Every website on the planet have visitors come in the door, click around, choose some items, plan to buy something from you, then just leave. See ya! And they’re gone forever.
What do you do about these people who abandon your cart right when you’ve got them on the hook? And what does this have to do with data monetization or list management services?
Your first priority to addressing this problem is to make sure your pages are being tested and improved with landing page optimization. (Our sister company Conversion Voodoo can help you with that ;-) I am still surprised to run into large traffic websites that are still doing no optimization on their sites. Don’t they know they are losing massive amounts of money that’s just falling off the table?!?! But, even after you have experts come in and massively increase conversions, you’ll still have people abandon your carts. Boo hoo.
So, is there another way to save some of those sales that have just walked out the door? Yep, a simple cart abandonment strategy.
There are 2 strategies: online and offline. Online strategies involve using automated email responders to contact the lost sales. Offline strategies involve contacting the visitors who abandoned at the point of sale by some means NOT via internet; could be phone, letter, postcard, coupon, showing up on their front doorstep begging, etc.
One of our Conversion Voodoo clients has had an ongoing campaign generating thousands of monthly online sales on their websites. They came to CV to increase their overall conversion rates, which CV happily did, and the client was VERY happy with the results. However, we told them that in addition to increases site conversion and creating an email auto-responder system, we could also do some “old school” techniques that could bring back even more of those lost sales.
Our Offline Cart Abandonment strategy was simple: as the client walked out of the door, we would send someone running out after them screaming at the top of their lungs, “Stop!!! Please don’t leave, I’m sure we can help you!”, figuratively speaking of course. We would make a call to the “lost sale” shortly after they left the site, and simply let them know we noticed that they were interested in purchasing, but then left. “Is there anything I can help you with? You are valuable to us. We notice you’re carrying a heavy burden in your wallet, let us help you lighten the burden a bit.”
With that small act of having a customer service rep call them, we increased the sales on that one campaign by 14.6%. Which added a couple million back into our clients pockets (and still adding into their pockets, as we are still running that strategy for them). Needless to say, the client was happy. :-)
This is a simple strategy to implement, with some exceptional benefits: Increased Profits!