Monday, August 20th, 2018
Cart Abandonment Rate
Here’s a hard, cold fact: Even the biggest brands in the e-commerce space deal with enormously high cart abandonment rates.
Aggregate data from the Baymard Institute reveals that the average cart abandonment rate sits at a whopping 69.89 percent. Fortunately, up to $260 billion of lost sales due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the right checkout optimization strategies.
Here are the top 9 tips on how to lower your website’s cart abandonment rate and maximize your profits:
Eliminate Distractions
In an age of instant gratification, it’s easy to derail users with the slightest of distractions.
Outbound links, pop-up forms, ads – anything that can divert the attention of customers from the checkout process can seriously hurt your conversions.
To reduce your website’s cart abandonment rate, your first priority is to implement a goal-oriented approach when designing your pages. This means highlighting key conversion elements, such as CTAs, “Buy Now” buttons, compelling visual assets, and pricing tables, while eliminating distractions that contribute nothing to the user experience.
According to statistics, one of the reasons why customers leave during the checkout process is the presence of unexpected delivery costs.
Remember, as customers browse your online store, they start to consider purchase decisions based on the costs they see. If you hide the costs of shipping, taxes, and other applicable fees for the sake of making a product look cheaper, customers may end up feeling manipulated — something you must never do if you want to build their confidence in your brand.
Of course, you may go an entirely different route and offer free shipping. This will increase the perceived value of a purchase in the eyes of customers.
Include Trust Logos
Regardless of your product’s quality, a customer will not commit to a purchase decision if they don’t trust your company.
One way to quickly earn their trust is to display trust badges from authoritative companies like VeriSign, the Better Business Bureau, Authorize.net, and Symantec. Doing so will prove the legitimacy of your business and will, therefore, make customers feel safe enough to push through with a purchase.
Speaking of trust, it’s hard to come up with a piece of content more convincing than a positive online review.
It doesn’t even matter if they personally know them or not — statistics show that 85 percent of shoppers trust online reviews as if they’re recommendations from people they know.
To generate positive reviews for your products, a good strategy is to automate review requests with an email marketing tool like MailChimp. It features pre-made automation templates for all sorts of activities — from scheduling birthday emails to welcoming new subscribers.
You can also use automated emails as opportunities to upsell more expensive products or cross-sell add-ons for a quick boost in profits. A typical approach is to include relevant links to specific products and category pages in your email signature.
Another way to use email automation is to send emails that remind customers about the contents of their abandoned cart. This will allow you to recover lost sales once the customer becomes ready to make a purchase.
Again, a tool like MailChimp has the automation tools you need to set up this campaign. You only need to use the pre-made automation template or design your own workflow — simply select the right trigger, specify your conditions, and attach the right emails.
Offer More Payment Options
Another reason why plenty of customers abandon their online carts is the lack of an accessible payment option.
Granted, providing support for a certain payment processing service on your website isn’t always simple. That’s why you must be in touch with the demographics of your customers and identify the payment gateways they are more likely to use.
Once supported, you can reassure customers by displaying the right logos on the checkout page.
A lot of online store owners overlook the importance of a fast loading speed when it comes to conversions.
Believe it or not, up to 40 percent of visitors will abandon your site if it fails to load in 3 seconds or less — nearly half of your potential sales gone before they even reach the checkout page.
It may sound technical, but optimizing your website’s performance can actually be done even by non-developers. With a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, you can run a quick analysis of your website’s performance as well as unearth ways to improve it.
Keyword Tool
In online marketing, your target keywords play a role in everything – be it SEO, content marketing, or conversion rate optimization.
If you target the wrong keywords, your audience’s expectations may not align with what your content or products have to offer. This ultimately results in more visitors leaving before they can complete a purchase.
To make sure you pull in the right crowd from the get-go, perform extensive keyword research with a tool like Ubersuggest or Keyword.io. Look for keywords that are viable in terms of competitiveness and intent, like “affordable web design services,” “event planners for hire,” and other long-tail keywords with commercial or action-based terms.
To optimize your online store for your target keywords, a rule of thumb is to mention them at least once in key page elements, like the page title, headline, subheaders, and meta description. If possible, you can also register or buy a new domain name that contains your target keyword so users know exactly what you have to offer.
Finally, allowing guest purchases is a great way to appeal to customers who aren’t willing to provide their personal information online.
Keep in mind, it already takes a certain level of trust to hand over your hard-earned cash to an online business. The least a marketer can do is to make the experience as convenient and frictionless as possible to customers.
If you really want to obtain your customers’ contact information, incentivize the membership by offering exclusive benefits, such as discounts, freebies, and gift cards. Otherwise, keep the entire checkout process simple – your customers will definitely thank you for it.
If you run an online store, cart abandonment is something you can’t afford to ignore.
The tips above should help you minimize cart abandonment and maximize your profits. The next step is to keep measuring your results as you fine-tune your strategy over time.
What advice can you give other online store owners regarding cart abandonment? Let us know in the comments below!
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