For most online ecommerce stores, despite a great website, great product offering and perfect pricing, the cart abandonment rate continues to be abnormally high. At least 70% of the customers who add items to cart, do not complete the purchase.
The problem is further aggravated if the majority of customers use mobile devices for shopping where the cart abandonment rate is over 85%!
Though the reasons for high cart abandonment are hard to pin-point, some of the more common ones include:
- high shipping cost
- completing the purchase offline or on competitor’s website
- deferring the purchase decision for later
Since it is difficult to know the exact reason in real-time for every customer, there’s little you can do to address the problem proactively. But there are other promising ways.
Recovering abandoned carts
The good news is that although the customers didn’t complete the purchase, they left behind a lot of valuable data:
- which items were added to cart (preference data) and
- when was the cart abandoned (recency)
You can leverage this data to design custom offerings and retarget the customers later.
By going above and beyond to deliver value to the customers, you are essentially building their trust and incentivising them to complete the purchase.
Ways to recover an abandoned cart
Thanks to the severity and the global nature of this problem, solutions do exist, but not without trade-offs:
Avoiding cart drop-off through In-App, real-time discounts:
Showing a discount when the customer is about to exit the page can be helpful, but it is less effective since by now the customer has made up their mind to leave.
Cart recovery through Retargeted Ads:
This can be effective but expensive. Also, there is added friction for the customer to manually go to the cart and complete the purchase.
Cart recovery using Push notifications:
The problem is that most notifications get lost among the sea of other high-priority notifications.
Is there no better and more well-rounded solution?
WhatsApp is the answer!
WhatsApp does manage to overcome some of the above limitations and is emerging as a promising channel to redirect your cart recovery efforts. Let’s take a look at why.
Why use WhatsApp for Cart Recovery
Other than known reasons like reach, easy of use and adoption, here are more important reasons to use Whatsapp for your cart recovery efforts:
1. High read rate
On Whatsapp, 80% of messages are read within 5 mins and in general the overall open rate is over 95%! Do email and SMS even stand a chance? Absolutely not.
2. Conversational means more personal
Your customers don’t need to go anywhere else to initiate a chat. Also, the entire chat history is accessible to them in a single window so they don’t have to hunt for information (discount code etc) later.
3. Real-time means better conversion
The quicker you reach out to customers who abandoned carts to address their concerns, the more likely they are to have a higher brand recall and hence convert on your brand.
How to use WhatsApp to your advantage
1. Automate abandoned cart recovery
When your customer has taken the time and effort to evaluate your offering, try to invest in a systematic way to contact them so that you don’t miss out on any.
For instance, if your order volume is manageable, have an automated mechanism to alert your team when a customer abandons a cart. Your team can then manually contact the customers to understand the issues and offer a solution.
On the other hand, if your order volume is large it's difficult to manage the process manually. So, better opt for an end-to-end automated process. Design unique and personalised Whatsapp cart recovery campaigns based on parameters such as cart value, customer loyalty etc.
Have an automated process to handle cart-abandonment. They are high intent customers and need to be treated better.
2. Offer personalised discounts
As mentioned earlier, it all boils down to delivering personalised value. If your customers get a feeling they are part of just another marketing campaign, they are unlikely to engage.
So, use smart macros to personalise the messages using:
- customer's name
- personalised discount code and
- relevant product they abandoned
Also, be sure to target the discount-related cart recovery campaign only to the price-sensitive customer segment. You may not want to burn money on low margin carts and on high-loyalty customers.
3. Notify about price drops
This is different than the earlier option because of the user segment they target.
If for certain products you decide to drop prices either because of seasonality or to match competition, proactively communicate it to your customers irrespective of whether they are price-sensitive or not.
By being transparent and proactive, you earn trust and have a better chance at recovering lost customers and carts.
4. Highlight product benefits
Leverage your cart-recovery whatsapp campaign to educate customers of your products or brand especially when they fall under any of below categories:
- Premium products with higher price-point
- Niche product or category such as pet toys, farming kits and ergonomic chairs
- Environmentally conscious or socially-responsible such as cruelty-free, vegan and recyclable
When your offering is niche and differentiated, most often the problem can be solved by educating your customers.
5. Reassure them of your user-friendly post purchase policies
At the end of the day, we as humans want to be assured that the worst case scenario will not be bad at all!
If your customers don’t like the product, would they receive timely support? Would they get a hassle-free cancellation and refund policy? Is customer’s payment safe in case of a payment failure?
Use the cart-recovery campaigns to reassure your customers that they will get the best after-sale customer support so they won’t have to rethink while shopping with your brand.
6. Collect feedback
If nothing works, so what! Try to go back to where it all started - to the root-cause of the problem and why did the customer abandon the purchase?
Use this as an opportunity to collect customer feedback if there is anything that can be improved on some of the below areas:
- your website’s checkout process
- product description page
- product’s ratings and reviews
Or pretty much anything else!
One customer lost can help you win more if you collect feedback and act on them :)
WhatsApp Cart Recovery for Shopify
Okay, now that you know how to be smart about contacting customers and incentivising them to complete their abandoned carts (answer: by delivering personalized value!), let’s see how DelightChat can help you solve this complex problem.
DelightChat will help you manage end-to-end cart recovery efforts on WhatsApp for Shopify stores. This is using the official WhatsApp API, which we will help you get access to.
Our solution:
- automatically syncs with abandoned checkouts from your store,
- checks for valid phone numbers,
- allows sending a customized message template with variables,
- provide a discount code as an additional incentive,
- track cart recovery and value of orders recovered
All this in one easy dashboard!
DelightChat allows setting up to 2 cart recovery messages! See a live preview of the message template as you configure them.
DelightChat: A Complete WhatsApp Marketing Suite
Our software will help you with not just cart recovery. DelightChat offers many more automation features such as:
- order confirmation messages
- order fulfilment notification with tracking link
- cash on delivery (COD) order verification via WhatsApp
You can also send a bulk WhatsApp Broadcast to your customer list using the official WhatsApp Business API.
And best of all, your customers queries and replies all land in a convenient and easy-to-use shared inbox that supports not just WhatsApp, but also Instagram, Facebook, Email & Live Chat.
Sign up today on our website, or install the DelightChat Shopify app.
