According to Business Insider, over a year, approximately $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise revenue is abandoned simply because customers were not ready to make a purchase. Luckily enough, out of this, approximately $2.75 trillion is recoverable. Question is, how do you do it?
In this article, Lisa Popovici, co-founder of Cartloop, will show you how to recover 10x more abandoned carts with conversational SMS marketing than any automated solution.
SMS marketing plays a very centric role in recovering abandoned carts. Its ability to take a conversational edge, along with the added advantage of human touch, assures not only business-revenue growth but also guarantees longer-lasting customer-brand relationships.
Why should you recover abandoned carts?
Abandoned carts are the daily ‘headache’ for each business owner. There are various reasons people abandon their carts. These can be: declined credit cards, too few payment options, found cheaper alternatives, not enough social proof, trust issues with the store, technical issues with the website, waiting for their payday, or they just got bored of browsing.
Average cart abandonment rate: 69.57%
People are usually lazy, but if you give them a little help, they’ll go back to their cart and try again.
How to recover abandoned carts with SMS Marketing?
Now that you know why you should recover abandoned carts, it’s time to learn what you should be looking at when adopting a cart recovery strategy with SMS marketing and how to do it for your own ecommerce store with Cartloop.
But first, a quick reminder on why you should use SMS marketing to recover your abandoned carts?
Why SMS marketing?
As I’ve mentioned in the previous article, SMS marketing has become one of the top marketing channels for ecommerce stores in terms of ROI. Proven stats like 98% open-rates, 45% reply-rates, and 6-8x times better engagement rates than email marketing can show all the extra revenue and profits you're missing out on if you're not using SMS marketing.
Also, SMS is the perfect channel to engage with your audience and build customer relationships from scratch. It’s got a weird balance between immediate and not immediate. There’s no pressure on the shopper and zero time wasted on waiting for an email reply or keeping the tab open until a live agent is available.
To make sure I don’t waste your time, before you dive into the details, take 2 minutes to read one of Cartloop’s recent case studies and then you’ll know for sure whether conversational SMS marketing is worth pursuing or not.
Case Study: $7.6K in 7-Days with Human-Powered SMS Marketing
The secrets behind 15x ROI from recovered carts only
So now you know why SMS marketing has reached the highest rate of recovery among other channels. You might be wondering what secrets are behind a successful cart recovery strategy with SMS.
If that’s you, then you’re in luck! I’ll cover five secrets to a great cart recovery strategy below.
2-Way Communication
Adopting a conversational SMS solution is going to help you differentiate yourself. Think about when you want to engage with companies and it’s only 1-way communication. How does that make you feel? Like the company is not listening? Exactly. The same goes for automated SMS marketing.
Sending automated text messages with deals and offers, trying to push another sale will just end up annoying your shoppers and getting them to unsubscribe. It creates a barrier between your store and your shoppers.
Conversational text messaging, on the other side, has the lowest unsubscribe rates. This is because there’s a real human behind each message that engages with customers on a personal level.
Your customers will appreciate you taking the time to explore their needs as this makes you come across as being attentive and valued.
Here’s a clear example of how automated text messages can come up as spammy and annoying to the customers, whereas the conversational approach acts as a shopper’s friend:
The power of human touch
People prefer the conversational tone, and if you add an actual human on top of it, it shows that someone actually cares about them. That someone is your business. With automated texts, when someone replies, they are getting routed to support which can take hours or days to reply.
With SMS platforms such as Cartloop, the average reply time is under 5 minutes. So what does that mean to you in terms of benefits?
- Improved shopping experience. Marketing is not just about Facebook Ads. It’s about awareness, nurture, and trust. Being close to your audience at every step of their buying journey will differentiate you from bigger players in the market, such as Amazon. For example, at Cartloop, we aim to bring the in-store shopping experience online. And that is powerful.
- Instant support. Customers know they have someone to reach out instantly and that influences their shopping behavior. 89% of millennials said that having access to real-time product availability information would influence their shopping choices in terms of which stores they would frequent.
- Increased Trust. First-time customers usually have doubts when shopping in new places. By providing actual humans to help, they feel safe and confident about their orders.
- Lowest unsubscribe rates. Because of the human tone, people are less likely to unsubscribe. Below you’ll find the subscribers' performance from one of our brands. In the past month, they gained 22.749 active subscribers - people who accepted marketing and provided their phone number at checkout - from which only 30 unsubscribed.
- Decrease in customer support volume. By enabling 2-way communication via text messaging, you are able to assist your customers much faster with all kinds of questions or issues so they won’t need to go back and email your customer support team. It’s a win-win situation. You reduce customer support expenses and they get a seamless shopping experience.
- Consistent results. By adding personalization to each conversation, shoppers will incline towards your store than competitors’. It’s proven that around 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.
Listening to customer’s needs
Whether it’s discounts, help with technical issues, or just assistance on finding the right size, your customers can have a shopping assistant. They get first-hand support, solutions to their pain-points, and access to the latest deals and offers. Would you refuse that as a consumer? Yes, me neither.
Having a clear call-to-action
Why are CTAs so important?
You have to be clear about what you want customers to do with the information they’re given and offer them a quick way to do it. Remember, you only have a few seconds of their attention, so the time it takes to log in to your site is precious.
To avoid this, you should include a shortened link to their carts. With their cart just a click away, most customers will go back and complete their orders.
Pro-tip: Short, branded links work best. People are hesitant to click on unknown links from texts, but one with your brand’s name on it re-assures your customers they are in good hands. Brand recognition immediately ingratiates you to your customer. Moreover, consumers with an emotional connection to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value.
Listening to customer’s feedback
Think about unlocking real-time feedback on why shoppers are abandoning their carts. The kind of feedback such as: “the delivery takes too long”, “there was a problem with the payment method”, “the shipping cost is too high” is not available through regular surveys, nor is it observable through analytics tools like Hotjar.
By having real humans on the other side of the text message that can gather insights and feedback from each conversation, merchants are able to make smart actionable decisions in order to improve their business. This helps you find otherwise undetected problems or areas of improvement.
How to set up your cart recovery strategy on Shopify?
So now that you know what the secrets are, you’re probably wondering how to set your own cart recovery strategy with SMS, right?
Well, let me tell you another little secret. It takes about 60 seconds to create and activate your account. Once activated, your job is done, and it's Cartloop’s turn to make magic.
Step 1: Install the Cartloop app from the Shopify App Store
First step, you have to go to the Shopify App Store and search for Cartloop to add it to your store. While you set up your account, your Shopify store will be synced in the background.
Step 2: Optimize your checkout
In order to collect phone numbers from people who accepted marketing, you need to optimize your checkout from Shopify. This is how we usually recommend our merchants to do it:
1. Go to Shopify Settings > Checkout > Customer contact > Select 'Customers can only check out using email'
2. Go to Form options > Shipping address phone number > Select 'Optional'
3. Go to Checkout language > Manage checkout language
Search for 'Phone label' and 'Optional phone label' > Add the following recommended text: 'Phone for support, offers and updates from the team'
4. Search for 'Checkout Marketing' and 'Accept marketing checkbox label' > Add the following recommended text: 'Sign up for order updates and exclusive offers via text messages & email'
This is how your Checkout page should look like now:
Step 3: Select a plan & get started
The pricing at Cartloop currently starts at $0. You only pay when you generate profit. Plus, you get a 7-day unlimited free trial.
You’re all set! Cartloop Recovery Experts will start sending personalized text messages to your shoppers who abandoned their carts and accepted marketing at checkout. The only thing you need to do is come back and watch the dashboard.
To get a better understanding of how Cartloop actually works, let’s take a look at some real-life conversation examples where Cartloop’s Cart Recovery Experts got involved in shoppers’ pre and post-purchase decisions:
Conclusion
Adopting a conversational SMS marketing solution is a long-term benefit for your ecommerce business. There’s no better way to get to know your customers, increase conversion rates, and improve your store than talking to them.
If you want to recover more of your abandoned carts and unlock actionable insights that will skyrocket your ecommerce business, then click here to learn more about Cartloop, schedule a demo call with Lisa or just get started.
