Cart Abandonment is a serious metric often retailers miss to focus on. While shopping in-store, many customers would come in and browse various products. I can think of many reasons why more than 90% of customers leave the place without making a purchase. A few of the main reasons could be that due to lack of enough information available in-store for the products they are looking for, unable to visualize the whole furniture while trying to customize a furniture item with a single 2 x 2 swatch and retailers cannot contact these customers as that they don’t know how to contact them.
And yes, having these three missing pieces on the website, can still lead to cart abandonments while shopping online. The biggest reasons are unable to keep the customer long enough on the website shop, unable to search for the right product, too many clicks to add an item to the cart, having too many third-party JavaScripts which can lead to slower page loads. In addition to making their website faster and efficient searchable, retailers could reach out to the customer via email reminding them to complete the purchase and/or offer a coupon to do so.
Retailers could incentivize repetitive customers, offer discounted shipping and offer other payment options like financing to reduce cart abandonment rates.
Pavan Alapati, Software Development Manager
What to Do: There are several things you can do to help reduce your cart abandonment rate. Avoid making multiple changes at one time; you want to be able to gauge which tactic is the most effective at reducing cart abandonment.
What to Do: Look for even more ways to reduce the cost of acquiring customers to increase your bottom line. For example, you could cancel low-performing newspaper ads and funnel those dollars into more effective social media marketing. If you can acquire more customers with the same budget, your customer acquisition cost goes down.
What to Do: Look for ways to improve your AOV by bundling products together, offering discounts for purchases over a certain amount, etc. Upsell customers on matching accessories, or design your website to have a “related products” section at the bottom of each product page. Address low AOV on mobile orders by offering mobile-only discounts that bundle products or require a minimum order value.
What to Do: Improving conversion rates is an ongoing endeavor for all retailers; the work truly never ends. To continue driving sales, furniture retailers should always be evaluating their conversion rates, eliminating low-performing ad campaigns and launching new ads while gauging consumer response via split testing. These metrics are usually in constant flux, but following trends can help you optimize your company’s conversion rates.
What to Do: Increase the lifetime value of each customer by creating additional sales opportunities. Follow up with customers who have purchased from you with special offers. Create loyalty programs that encourage customers to continue shopping with you. Create relationships with customers by sending coupons on their birthdays or by calling to check if they’re happy with their purchases.
What to Do: Split test emails to determine the best subject lines, open rates, and click-through rates. Halt low-performing email marketing campaigns and put more into successful campaigns. Use creative subject lines to make emails more exciting to open, such as teasing about a discount or an exclusive subscriber-only product deal.
Why building enough content matters and I am not just talking about adding more products to your site.
One of the toughest challenges for any brand that wants to grow its e-commerce is generating enough content to compete with the increased competition and Google’s ever-changing algorithm. With record e-commerce competition, customer acquisition costs are rising. SEO is the best overall investment for an e-commerce website where content is king. Between March of 2020 – March of 2021, I have seen 30:1 returns from SEO traffic.
Through our research, the average content length of top ranking pages in Google articles contain 2,300+ words. We have also concluded that our top e-commerce websites create at least a blog a week and weekly participate on three social platforms.
Consistently matters more than frequency, so planning accordingly will help e-commerce sites in 2021 and on.
-Nathaniel Smathers, Director of Customer Digital Marketing
To learn more about eCommerce website platform features that retailers need, contact MicroD.