Marketing strategy

I want to improve sales and reduce cart abandonment

Your website is beautiful. The photos of your products are perfect and the descriptions of your services are tempting to say the least. Yet, your sales don’t seem to be increasing. In fact, it seems like lots of people aren’t buying at all.

Naturally, this is a worry for any business, but fortunately there are steps you can take to understand the problem and to rectify it.

Some reasons for shopping cart abandonment

Some reasons for shopping cart abandonment

Before you can solve any issues, you need to find out what they are. A good way to do this is to ask for some feedback on the site and what’s on offer. This can be tough to hear, but necessary. It might be that you have a broken link so that shoppers physically can’t progress to the check-out. The site might be unnecessarily convoluted and in need of better navigation. Maybe calls-to-action (such as ‘buy now’ and ‘add to shopping basket’) aren’t sufficiently clear. Perhaps you aren’t providing enough payment options? The list goes on and on, but ask reviewers to be brutal, as that way you have a starting place from which you can make your site better.

You could ask an expert for a site review and for any tips on optimisation – it might be that your business is simply not being found. Make use of free tools, like Google Analytics, so that you can determine how many people are visiting your site, at what time, from what sort of device and for how long. Other forms of customer relationship management (CRM) software may be able to track your users’ behaviour, so that you can see their journey through your website and identify the point at which they leave.

How to discourage shopping cart abandonment

The practice of adding items to a shopping cart and then abandoning it without making a purchase will amount to around $4 trillion (£2.7 trillion) in 2015, according to Business Insider. The same article claims that 63 per cent of this is recoverable, so how can you tempt consumers back? One of the first tips would be to ensure you use good design to avoid letting them leave in the first place. If you bear in mind the points above (clear call to actions, easy site navigation, plenty of payment options), you should save a huge swathe of deserters.

Another is to use your shopping cart abandonment software or your CRM to send enticing emails that tempt people back to complete their purchase. Many businesses follow this practice, sometimes incorporating a special discount, other times simply reminding the individual that their cart is still active. This is an easy way to hook people back in. The aforementioned article says that an email sent to a customer three hours after they leave a site can generate a 40 per cent open rate and a 20 per cent click through rate. In other words, people read them.

Essentially, you should aspire for a smoother user experience, making it as easy as possible for the customer to work their way through your site.

Shopping cart abandonment statistics and facts Shopping cart abandonment statistics and facts
What can we do?

Whether you have decades of experience or have only recently started your first ecommerce website, we can help you to reduce you shopping cart abandonment rates. We have skills and experience with all forms of online marketing and ecommerce websites which makes us the perfect team to help you. We also offer a wide range of services and marketing strategies which may be tailored to your individual needs to help meet any of your business goals. To find out if we can help you just give us a call today!

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