It’s no secret that one of the biggest hassles for e-commerce shops and marketers is the issue of abandoned carts. In fact, nearly 70% of all shoppers online will abandon their carts without purchasing anything. This is frustrating considering that you spent resources (namely time and money) coming up with strategies and campaigns to grab onto and maintain new leads for them to abandon their carts. And what’s more is that even when they’ve been interested enough to look at your website and add your products to their cart, there’s still more to be done!

There are a couple of reasons as to why a potential customer would abandon their cart and never return. These are:

There are too many competitors.
It could be the case that numerous products similar to yours can be found online. Keep in mind that once your lead Googles a product, a competitor could be tracking that lead to send them ads along their customer journey. In other words, your potential customer could easily become sidetracked with another viable option. And the crazy part is that this can happen seconds before they were about to buy something from you.

People have short attention spans.
These days, it’s often quite difficult to hold people’s attention for long online. While they may need to have quite a few reasons to reach a decision, it doesn’t take much for them to change their mind. They could leave their cart abandoned with the intention of coming back later or to look into alternatives.

In this post, we’ll take a close look at why traditional ways to recover abandoned WooCommerce carts are no longer effective and how you can recapture their attention.

Reasons your follow-up attempts are ineffective

There might be several reasons as to why your campaign to follow up with cart abandoners in WooCommerce fails – however, by far, the most vital factors are reach and engagement. What does this mean? Simply that your campaign hasn’t reached your cart abandoner or it’s not engaging enough for them to return to your site to complete their purchase. Let’s look at why this might be.

Your campaign is not all-encompassing

One vital aspect missed by many campaigns to recover abandoned WooCommerce carts is the fact that online shoppers are unable to pay attention for very long. In other words, they get easily distracted. Just think about it: they are inundated with similar emails that you’re sending out and visit multiple sites and online shops on a daily basis. Simply sending one follow-up email upon exiting your store is not enough.

What we mean to say by this is: your campaign to follow-up with them should include their email as well as through main touchpoints in their customer journey, including your website, popups and social media.

Your campaign is not customized

By far, the most cost-efficient and effective way to capture someone’s attention is through personalization. When people see a personalized message conveyed to them, they feel acknowledged, which increases the chance that they’ll take action or respond.

But let’s first get one thing straight: personalization is much more than simply displaying the customer’s name in your message. It’s also about showing them offers and incentives tailored to their preferences.

What this means is that a cart abandoner is more likely to pass over a generic campaign and pay attention to personalized outreach.

Let’s take a closer look into some methods that you can use to tackle the obstacles in follow-up campaigns to recover abandoned WooCommerce carts.

1-   Use a comprehensive, multi-channel approach

As mentioned earlier, your follow-up campaign should not be something you do only once but should be an ongoing effort as part of a wider multi-channel campaign. Doing so will create a seamless, tailored customer journey, which will boost your reach probability and appeal to your target audience. So what does this look like? Your cart abandoner will get both a follow-up email as well as see the items that they abandoned in their cart while on your homepage (or any other major touchpoint such as the products page).

To take it one step further, you can show them relevant pop-ups with exclusive deals as they navigate your website so that they’ll be incentivized to finalize their transaction. On top of this, you can make use of remarketing ads on Google or social media to serve as a reminder of their abandoned carts.

To go about doing this, your best bet is to find a cross-channeling marketing tool such as  Growmatik. This will enable you to link all your segments from various touchpoints and provide consistent marketing messages on multiple channels, including your website and email. Let’s now go into more detail about each aspect of building up your multi-channel follow-up campaign.

Sending emails 

By far, emails are the most prevalent way of reaching out to follow up with cart abandoners. It’s also a crucial part of our multi-channel campaign. In Growmatik:

• Navigate to the Automation page.
  
• If you’d like to reach new users who have not yet bought anything, then make a rule in the Leads column. If you’d like to reach out to existing customers, then make a rule in the Customers column.

• Assign the condition as User Behavior > Abandoned Cart and the action as Send Email. Click on the Create Email button.

• In the window that pops up, select the Abandoned Cart template. Enter a name of your choice and click on Customize.
  
• When you get to the email builder, tailor your template to your preferences. You can make use of features such as dynamic keywords, product elements (like abandoned items) and coupons to customize your email.

• Hit Save & Exit.
  
• In the Automation page, hit the Create Rule button.

And this is the first aspect of your follow-up campaign. After doing this, every WooCommerce cart abandoner will receive this follow-up email after abandoning a cart on your site.

Customizing the homepage

As you might have guessed, the next touchpoint that should be addressed is your website. This means that we’ll need to personalize that cart abandoner’s experience on your site. To go about this in Growmatik:

• Head to the Automation page and in the Leads or Customers column, make the following rule.

• Assign the condition as User Behavior > Abandoned Cart and the action as Personalize Page. Choose a webpage and hit the Save button. You can then select the homepage or any other page that you think is important (such as the products page)

• In the personalizer window that pops up, you can personalize the page by editing the content or creating new content by hitting the + button. After you’re finished, hit Save & Exit.

• When on the Automation page, hit the Create Rule button.

And, with this, concludes the second part of our follow-up campaign. This means that every person who abandons their cart on your site will be able to see a tailor-made version of your page.

Displaying a popup

Another way to help recover abandoned WooCommerce carts is through showing popups on or throughout our website. Doing this is two-fold: to remind visitors they’ve abandoned their cart and to encourage them to complete their purchase. To get this done in Growmatik:

• Navigate to the Automation page, and in the Leads or Customers column, make the following rule.

• Assign the condition as User Behavior > Abandoned Cart and the action as Show Popup. Choose the amount of time that you want to have passed before showing the popup. Then hit the Create Popup button.

• In the window that comes up, select the Cart Abandonment template. Enter a name of your choice and hit Customize.

• When in the email builder, tailor your template to your liking. You can make use of certain features like dynamic keywords, product elements (such as abandoned items) and coupons, which will allow you to personalize your popup even more.

• Hit Save & Exit.

• Once on the Automation page, hit the Create Rule button.

Once you’re finished, everyone who abandons their cart on your site will be able to see a popup personalized to them.

Retargeting ads outside your site

After the follow-up email and personalizing your website, the next and third touchpoint is external websites as well as social media (such as Instagram and Facebook). This is something that’s overlooked by tons of e-commerce sites when it comes to recovering abandoned WooCommerce carts. By integrating your site with Facebook Pixel and Google ads, you’ll be able to follow your cart abandoners and target personalized ads on other websites as well as on Instagram and Facebook. The articles listed below offers some excellent tips to get this done:

• How to Recover Abandoned Carts with Facebook Sequential Retargeting Ads
• The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Retargeting for Your Ecommerce Store

(Growmatik is slated to add social media automations soon in 2021).

2- Customize your follow-up message

So far in this article we covered the technical aspects of crafting a follow-up campaign that can be sent through multiple channels to recover abandoned WooCommerce carts. However, we haven’t yet covered the personalized content of such marketing messages.

We want to go beyond the simple ‘Hey [first name] Have you forgotten something?!’ message. Adding more personalization will make the cart abandoner feel special and unique.

Keep in mind that you might be limited as to what you can personalize depending on your marketing automation tool of choice. In Growmatik, we’re going to include three items to our campaign to reach out to cart abandoners.

Add abandoned items to marketing messages

When you’re composing email templates and page content for the cart abandoner, you should include the items that the user has in their cart. While you might not think this is important, it can have quite the impact in assisting the abandoner to remember which products they left behind. This is because online shoppers are likely to have visited several sites and get similar emails all the time.

While in the Growmatik email builder and page personalizer tools, add the Product element, which you’ll see in the toolbox. Then go to the product settings panel and assign the content as Abandoned Cart Products. By doing this, Growmatik will show the abandoned items to the cart abandoner.

Use an exclusive coupon to incentive the abandoner

It’s often the case that users who abandon their carts haven’t forgotten they’ve done so – meaning that a “did you forget” message will not resonate with them. It could be that they found something better (finger’s crossed that’s not the case!) or they’re uncertain about which business to buy from. The competition between you and someone else might be quite close that you don’t need to do much to get ahead.

One great proven solution is through exclusive offers. This can be a great way to sway users to make a last-minute decision. This is because a discount coupon plays into cognitive biases like FOMO, hyperbolic discounting, loss aversion and reciprocity. All these biases could help persuade a cart abandoner to finalize their purchase.

To make sure that this is effective, it’s important to state inside your pitch that the coupon on offer is exclusive to that particular user.

Growmatik allows you to include such coupons in not only emails but also popups. To do this, all you have to do is add the Coupon element to your template and input your discount preferences like the amount of the discount. Growmatik will then do its job and automatically show the coupons to the cart abandoner.

Add social proof

An important factor that might make a user hesitant in the customer journey is when they question whether or not the product they are considering is quality. More often than not, they’ll need something more than simply a flashy presentation or slick sales pitch. Instead, they’ll need to see proof of what others have thought about after buying and using your product. We call this social proof.

Your campaign to follow up with cart abandoners will likely necessitate social proof to ease any concerns about your product. What this looks like in reality could range be a couple of excellent reviews from previous customers or testimonials from influencers. To boost the review’s authenticity, you could even include the name and picture of the reviews (with permission, of course).

You can include even more info on your website so that you can boost user confidence, such as real-time data about when exactly a product was sold, how many items are left in stock as well as how many people are looking at a particular product. You can easily do all this with plugins like WPFomify.

Wrapping up

The communication you establish with a user throughout their customer journey can either be simplistic or sophisticated. The methods mentioned in this article can go a long way in helping you recover abandoned WooCommerce carts. However, keep in mind that these techniques might vary depending on your particular business, the market as well as your target audience. We recommend that you focus on your goals and set up the type of campaigns that will have the maximum reach and engagement. And this campaign should be both cross-channel and personalized.