6 Cart Abandonment Tactics to Test for a Happy Holiday Season

“Look but don’t touch” is a great guideline for a museum, but an extremely unprofitable habit for retail consumers to have. A Statista survey found that in March, the cart abandonment rate was a whopping 88%. That means that on average, if someone adds nine items to their online shopping cart, they’re only buying one.

That’s just one reason that of all the different triggered messages, abandonment may be the most important to highlight during the holidays. There’s another big reason, which is far more positive: Cart abandonment emails result in opens 45% of the time. Here are six strategies to augment your abandonment messaging and crush Q4:

1. Discount Strategically

Why do cart abandonment emails have such high open rates? Customers could simply be onto you.  In many ways, online shopping carts are the new wishlists. People purposely pass on purchasing, waiting for a discount to arrive in their inboxes. Try meeting those people in the middle with a cross between segmentation and personalization, offering cart abandoners a smaller discount, or a simple reminder like Nordstrom does, shortly before a larger sitewide sale.

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2. Use Customer Data to Dictate Cart Abandonment Creative

One abandonment best practice we always recommend is to include a picture of the product to jog the customer’s memory. But because so many people do treat online shopping carts like wishlists, those carts may be pretty packed. Use customer data to prioritize which products you display. Say she has a sheath dress, a wrap dress, and a handbag in her cart. If her previous behavior tells you she’s most likely to buy the wrap dress, that item should get top billing.

3. Insert the Cart Everywhere

A dedicated abandonment email isn’t the only way to remind shoppers of the items in their carts. With a dynamic shopping cart icon in your universal template, you can stick a reminder into every email. As an alternative, you can also highlight abandoned items with a banner serving as a friendly reminder of what customers have left behind.

4. Think Outside the Inbox

Modern retailers engage users through multiple platforms, so re-engagement should have a similar omnichannel approach. If the customer is an engaged app user, try closing the sale with personalized push notifications or SMS message like Century 21. Don’t forget to put the highest-priority products in her cart front and center with your retargeting ads.

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5. Don’t Clear the Cart

If your abandonment campaign is successful, great! However, you should also plan ahead in the (likely) event that the customer doesn’t buy everything. Offer the option of adding the remaining items to a wishlist or a save for later option in cart… and then let those items be a starting point for your next send, of course.

6.Bet on Browse Abandonment

While browsing doesn’t signal the same level of interest as actually adding an item to a cart, browse abandonment is a strong messaging strategy in its own right. Many of the same tactics apply, but use caution as this can come off as far more invasive. Try testing a playful tone, a more earnest plain text format or a helpful approach. Here, Target tries the latter, sending a browse abandonment email that doubles as a proactive price drop notification.

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Augmenting your cart abandonment messages is just one way you can ensure a happy holiday. To learn more about perfecting your promotional strategies, blueprints to grow your base into the new year and more, download our 2020 Holiday Marketing Playbook here.