Your site is performing, and you are succeeding in bringing traffic to your site – kudos to you! But wait, then you notice they are dropping off…
This is not a problem that you are alone in experiencing; it’s reported that nearly 68% of online shopping carts are abandoned. In fact, in some cases – they don’t even put items in the cart before they leave; two years ago, the dismal figure of international shoppers that made it to the court was 5.31%.
Just like humans, websites to have issues with abandonment, but there are three underused strategies you can use to retrieve and convert these customers while keeping one step ahead of the competition.
- Persistent Cookies
Improving your shopping cart is key when it comes to optimising conversions, but of course, it’s important to remember that your visitors are operating on their own schedule – and sometimes you won’t be able to prevent them from abandoning their shopping.
In fact, 55% of customers put items in their cart that they have every intention of saving for later; 28% of those return within two days, 21% within three and 16% take longer than a week to return.
Research has shown that carts are often used as ‘wish lists’, so while you can’t prevent them from leaving, what you can do is ensure that when they return, they can return to a cart that is still intact and ready for them to make the purchase without starting from scratch.
This can be done using persistent cookies, different to session cookies, which disappear once the user exits the site, persistent cookies are set when a user visits the site and remain there, usually for 60 days, so that visitors can return to their carts.
Not every website uses them, and it is reported that less than 25% use persistent cookies and 39% of these cookies expire within a matter of hours. These numbers do not indicate that e-commerce businesses are equipped to keep shopping carts intact.
Persistent cookies need to be used- and used effectively – i.e., lasting longer than a couple of hours to allow you to increase your conversion rate. It is also a turn off for a customer if you make registering with your site a requirement to be able to make a purchase. In fact, a major retailer increased their revenue by $300,000,000 by removing their registration requirement. However, it seems that on many sites that DO use persistent cookies, they are only activated once the visitor registers with the site.
Fix this.
56% of your visitors will save their cart to shop at their convenience, enable your website so that it allows them to do this.
- Remarketing
Ever left a website but found that the ads from the site or item that you were looking at followed you around everywhere? What a strange coincidence right? WRONG.
Remarketing, or retargeting is where ads are displayed on other sites to those who have previously visited your website. And it’s genius! It’s commonly said that consumers need to have seven separate ‘touches’ with your brand before they trust you enough to convert to a paying customer. Of course, there is no solid data that the number has to be seven – but you get the idea, it needs to be repeated.
Presenting your brand to the customer more than once creates increased brand recognition, so it’s ignorant to pass up the opportunity to pull consumers back to you.
Only one in five marketers has a budget that is dedicated solely to re-marketing making it an incredibly underused tool. There are some incredible statistics to support you in considering remarketing; remarketed ads have a click-through rate that is ten times higher than display ads, .70% vs .07% respectively. Remarketing is said to boost ad response by 400%, and remarketed ads are 70% more likely to convert.
Marketers who use remarketing, are loyal to it; 52% have said that if they had the option to either increase or decrease their remarketing budget, they would increase it, while less than 3% would decrease.
Businesses that use it yield great results, Richard LeCount from USB4Photographers, “We have used remarketing ads for a number of years now and have had exceptional results; we use a range of digital strategies and it converts higher than our other paid traffic and is one of the most effective tools that we have in our marketing arsenal.”
What Google says about the process of re-marketing, “Remarketing with Google starts with the remarketing tag which you implement once on your website. This one-time tag implementation allows you to create granular remarketing lists which you can use to create not only targeted display campaigns for specific segments of your audience but also targeted search campaigns.”
It’s not just Google that offers the service, businesses such as AdRoll remarket businesses on social media platforms and other popular sites. AdRoll boast ROI like $340 dollars for every $1 spent on some campaigns.
- Exit-Intent technology
How long do visitors go idle on your site before you lose them? Approximately five minutes. Exit-intent technology is so valuable because it doesn’t rely on visitors leaving your site before it’s effective; it’s a proactive tool that detects when a user is about to leave a website.
The technology tracks mouse movements and visitor’s activity before using an algorithm to identify visitors that are about to abandon the site before enticing them back with a last chance call to action via an overlay – a type of call to action which isn’t used very often.
This type of technology isn’t yet widely adopted, but someone who does use it is Neil Patel, who generated a 46% increase in contact requests.
While average overlays are effective in increasing opt-ins (400% more effective) – these overlays are super effective because they are initiated by the mouse movements that indicate a visitor is about to leave, you are given an extra life in effect. The offers can be anything from discounts, eBooks, cart reminders or contests – this list isn’t exhaustive.
Sceptical? There are tools out there that offer a 30-day free trial to monitor the impact it has on your conversions. Preventing prospects from leaving your site is the first step to managing bounce rates.
Don’t dismiss those visitors that abandoned the site as a lost cause – they are only truly lost if you aren’t implementing any active strategies to pull them back. As we have read now, customers rarely convert on the first touch with a brand anyway, the best strategy is to making sure they have contact with your brand again and again before they finally convert – or to engage before they leave the site!
