3 Tips to Overcome the Cart Abandonment Challenge

We’ve all been there. You see a Facebook ad that piques your immediate interest. Maybe it’s for that life-changing, spinning, shower-scrubbing brush you thought only existed in your dreams until now. You click, add to cart—and then realize that you just pulled into your train station. Your phone gets shoved into your pocket in the scramble to get off, and you forget all about the magical scrubbing brush.

Enter cart abandonment—the challenge of all ecommerce marketers.

Fortunately, there are ways to recover from abandonment.  Here are three ways ecommerce marketers can recover more abandoned carts, specifically for sites running on Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

1. Set up checkout abandonment campaigns for guest checkout users.

When given the option, many shoppers prefer to breeze through guest checkout instead of dealing with setting up an account or logging in (yet another password to deal with?). 

For marketers, this is less than ideal—but there are still ways to trigger cart abandonment emails to visitors who abandon guest checkout. 

The first (and easiest) approach is to leverage exit-intent pop-ups with a special offer or incentive. To boost conversions further, personalize pop-ups according to shopping cart items, geo-location, or other data. For example, if a shopper has back-to-school items in their cart, we might offer a related coupon for 50% off back-to-school supplies, valid for a limited time.

The second approach is even more powerful. Leveraging Digioh’s JavaScript framework, marketers can add “event listeners” that capture any email address that’s typed into a guest checkout form field—without requiring a complete form submission. Digioh stores the email address in the cookie record, and if a shopper exits, a cart abandonment email is triggered in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

2. Ensure your Marketing Cloud abandoned cart emails are opened and clicked.

Once an email address is captured, the next step should be to ensure your cart abandonment emails are opened and (ultimately) clicked. 

Here are our top suggestions to create open- and click-worthy emails:

• Include the abandoned items with pricing information.
• Make any images clickable with a link back to the checkout page.
• Include a time-sensitive promo code to encourage immediate action.
• Add a  “Rebuild Cart” cart button in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud abandoned cart emails. This takes shoppers directly back to their cart so they can finish checking out.
• Rebuild carts with cross-device detection. This ensures the shopper will click and return to their abandoned cart just as they left it—even if they started on mobile and checked the email on desktop.
• If you use an inventory management system, indicate the number of items left in stock (if it makes sense).
• Offer customer support. For example, “I noticed you left these items in your cart. Let me know if you’d like me to find something else for you or if you have questions about sizes. Feel free to reply back, I’ll be personally reviewing your picks.” Route replies to your customer service team.

3. Set up cart and browse abandonment campaigns.

Capturing shoppers who exit checkout is great, but there are even bigger opportunities if you can capture shoppers who exit before reaching the checkout page. Cart abandonment targets shoppers who exit after adding items to their cart, but before reaching checkout. Browse abandonment targets shoppers who abandon after browsing a few pages.

In both cases, there are a few ways to capture the email address — plus the browsed or added items — and pass them directly to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

For new and anonymous visitors:

• Use an exit intent pop-up with a discount or gift offer
• Use JavaScript event listeners to capture any emails entered into forms (for example, footer forms)

For returning visitors (logged in):

• Grab the email address from a cookie record or the HTML source

For returning visitors (not logged in):

• If a visitor has previously submitted their email address, store it in a cookie and use it to trigger cart abandonment campaigns on future visits

Abandonment is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to mean the sale is lost forever. By setting up a combination of browse, cart, and checkout abandonment campaigns, ecommerce marketers can close the gap and create personalized, timely experiences for customers and potential customers.

Want to learn more? Check out Digioh’s AppExchange listing and learn even more about our Marketing Cloud Cart Form Builder and Cart Abandonment app.

Mariana Park leads the marketing team at Digioh.