Every year, online retailers worldwide lose $4.6 trillion due to abandoned carts. It’s one of the biggest problems in the e-commerce world, but abandoned processes encompass more elements. In this post, we want to show you why abandoned processes can hurt your business and how iPresso can help you rescue at least some of them.
First off, let’s quickly analyze two scenarios. In the first scenario, you run an online store, and you have a customer interested in one of your products. They browse the product tab and click the “buy now” button. The product lands in the cart, and then something happens. You don’t know what, but the purchase was never finished.
And here’s the second scenario. You run a SaaS company and offer a free trial for your platform. In order to grant access, you require your potential clients to fill out and send a short contact form. Again, a given person opens the contact form and even starts filling it out. Again, something happens, and the form is never sent.
These two scenarios show how abandoned processes can be frustrating and damaging to your business. After all, all the heavy lifting was already done! Both customers discovered your store/company and trusted you enough to reach out. And then, something happens, and the whole process is put to a halt.
You’ve just lost a customer, perhaps a regular one. What can you do about that? Before we answer this question, let’s have a look at why something like that even happens in the first place.
Why do people abandon processes? Fix your website and your offer!
Of course, there can be hundreds of different reasons, but according to a study published some time ago by FinancesOnline, there are ten major reasons. Let’s have a look at them:
When you take a look at those reasons, you will likely come to the conclusion that many of those elements can be fixed by making the necessary adjustments on your website or in your offer. You must also take good care of your online reviews, as negative reviews are the number-one reason for cart abandonment. A good return policy is also incredibly important (80% of answers). The third biggest reason is the fact that your website loads slowly – this is something you need to fix not just because of cart abandonment but because of SEO, too.
Other elements refer mostly to your offer. Hidden extra costs and required registration can discourage many people from placing an order, so you need to make shopping/ordering at your company as easy and transparent as possible. And speaking of transparency – an SSL certificate is an absolute must-have element of any decent website.
Naturally, fixing all those problems will likely not eliminate process abandonment in your company altogether. After all, almost 60% of customers claimed that even though they started the process, they were not ready to purchase. But eliminating all the other roadblocks will help you minimize the number of abandoned processes in your company, and that’s a good thing.
How to deal with abandoned processes
Suppose you’ve already made all those modifications. Your website works amazingly; your offer is attractive, and all is good. The number of abandoned processes is lower, but it’s still there. Is there anything else you can do? Thankfully, yes. Let’s have a look at two of the most effective options:
RETARGETING
If you use performance marketing channels such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you can reach customers who have already clicked one of your ads in the past. Moreover, you can reach them with a different message that’s tailored specifically to them. This is called retargeting (also known as remarketing). It’s all about trying to reach people who were initially interested in your offer but never followed through.
All the large advertising networks usually come with built-in retargeting features. This way, you can try to ignite someone’s interest once again. Usually, at this point, it’s a good idea to offer some incentive, e.g., a small discount or free delivery. An exemplary retargeting offer could say something like that:
“Hey, are you still looking for [product name]? If so, we have a 10% discount for your first order in our store! Start shopping today!”
Again, it won’t work in 100% of cases, but even if you manage to rescue 10 or 20% of abandoned carts, that’s a big win!
REMINDERS
This is where our role begins. At iPresso, we have a feature called responding to abandoned processes. The name is pretty much self-explanatory. With this feature, you can reach out to your customers with different forms of reminders (including pop-ups, push notifications, and emails) as a response to the process of the cart they abandoned.
To make those reminders more effective, there are personalization options. In other words, each reminder refers to a given person and their process. For instance, if you run an online booking platform, and someone was interested in buying a flight to London, our reminder will also refer to their planned London trip.
Our reminders are based on marketing scenarios that you can adjust to your business profile and your preferences. This is how it can look:
In fact, all you have to do is design a specific scenario. The rest happens automatically. Suppose you want to send email reminders to everyone who started but did not finish a specific process. You go to iPresso, create such a scenario (just like in the screen above), and that’s it!
From now on, every person who does not finish the order or the contact form (or any other activity that’s important to you) will receive a friendly and personalized reminder.
We need to emphasize this once more – iPresso is no magic wand. Most likely, our platform will not fully eliminate abandoned processes from your company because that’s simply not possible. If someone is no longer interested in buying your product, there’s nothing you can do about that. But our platform will help you minimize this problem. And we’re sure you’ll agree it’s better to have ten abandoned processes per month than 40, correct?
Start rescuing abandoned processes today (with a free trial)
If you’re not our user yet, we’re happy to invite you to free trial access to our platform. You will be able to see how responding to abandoned processes works. We hope this feature will help you lower the number of abandoned carts/processes you see in your company.
All you have to do is fill out and send this short contact form. And don’t worry! If, for some reason, you don’t finish the form, we’ll remind you of it! 🙂
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