Make More Money by Reclaiming Abandoned Shopping Carts

Most online shopping sites have plenty of traffic. The problem is they fail to take full advantage of the traffic they have today, instead focusing on driving new traffic. Put this strategy into place now to reclaim abandon shopping carts and get more out of users currently visiting your site.

1. Set up a conversion funnel in your analytics. Find out where the most abandons take place in of your checkout process. This will usually be the shipping charge information page.

2. Edit the checkout flow so that you are asking for some basic information before they get to see the shipping charge. Have them post their shipping information with an email address so when they hit submit to get the shipping charge you are capturing their email address with the shopping cart content information.

3. At the end of each week run an abandon shopping cart report for those who filled out the shipping information with the email address but did not finish checkout. From here you have options as to how to approach the reclamation process.

Example 1: Send an email to the user with an incidental sale. Either something generic like % off or free shipping. Or include a couple of products (including the main items in their shopping cart) on sale to see if you can stimulate the customer to return and finish checkout.

Example 2: Send an email asking if the user had trouble using the web site or needed additional information or assistance checking out.

Or do both in some sort of sequential manner. If you don’t get a response from the first try the second.

Plus come up with some ideas of your own. Reclaiming 10% or more of your abandon shopping carts could translate to big increases in incremental revenue!

PS>B2B web sites can use a variation of this technique in your contact or download conversion funnels.