As a WooCommerce business owner, you go through a lot of effort to get visitors to your site and help them understand the value of your product. You get them to even drop that product into the cart. And at the last minute, they pull out from the transaction and you’re left with an abandoned cart.
What happened? That is the million-dollar question. But the more valuable question is, how can you recover that sale?
This article shares advanced strategies for maximizing your abandoned cart recovery efforts.
When considering why a cart is abandoned, you need to look beyond the easy answers: that added shipping costs were too high or that the checkout process was too complex. There are other factors to consider in why you’re left with an abandoned cart.
Visitors to your site may be experiencing friction points in their user journey. This could include slow loading pages or that the site is not mobile responsive. Another common factor is lack of trust or a perception that the site’s security is questionable.
Are you providing too much information on your products or services? Is the process for making a purchase clear and easy to navigate? These are other common factors leading to abandoned carts.
Placing an item in the cart does not always mean a visitor intends to buy. Often, users are just browsing and not really ready to purchase.
Many subtle factors can influence a visitor to abandon the cart. Using analytics tools like Google Analytics or heat mapping tools like Hotjar and Clarity can help you identify specific abandonment triggers you may be dealing with.
There are changes to your site you can make to get ahead of and reduce these common cart abandonment triggers.
The first step you can take is to hyper-optimize your checkout flow. Set up a single-page checkout or minimize the steps involved and provide clear progress indicators to customers. Make guest checkout the default on your site, while making account creation an option in the post-purchase process. Institute auto-fill capabilities for form fields wherever you can to smooth the customer’s move to purchase.
When it comes to pricing, be clear and upfront. Clearly identify shipping and tax amounts on your product pages and in the cart. Offer multiple prominent payment options such as credit cards, digital wallets and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL). The final step needs to be as frictionless as possible.
The second step is to enhance your site performance and set up mobile responsiveness. Optimize your website’s images so that they load quickly and set up caching so the images are then stored on the user’s device.
In addition, use lightweight WooCommerce themes and review all plugins to make sure they are needed and set up to run as efficiently as possible. To deliver a seamless experience to the numerous mobile visitors to your site, set up mobile responsiveness so they have an effective UX.
The third step toward improving your site for users is focusing on building trust and transparency. Visitors are more comfortable when you have security or trust badges like Norton Secured or DigiCert. Make it clear you are using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for your transactions.
Provide clear return, refund, and privacy policies on your site that are easy to read and find. Visitors also want to know that help is available if they run into a problem. Visible customer support channels are a prominent signal of trust to customers.
Sending a follow-up communication to visitors leaving behind an abandoned cart makes sense. But business owners need to go beyond generic email follow-ups and look at multi-channel recovery sequences. A few WordPress plugins can help with different parts of your recovery efforts, including Cart Abandonment Recovery, Abandoned Cart Lite, and Abandoned Cart Pro.
Abandoned cart emails themselves should be segmented. You can offer tiered incentives to visitors based on the product value in their cart: higher incentives for more-valuable carts. Include product-related reminders like images or a list of benefits.
Emails are a good spot to stress urgency of purchase or scarcity of products. You may also use social proof as a tactic in your emails, inserting customer reviews or testimonials relating to the carted items.
A/B testing of subject lines, calls-to-action (CTAs), and content in your emails is a must to gain the most value from this recovery tactic.
Short Message Services (SMS) notifications should be another part of your multi-channel recovery sequence. With SMS notifications, the goal is to offer concise, timely reminders for immediate impact.
Include a link directly to the abandoned cart to allow them to easily finish their purchase. Integrate your SMS notifications into your email sequences as part of a holistic approach.
The next part of your multi-channel recovery sequence is dynamic retargeting ads. Use this tactic to display abandoned products across the visitors’ social media and through Google Ads.
Craft personalized ads and messaging to re-engage visitors who didn’t complete a purchase. Be sure to exclude already converted customers from this sequence to avoid wasted ad spend.
The final piece of your multi-channel recovery sequence is using exit-intent pop-ups with smart offers. These pop-ups are triggered based on user behavior such as the mouse leaving the viewport.
You’ll want to offer immediate, relevant incentives to visitors, such as a small discount or free shipping. This is an opportunity to also capture an email address for later follow up.
In addition to multi-channel recovery sequences, you can develop a separate email strategy with personalization and behavioral triggers. Using triggers allows you to leverage user history like past purchases and browsing behavior to tailor offers to them.
Triggers also let you take advantage of rule-based automations to send different emails for different visitors. First-time visitors may get a different offer than a repeat visitor. With triggers you can even do real-time cart tracking to initiate immediate abandoned cart efforts.
Abandoned cart recovery needs to be data-driven. Keep an eye on and regularly analyze your site’s abandoned cart and recovery rates. In this process, also identify the top abandoned products or categories. In addition, track key metrics including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for recovery campaigns. Reviewing all of this data will help you guide the development of your recovery efforts.
You will also want to apply A/B testing to everything, including email timing and frequency, incentive types and values, and pop-up designs and messaging. Build on and iterate improvements based on what the A/B testing reveals.
You may never have an answer to the million-dollar question of why the cart was abandoned. But you can improve your abandoned cart recovery efforts and gain more revenue by:
Being proactive rather than reactive to abandoned carts will significantly boost your WooCommerce revenue.
Pressable helps you avoid the need to chase after abandoned carts. We support your user experience by providing a hosting foundation that delivers unmatched speed, security, and reliability. Your site’s page loads are optimized to deliver an efficient and reliable experience to your visitors. We give you the technical confidence you need to focus your attention on integrating useful plugins that help you recover abandoned carts and generate more conversions.
Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—is staffed by WordPress experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your site. If you’re thinking about switching to a managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued optimization and growth.
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