75%. That’s the average rate of people who add items to their online shopping carts and then never checkout. That’s why online retailers began using landline texting to help reduce cart abandonment rates and improve sales.
Window shopping took an entirely new turn with the birth of true e-commerce (online shopping) back in 1991. What was once known as a stroll down the busiest city streets to look at the window displays of your favorite department stores was now a scroll and click on a browser. With the development of apps, consumers began downloading their favorite stores’ apps where they can now browse for items that come to mind, add to cart, and checkout when they’re good and ready to.
What about those who just leave items in their shopping carts and never checkout?
How can landline texting help encourage those consumers to place their orders?
We’ll tell you how.
How Landline Texting is Reducing Lost Sales from Abandoned Carts
Scenario 1: Potential Payday Purchase
Payday is this Friday and you know you don’t have any major bills to pay so that means this week’s payroll is your playground. By Tuesday you catch yourself browsing your favorite online stores and adding items you will definitely purchase once your direct deposit hits the account.
Going from website to another while you’re bored at home and can’t sleep, you’ve now reached website # 10 and all of them have items in the cart. You probably shouldn’t have done this from your mobile device because you used the same browser to hop from site to site whereas on the computer you would have left a tab open for each store. Chances are you’ll only remember the last few website you added items to cart to when you’re ready to buy. The rest will be lost in the abandoned cart world never to be found again.
Solution: Retailers can use landline texting to send a reminder about the items that were left in the shopping cart. Include a link to the shopping cart with all the items to encourage consumers to complete their purchase.
Reminder: In order to send messages to consumers, they must opt-in to receiving messages from your brand.Be sure to include a pop-up asking them to enter their email address to subscribe after they add the 1st item to their cart.
Scenario 2: Caught Browsing at Work
How many of you have had a slow day at work and the next thing you know, you’re 10 tabs deep into comparing prices from one website to the other when your boss walks in. Now you’re quickly closing all of the tabs you had open while you do your best to appear busy. Sound familiar?
What are the chances you will remember all of the tabs you had open? Sure, you can look through your browser history and try to re-open each tab but if the IT department has it set so that history is cleared as soon as you close out tabs or browsers…you’ll be out of luck.
Another case of items going into the abandoned cart abyss.
Solution: Retailers can send a text message using their landline texting platform to send subscribers a reminder about the items in their shopping cart. You could word it like a friendly reminder to see if they forgot to check out (highly unlikely but still) or use similar personalized verbiage.
“Hi Sarah! We noticed you left some items behind in your shopping cart and didn’t want you to forget. Click here (insert hyperlink to their shopping cart items) to checkout before the items run out of stock!”
Scenario 3: The Shipping Costs Buzzkill
We’ve all been there. Happy we found an amazing sale going on from our favorite retailer and all too excited to add, add, and add some more to our shopping carts. Right when we feel we have gotten away with the bargain of the year we happily click on that button to checkout.
Once you’ve checked the subtotal you get your payment method ready, enter your shipping address so that your shopping cart full of items is ready to be sent to you and boom! The shipping cost is added. Total buzzkill! Your great bargain has now taken a turn for the worst and you find yourself hesitating on completing your purchase. You decide to leave all the items in the shopping cart so you can contemplate on whether the shipping cost is worth it or not. But you never go back…
That’s the point of view of a consumer who was turned off by shipping costs. So what’s a retailer to do when they lose customers who liked the subtotal but hated the grand total?
Solution: Shipping costs are what they are and if your business cannot afford to offer free shipping, then perhaps it’s time to use landline texting to send promotional discount codes. If a consumer can cancel out some or all of the added cost to their purchase by using a promotional code at checkout, this may help convince them not to abandon their cart.
Reminder: There are so many online retailers who offer free shipping, 2-day shipping, or free shipping when orders are above a specific dollar amount. Try to work with your shipping provider(s) to work out lower shipping rates that can then be offered to your consumers.
Send SMS Surveys to Find Out Why Customers Are Abandoning Their Carts
The best way to find out why consumers are abandoning their carts is to use the landline texting survey featureoffered by Text My Main Number. Send a quick text to subscribers asking them to reply with the reason they didn’t finish their purchase will help retailers gauge the areas of the business that can use improvement. Here is how you would find out if they abandoned their cart because:
- They compared pricing on your competitor’s website and your competitor’s pricing won
- The website was slow or caused technical issues that need to be fixed to enhance the shopping experience
- Shipping costs were a turnoff and it caused them to cancel their intent to purchase items
- They decided they would prefer to buy in-store
- There was a lack of payment options
If you offer a promotional discount to consumers who take the survey you sent them via text message, you will increase your response rate. For more information on how to decrease your abandoned cart rate, feel free to contact us to learn about implementing landline texting.
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