So you’ve setup your ecommerce store, you have organised great products, have great photos, have done your research into your chosen niche, and are driving targeted traffic to your store. You should be getting good sales right?
For many of you, you are, but for some it’s not quite so simple. Your analytics tell you that there were people, yes real people (not bots) looking at your product, and clicking your add to cart buttons, but for whatever reason, they get further into their buying decision and exit the site.
What’s going on? Do you know how to find out what’s going on?
Here are four ways you can investigate online shopping cart abandonment:
1. Install a Script to Track Mouse Behaviour, and Heat Map Overlay.
A service like Hotjar can do heat map tracking, scroll tracking, funnel tracking, form tracking, polls, surveys, and even invite your users to help directly on your pages, to give live feedback on their experience via screen sharing (Maybe send them out some branded swag as an incentive, or something that makes them feel really important for sharing their shopping habits with you, and also their time).
2. Add a Service That Captures Details about the Cart and the Email Address and Sends Follow up Emails Encouraging the User to Finish the Purchase.
A well know service called CartHook works by adding a small script to your cart page, and it can capture the required data they need, items like product name, product image, the price, the quantity, and on the checkout page the email address. Then some magic happens in the background, and the service waits, for 60 minutes.
If the user doesn’t purchase after this time, they get sent a follow up email, there’s more to it but it’s a great way to get eyeballs across items they added to cart, and get them finishing that purchase.
3. Create an Exit Pop, with a Coupon Incentive via Email to Buy Right Now.
A common example is to offer an exit popup with a coupon, this is not always a good thing, I know from personal experience, I test for this, to see if I can get something cheaper, all it does is devalue your initial product, a better tactic is to get them to opt-in to a campaign or something of value like a VIP program that will allow you to get some identifiable information from the user, and be able to follow up with them in targeted mailing campaigns.
Don’t add too much of a barrier here, remember they were exiting your site, so just ask for an email address, and keep the responses helpful, engaging, and polite. A good exit intent service to look at is Optinmonster.
Here are some examples of pop ups you can include:
4. Add a Retargeting Pixel and Follow Them round the Web with a Call to Action to Finish the Purchase.
By now you would have heard about retargeting. This powerful little pixel, and some script magic, can target and identify users across multiple media streams and specifically target users that added items to cart but didn’t get to their receipt page.
You can retarget these people with ads reminding them that they left something in their cart, or a special coupon for free shipping, etc to incentivise them to return. Facebook business help is a great place to learn how to implement this type of code, and best of all this one is free, (all it costs you is what you spend on the ad campaigns.)
So, Where to from Here?
Hopefully you learned something here and can implement at least one of these tactics to increase your checkout turnover, and reduce cart abandonment.
These are only a few of the ways we to investigate online shopping cart abandonment, do you have your own favourite? Share it with us in the comments below.
If you’re interested in more ways to improve your online store, check out the following related articles on Marketing.com.au:
Chris runs a small virtual agency in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Chris brings a unique edge to his clients, combining inside Hospitality industry knowledge, Design, Graphics, Photography, SEO, Email Marketing, Marketing, advanced funnel techniques and anything in between. Chris is an active member of the WordPress community in Melbourne and helps run the Melbourne WordPress Meetup.
