In today’s day and age more and more people are looking to the web for their shopping experience. While this is good for the consumer, it presents a challenge for organizations to maximize conversion rates of individuals going onto their sites and ultimately completing a transaction with their shopping cart.
Numeric Analytics knows that to fully understand your customer; you need insight into your analytic data, voice of customer and customer experience. That is why we work closely with leading providers like Tealeaf.
This month’s article is provided by our partner, Tealeaf. This article addresses the challenges organizations are facing with shopping cart abandonment and areas of opportunity that have been identified.
It’s no surprise that shopping online is different than buying in ‘the real world’. The differences are endless and the simplest distinction is in the outcome— the conversion rate.
Many reports put the average online conversion rate at 2%-3% percent and the cart abandonment rate above 60%.* Imagine your local supermarket with half full carts scattered throughout the store, people asking each other for product reviews and opinions, hunting for coupons during checkout. Yikes! But that is today’s self-created online reality.
Online channels have historically developed their own set of rules (When was the last time the supermarket asked you to add an item to your cart before you could see the price?) which could be fostering abandonment. On the upside, these online merchants have options; when people leave items in the cart online there are ways to follow-up in hopes of getting customers to convert.
In the supermarket, if you removed an item last minute, or walked away from your cart, the cashier would never chase you down in the parking lot offering you 10% off if you buy within the next 30 minutes.
In the example above, website analytics married to email creates a profitable remarketing opportunity for savvy merchants. A Google search on “Abandoned Cart Remarketing” will return results featuring best practices from all the top-tier Email service providers. I recently sat through an informative workshop outlining the steps to scrape shopping cart data from your web analytics tool, drop in a template, add your incentive code and deliver it to the customer only minutes after they left your site.
The deeper you align your marketing efforts to your individual customer’s behavior, the better your results. Rich insight leads to campaign modifications that can counter negative behavior and minimize the ‘Pavlovian’ traps that cause shoppers to abandon.
Unlike the Rotisserie infomercial, it’s not “Set it and Forget it”.
Understanding WHY the customer abandoned is critical for honing in on what the best remarketing efforts would be and which could be counterproductive.
Let’s see how plays out in the ‘real’ world of online commerce
Ouch, you are now blindly encouraging the failure, customer after customer, putting your brand at risk and you didn’t even see it. Can you think of a worst case scenario?
That potential customer who started out trying to give you money has now become a brand liability. This occurrence in volume can affect your email sender score threatening to send your following campaigns right to the junk/SPAM folder.
Extreme example? Yes. Possible? Sure. Pete Blackshaw wrote a book on just this topic, ‘Angry Customers tell 3,000, Satisfied customers tell one’ and Forbes.com turned the topic and a recent panel discussion of the topic into a 3 minute video, ‘Cyber Shoppers Complain’.The original posting of this article can be found on the Tealeaf Blog. Click to learn more about Tealeaf and Customer Experience Management or review customer testimonials.
Customer Experience Management Summit: Join Numeric Analytics, OpinionLab, and Tealeaf in San Francisco March 19th 2:00 pm – 5:30 pm. See Agenda.
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