Every D2C store owner dreams about the day when they might be able to see 100% of their brand check outs. Alas, it never happens.
The average abandonment rate is about 70% when it comes to online purchases. Owners are frustrated because the numbers are so high. Therefore, here we are to decode the reasons and possible solutions to reduce the abandonment rate for e-com shop owners.
Before we get to the solution, let us deep dive into the problem.
After all, the term "abandonment" means leaving a thing or place with no intention of returning.
So, why are users abandoning your products and not buying them?
Of course, there are many reasons why someone wouldn’t want to buy your product. Some of the most common reasons are:
- Poor customer experience
- Complicated website navigation that makes users put in a lot of effort.
- Unable to locate an exact product that met the requirements.
- High cost as compared to the competitors.
- Shipping is too expensive, and patience will run out sooner than money.
- The most unexpected reason: targeting the wrong audience. Because how can a marketer be wrong?
To understand which reason is true for your D2C store, let’s explore the different stages of abandonment.
Different Stages of Abandonment in D2C
Many times, owners or marketers just focus on customer behavior during the time when a consumer is about to make a payment but does not go ahead with it.
When we put the process under a microscope, owners and marketers are making a very basic mistake of not considering engagement at other stages as well. Let’s look at the three types of abandonment.
Product Abandonment
In a typical purchase journey, after discovery comes consideration, where a customer opens the product to zoom in and read about other information about it.. Knowing that a potential customer viewed a specific product gives you an understanding of what the user might need, and can help you to analyze the likes and dislikes of your customer.
This is great news. Now your brand knows what your users are interested in and you can reach out to them and nudge them towards completing the purchase.
Cart Abandonment
Moving ahead in the purchase journey, a typical user explores a brand and keeps adding the desired items to the cart to review later. This also forms another crucial stage where the most contemplation happens at the time of the review. The ever-ongoing struggle of ‘do I need yet another black top or not’ is very much real. Unfortunately for the owners of the brand, this is a point where users choose to abandon more often than one might like. While their chosen items rest well in the cart, users are long gone without any indication of return.
Checkout Abandonment
Next, and the final stage in the purchase journey, is called the action stage, where a user finally checks out via a selected mode of payment. It is a marketer's dream to see those leads converted to create all that revenue. But dreams don’t often come true, right?! Users get indecisive at the time of making a payment. All of the arguments in a user's head start to get louder and louder, demanding a decision and confusing the hell out. And as we can all agree, when in doubt, most of us just sleep on it because no decision is the best decision ever.
Given that only 10% of the visitors reach the checkout stage , if you aren’t targeting or re-targeting the users at product or cart abandonment stage, you are going to miss out on a huge opportunity to create more revenue.
What’s the magic pill that can help D2C owners and marketers help solve this issue for them?
Old way of recovering abandoned carts
The most common and a very traditional way to get the cart recovery has been through email. But does it even work? Is it perhaps an efficient channel to target and re-target the customers for recovery?
As a marketer or D2C store owner you can’t really depend on the success of an email because let’s just agree that we all have skipped or directly deleted an email from a brand knowing that it’s for promotions.
Sure, compared to the high CPCs in Ads, emails are awesome. But in the modern day, emails have not proven to be very effective. The open rates of an email is depressing, especially if it's coming from a brand.
The average email open rate is just 15% to 20%, which essentially means that when you send 5 emails, your potential customer is likely to open only 1.
Bleak, right?
In that case, what is a better solution that drives a better RoI?
Modern way of recovering abandoned cart
The answer is ‘WhatsApp’.
Establishing a connection and engaging with users on WhatsApp is extremely efficient and an effective way to tackle abandonment.
In many ways, WhatsApp is an act of God. With a 2.4 billion unique active user base, it has the largest audience that a brand could target. It is the most used and popular communication channel in the world, where about 300 million messages are sent on a daily basis.
Average time spent in a month on WhatsApp is about 18.6 hours. And about 38 minutes a day are spent on the app by an average user.
Evidently, WhatsApp is where all the action is happening. The most interesting and useful bit of information for all marketers and D2C owners is that WhatsApp has people of all ages and demographics, so even after segmenting the volume can be huge.
Why Choose WhatsApp to Convert More Shopify Sales?
Now that we know the power of WhatsApp, let's dive into why a brand owner or marketer should use it to convert more purchases.
- High open or read rate on WhatsApp. 70%-80% of the messages sent on WhatsApp are opened by an average user.
- It's more personal, which means you can engage with a user in deep, insightful conversations. This can also help in establishing and maintaining a good relationship with the customer.
- WhatsApp is real-time and is proven for better and faster conversion. The sooner you contact customers who abandoned carts to address their concerns, the more likely they are to have a positive brand recall and convert to your brand.
Steps to recover abandoned cart using WhatsApp
- Send a friendly reminder at the product abandonment stage. Users are probably checking similar products out for better prices and offers with competing brands. Here is your chance to send them a sweet reminder of your product and its superiority.
- Instill FOMO (fear of missing out) in the users. Users might be in different moods while shopping, and tapping into the psychographics can help a brand convert the cart into an order. Reminding a user that the product might be out of stock soon or that it is a fast-moving product that might run out of their reach could help them make the final leap into purchase.
- Make an offer they can’t refuse. If the other two ways didn’t work out, then it’s time to pull the tried and tested trick out. However, one should usually wait 4-5 days before sending a WhatsApp with offers to avail.
- Incremental discounts to keep the interest levels high: Brands should not give away their max discount in the first message. Instead, consider creating an incremental discount offer in each message where you offer a small discount on the 1st message and if that doesn't work, bump up the discount to see if that catches the user’s attention.
- Offering easy payment at the time of checkout abandonment can make a huge difference. Add as many options as you can to your payments. Options like EMI, COD, and free shipping can add motivation to the potential buyer.
- Always ask for feedback. The brand can send a message with the help of a chatbot asking why they didn't make the purchase and use the feedback to improve the experience for future customers.
- Include an image of the product they just viewed instead of a generic image. This can stimulate interest in the users again.
- Introduce them to similar products in the same category. Chances are after attempting all the above tricks, if they still haven't purchased, they likely purchased it elsewhere or decided not to buy the product altogether. Constantly nagging them about the same thing could lead to an unsubscribe.
As a bonus to this article, here's a cheat sheet for all you marketers and D2C owners out there.
6 Best Practices to Recover Abandoned Carts for Shopify Stores
- Remember to keep the text personal and casual. Don’t try to sound like a salesperson even when you are trying to make a sale. Automated WhatsApp can be made personal and custom too, so be aware of that. Word your message as if it is speaking to the consumer, almost calling them to relook at what they just abandoned.
- Be as dynamic as you can be. Send pictures or infographics of the product; add gifs to keep things interesting. If it fits the brand, use pop-culture references to keep the conversation more human. Conversation is the key to conversion so stay topical and engage with the consumers.
- Be prompt with the replies. Consumers don’t like to wait. Answer their queries in a real-time manner and you will give yourself an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell more products.
- Include a crystal clear ‘Call to Action'. A CTA will prompt the user for an immediate action which otherwise would not be at the top of mind. This could be links to your site or being able to make payments from within WhatsApp.
- If you’re using links, brands should consider using a branded URL instead of a shortened URL. If you decide to go with a shortened URL, make it branded. This gives you the opportunity to stand out, build a brand, and also reassures your customer that they're not clicking on a spam link.
- Automation of the response messages using the chatbots is the way to go. Response time to any of the customer queries is viewed to be a very important factor in conversion, if it is delayed then you are risking out of mind, out of sight. Using chatbot is the key to remain contextual and top of the game as it will free up 70% of the agent’s time and effort.
That's all there is to it. You just have to be persistent and apply the right strategies to recover abandoned carts. Hopefully, the ways I've outlined above are enough to get you started.
