., related personalized product recommendations). For example, if the shopper leaves an Indianapolis Colts T-shirt in the cart, not only include that specific T-shirt in a remarketing messaging, but also a Colts hat, shorts, etc. Remarketing messages present a prime opportunity to cross-sell and upsell other products within the body of the message.

Eric Tobias is president of iGoDigital, a provider of personalization and product recommendation tools. Eric can be reached at eric@igodigital.com.