Every eCommerce business has a common enemy… abandoned shopping carts. An abandoned shopping cart occurs when a user visits your website, finds something of interest, adds it to their virtual basket (or shopping cart) but fails to cross that final hurdle of actually purchasing the item.
To understand the scale of the problem, let’s start by looking at some statistics around the infamous abandoned shopping cart:
- E-Commerce Brands Lose $18 Billion in Sales Revenue Each Year Because of Cart Abandonment*
- The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Across All Industries is 69.57 Percent*
- Mobile Users Have an Even Higher Abandonment Rate of 85.65 Percent*
- On average around 7 in 10 customers that put an item in their cart, will leave the site without completing the purchase**
In addition, many cart abandoners won’t have reached the point of providing a name, email address or telephone number.
This can make following up with this audience highly problematic.
The Solution For Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts
If you’ve had enough of abandoned shopping carts, you’ll be pleased to hear there IS a solution.
Introducing: Remarketing.
Remarketing is a form of PPC marketing that can help you can stay in touch with these users who are close to converting, and go on to push them over that final hurdle to complete their purchase.
But how does it work?
Remarketing enables you to keep track of a user’s progress on your website, through a unique tracking code.
With this, you’ll be able to create certain audiences based on how far down the sales funnel a user is.
For abandoned carts, the priority is in capturing those website visitors who added items to their cart but did not check out.
To do this you need to create the following Remarketing audiences in your PPC Account (Google Ads…) audience manager:
- First Audience – Made up of users who have reached the ‘add to cart’ confirmation page.
- Second Audience – Made up of users who have reached the ‘checkout complete’ page.
- Abandoned Cart Audience – Create a custom combination audience by selecting all those who are in Audience 1 but not in Audience 2 – these are your shopping cart abandoners!
We’ve now successfully created the remarketing audience we want to talk to.
Create Your Remarketing Ads
Let’s remind ourselves about who we’re targeting – shoppers that have added items to their shopping cart; but are yet to make it over the final hurdle.
From this, we know that they’re very interested in what you have to offer.
What we don’t know, is why they didn’t complete their purchase in the first place.
One possible reason is that they may have abandoned the cart due to an interruption, or a mere lack of time.
Therefore, a remarketing ad with a reminder of your business name and your offer can be a simple, but successful way to bring shoppers back to your site to convert.
In addition, remarketing ads are the perfect opportunity to highlight your USP (unique selling point) to potential shoppers – giving them a strong reason to complete their purchase with you.
Another possible reason that they may have abandoned their cart may be due to their need for consideration.
If the products you are trying to sell are of higher value, they’ll be more likely to cause shoppers to think about the purchase more before they decide to pull the trigger and buy.
Shoppers may even begin to research into competitors, in the hopes of finding a similar product for a lower price.
For this audience, try offering a sweetener – maybe a discount, or a free gift with each purchase.
Offers like these placed in Remarketing ads can help you win the sale over your competition.
It may be worth trying an A/B split test on your remarketing ads.
This will help you see how the results differ between the ads that do this, and the ads that do not.
In turn, helping you decide if it is worth adding an incentive or not for your customers to win that sale.
Also, be sure to carefully consider where you direct your abandoned cart audience when returning them to your website.
Use dynamic remarketing to take them back to the product page that they abandoned.
This works better than taking them back to the homepage, as they’ll have to start the whole process all over again this way.
Results of Remarketing to RECOVER Abandoned Shopping Carts
A great real-world example of how Remarketing can be successfully used to recover abandoned carts comes from Yankee Candle.
They launched a Remarketing campaign and compiled an audience of 41,000 visitors who had placed items in their shopping carts in the last 60 days, but had not completed their purchases.
Yankee Candle used remarketing ads to target this audience with discount offers across sites in the Google Display Network, with the hopes of encouraging customers to return to their website and complete their purchases.
The results of this campaign were extremely positive:
- 10% of abandoned shopping carts returned to site
- 10% of these return visitors ultimately converted
- Conversion rate 600% higher than account average
- Campaign cost-per-conversion nearly half that of account average
This clearly shows the power of Remarketing to recover abandoned shopping carts, and demonstrates why Remarketing really is a no brainer for anyone with an eCommerce site.
*Kristensen, E. (2021) https://sleeknote.com/blog/cart-abandonment-statistics, Sleeknote
**Baymard Instiitue (2015) https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, Online
