Cart abandonment is known to be a major issue in e-commerce, with an average rate of 71.39% in 2015. A study found that only 49% of visitors who reached the checkout begun filling in their details, and of those who did, only 16.5% completed it.

However, not all hope is lost. There are steps you can take to start recovering those abandoned carts and obtain some of the lost potential revenue:

1. Capture more emails

While some of the abandoners return on their own, some only return after being motivated by the company. Therefore, you should implement strategies that encourage customers to return to the site and finalize their purchase. In order to do so, you must be able to reach out to those customers, most often via email.

Consequently, the higher your email capture rate is, the more emails you send and the higher conversion rate you experience.

However, most abandoners abandon sites without providing any details. Therefore, you should implement strategies to capture more visitors’ email addresses.

Such strategies are the following:

• Optimize your checkout page

Make some changes to your checkout page to improve your email capture rate, such as positioning the email field in the top three fields, having one checkout page and more.

• Use Pop ups

Pop ups offer customers something of value, which can only be obtained by providing an email address, thereby ensuring its capture. The value should be personalized. Pop ups are particularly effective for capturing email addresses of new, anonymous visitors.

You can implement a welcome pop up solely targeted at first time visitors, which often offers a monetary incentive. You can also implement an exit intent pop up, which appears to all shoppers who are about to abandon the site and may offer a discount, cart save, becoming a member and more.

• Use Triggered Emails Booster

Some visitors have already provided you with their email addresses but are not currently logged in to your site. Instead of bothering them for their details again with a pop up, the triggered emails booster feature allows you to identify such customers easily, pairing them with their associated email.

2. Send personalized, multi-stage emails

One of the best practices to encourage abandoners back to the website is the multi-stage abandonment email campaigns. This practice leads to an average of 18% conversion rate (though some companies can reach even 40%) and allows the company to re-engage with customers and build a relationship.

According to a Barilliance study, the most effective email campaign consists of three triggered emails sent out at intervals of 1 hour, 24 hours and 72 hours after cart  abandonment. For best practices of emails’ contents refer to this study.

The emails’ content and type of incentives must be personalized according to the cart content, purchase history, brand affinity and more, to send the right message to the right shopper and thereby improve conversions to about 10%-30%. Furthermore, the cart content should remain on any device the link to the site is opened with, tackling issues caused by device-hopping.

3. Continue campaign on-site

Your customers click on the link in the abandonment email and return to the site, but your job does not end there. The customer journey must continue with the same tone and message of the email.

How?

For example, have a “welcome back” pop up with the customer’s name, if you offered a discount in the email, echo it on the site to ensure them and auto-apply it at the checkout, etc.

4. Implement persistent cookies

When the abandoners return to the site, they are ready to make a purchase. If their cart from the previous browsing session is gone it can prevent them from making the purchase, as they must browse and research again, which takes time and effort.

To prevent this from happening you should have persistent cookies, which keep the cart contents (and other customer information) for future sessions. The cookies should not require the customer to make an account (as many customers don’t) and should take place for as long as possible, as a study by Scanalert found that 4% of customers return after 2 weeks.

Combining the two points above, a simple “welcome back” message and saved shopping cart can increase the conversion rate by as much as 70%.

Follow those steps and you will be able to capture more emails easily and identify returning (not logged in) users with Barilliance’s triggered emails booster. You will target abandoners more effectively with multi-stage email campaigns and continue the abandoner’s journey with the same tone and personalized messages, while saving their carts with persistent cookies.

All of these will allow you to begin recovering more abandoned carts and increasing your conversions.