Be Christmas Sale ready – Best Strategies for Cart Abandonment Reduction and Recovery

It’s more and more people are coming there. So let’s just give them a few more minutes. Meanwhile, I can also already tell you that our panelists have arrived, so that’s good. Alright. More people are coming in.

Come on in, have a seat, grab a coffee, tea, or water, whatever makes you feel comfortable. Tell your kids they should be quiet now because you are now in the webinar.

Okay. I see more and more people coming in. Alright. Okay. I think we have a tight schedule.

So, since we’re gonna share our presentation and also the session recording afterwards, let’s go right into it. Welcome on board, everybody. Welcome to a very exciting edition of a VWO webinar, which I would say it’s quite special because of the guests that we have with us. And I would like to say welcome on board, and thanks for being with us.

Lino Bort, Founder and CEO at Blueknow. Hi, Lino. It’s very good to meet you here. And with him, we have Paul Nichols, a CRO analyst at blueknow. Hi, Paul, good to have you here.

Paul Nichols: Thank you.

Jan: And my partner in crime Oliver Engelbrecht from Germany’s leading CRO agency, LEAP. Welcome Oliver. It’s good to see you again.

Oliver Engelbrecht: Hi, everyone.

Jan: 

Okay. For the sake of time, we jump through the agenda, which is, very simple, actually. In the first 23 minutes, We’re gonna talk about multiple ways to reduce cart abandonment, which is the first part of the mission. And then afterwards, our friends from Blueknow with us will give us some really interesting insights on how to recover abandoned carts as the second part. It’s all about abandoned carts and abandoned carts become a major subject these days.

Why is that? What primarily because we are living in times of uncertainty. Times of uncertainty are kind of like becoming a roadblock for final consumer decisions. And as such, we see an increase in cart abandonment in multiple areas. So, let’s jump right into the first part, which Oli and I will walk you through before we listen to Lino and Paul and how they show us how abandoned carts can be recovered.

So, check-out is a critical part. We all know that everybody in the audience knows that. So the user browses the products and then adds them to cart. So when he arrives at the cart page that is already about 29% of cart abandonment of total sessions happened. When it comes to log-in and sign-ups and so on, you already lose a significant percentage in this part of it.

It’s a really crucial step. Then you go to the sign-out guest checkout shipping page. It’s interesting. For me, that was when I read the study behind it. I saw that 39% actually drop off when it comes to the clarification of shipping terms, shipping times, and payment. Not necessary to mention that there are more drop-offs there. Let me wrap up quickly.

Some of the recent studies that we found checkout is the crucial point when a visitor becomes a customer. It’s 69% of all visitors. After having added items to the cart, they choose to abandon their purchase. That’s really a big surprise.

If you compare this to a real-world shopping experience, it’s incredible. And SEMrush recently found out that 25 percent of shoppers desert their carts due to overly complicated checkout processes. Altogether, I can’t remember exactly which study it was, but we found the number of 260 billion of global sales is recoverable simply through a better checkout design. And an average site has about 31 preventable usability issues in the checkout form.

It’s another interesting fact. And fixing the issues pointed out in this presentation is a great first step towards optimizing for the reduction of cart abandonment. Now, we have looked into different areas and, we found, let’s say, 8 experiences, 8 clusters of specific moments that have the greatest influence on whether a website shopper would actually ultimately become a customer. Or become at least a lead. It is about the order review, user interactions, account creation, or account selection, the checkout process in itself, cultivating credit credibility, the challenge of trust, fields, microcopies, totally underestimated subjects.

Really interesting what we’re gonna see there shipping information and how it should be provided and payment methods, of course. So we might have presented a lot of slides here, and we will flip through them pretty quickly. And if we are running out of time, we might skip one or the other thing. But we’ll still be in the presentation. It might be useful in the presentation deck that we can share with you.

So, the division of this user experience is basically a framework. It’s just a guideline. It structures our work when we review the checkout experience and we don’t get lost in the many things that we can optimize. So let’s jump right into our first part – Order revenue.

65% of all sites failed to reach a good level of performance for the order review. It should say it’s like I don’t know why it is. Actually, I think the order revenue is a little bit when we feel our UX Designers feel that the job is done. So it’s still a very critical thing. Order review is a crucial step. And an acceptable performance is the least that we should generate.

So what we have seen are the pitfalls are omitting important information that the users will need down the line or not using supportive wording that will make users want to take the step. Best practices – we’re gonna see some of them. Give shoppers concise and order summaries, product details, quantities, and breakdown of all fees. Shipping and billing information must be precise, clear, transparent. And it’s also smart to show product pictures that’s often forgotten because people should keep in mind what they actually have chosen. But behind all of this is psychology. 

We’re talking to users. We always call them users. People. Right? So there’s a lot of psychology behind it. So tell us a bit about cheering.

Oliver: 

Absolutely. Thanks, Jan. So, I’m here to always give a bunch of examples of experiences that Jan talks about. And coming from a psychological background with our agency at LEAP. Of course, there’s always many, many different principles you could apply. But we’ve always picked 1 for every experience that we think is the most prevalent in each case.

And in this case, it’s cheering. And cheering is something that every one of us experiences on a daily basis. Users love positive affirmation. Humans love positive affirmation. Whenever someone tells you, “Hey. Good job. You’ve done a really good thing here”, you feel better about yourself. We can use that in check-outs as well. 

Here is an example where it’s not done very well. That’s a check-out. It’s a cart page, and there is a lot of information on there – a lot of important information. But it doesn’t really talk to the user and about the user.

So there are some ideas of how we can do it better with positive reinforcement. We positively reinforce users’ choices, and they would not only feel like they’ve made a good choice, but, crucially, they will also feel like the product that they’ve put into the cart kind of already belongs to them. And something that already belongs to us is something that we hold very dearly, and we don’t wanna lose it. And by combining these two factors, we can very significantly reduce the minutes as part of the checkout. And here’s one example where we’ve done it, where we had to simply just add one line basically, and that line is a good choice.

This is your item. And we’ve tested that over and over again with all kinds of different clients and something along those lines, which you can very much personalize to your target audience as well, really goes a long way in invoking this feeling of happiness because I’ve done something good in this feeling of ownership of product. So, by simply vetting these lines, we’re seeing significant uplifts, basically every single time we tested and much lower cart abandonments.

Jan: 

Okay. Well, there are… That’s probably a very well known example. Making the order review section editable is another one that we find so that you can still edit certain characteristics of the stuff that you put into your basket. Using supportive wording, adding or removing, certain summary information also can make a big difference. The user interactions – So, on an average user will encounter poor or broken performance on 30% of sites. So only 21% of the sites in the recent study that we’ve seen have user interactions that perform well or even perfectly.

So not supporting the back button used for navigating to any previous checkout view. That is a typical pitfall – Use of an apply button rather than automatic updating and highlighting changes. Allowing users to forget about your checkout, not adding adequate payment methods. And there’s a lot of psychology in there as well. Over to you, Oli. 

Oliver: 

Absolutely. So, Jan has pointed out several things that go into pretty different directions, but we wanted to focus on one thing that we’ve seen to work very well, which is generating attention to movement. And it’s something that really goes back to a primal brain from 1000 and 1000 years ago. When there is movement somewhere in the side of our eye, we can’t quite know where it comes from.

We will immediately direct all our attention what’s this movement to make sure there’s no danger to us. So it distracts us, which is also, by the way, a reason why you should never have automatic sliders on your homepage. But we can also use this very much to our advantage. And here we see a normal shopping cart and what happens in many unique cases is as people open another tab, they wanna check what the competition is offering. They need to look into the emails to recover a password or something like that.

And in many cases, they might open Instagram or Facebook and forget about the shopping basket altogether. And that’s something we can avoid quite significantly here if we show a moving text in the shopping cart tab once people open a new tab because their attention will be drawn back to the potential purchase. 

And next slide, please. 

And this is an example where a shop has done that very, very well. So you can see a bear and there’s a text that’s rotating through that’s saying your shopping cart’s waiting for you and even with a little heart at the end.

And simply from this movement, people will at a much greater rate return to the shopping basket and continue with their checkout.

Jan: 

Thanks, Oli. I’ve never tried it, and I think that’s a real plus, and it’s, definitely something that we will encourage our customers to give it a try because we all know how easy it is to open an additional tap and then get distracted and forget about the basket. Adding functional buttons during the checkout process is another one. Adding functionality to automatically apply discount codes is another one. Making sure that users don’t forget to interact with your site in the first place. So here is the thing that I like less. It deals with creating an account, dealing with registrations, and so on and so forth.

So for most sites, the performance for account creation selection is very poor, basically. So it is cumbersome. It’s mandatory where it shouldn’t be, and there is a very high number of implementations where users told us that this is absolutely considered broken, making it the first time to create an account with elaborate forms. This is a real showstopper not having a visible guest login option. We know yes, we would prefer to let them register and create an account. 

For being customer-centric, you really have to think about a guest checkout option. And complex passport creation is my favorite one. It drives me crazy if I am warned again and again, and I can’t find a reasonable password. So, let’s move just into the psychology here because I like that a lot, Oli, over to you.

Oliver: 

Thank you. The main thing here is simplicity. So Kahneman has found that we think through 2 different systems. System 1 is the one where we make 95% of our decisions, and it’s the one where we can just instinctively continue with tasks that are very, very easy to do. And system 2 is the one that we have to use when something happens like what Jan just talked about where we have to figure out a very, very elaborate password, or we have to go into some folder and find a password because we remember we once created another calendar that website 5 years ago, but we have no idea what password possibly we set.

So we want to make sure that people can stay in system 1 gear as much as possible. And pages like these really do not help them. I mean, especially the one on the right side with, like, what feels like it does require your password. It’s really not helping to just very easily click, click, click, and go to the next step. So what we should do here, coming on the next slide is basically offer a guest checkout option in the first view.

It’s one of the options you have here. You can also do quick checkouts with PayPal, things like that. Log in with Google. It’s used more often. But here, we wanna focus on the guest checkout because many users simply aren’t sure yet that they wanna become regular customers at your page. You’d rather have someone shop once and realize, ‘Hey, it’s a great experience,’ than have them drop out because you have terrible pages like the ones we showed earlier. So here you have, in the first few options, very clear choices of what you can do, how you can check out, and it really, really helps easily get to the next step. Another option, which is on the next slide, is once they have gone through your checkout and they have become a customer and you have them in your system, then you can still ask them to create a password because, hey, it helps you next time – we save your information. It makes it much easier for you next time. You give a valid reason, a reason why; it makes people understand why it might make sense at this point to actually create something.

But crucially, you already have the order in your system. You’ve already made some extra money.

Jan: 

Yeah. Thank you. I I think simplicity rules, and I am a big fan of guest checkouts. And I think if it’s properly done, it actually is not lost data because you can actually, post-purchase, pick up a lot of information, because people want more information.

They want guarantees and so on. So adding a guest login permanently is a real must. Adding ‘Save your information for later’ also is highly recommended. And there are many good reasons that you can give why they should create an account. Please make sure that passwords are simple because otherwise, you’re driving people crazy. At least me.

The checkout progress bar is not a new subject. It is knowing where you are in the topography of your site and the process will give your users a sense of control. And, if there’s a clear progress indicator, then people are much more likely to put up even with the longer checkout process. So this transparency is mandatory. And, the best practices are to create clear visibility, simple wording, bold visuals, and fit your brand, etc. So, have a look at the overall impression it gives to you, and I think about the psychological moment as well.

Oliver: 

Yeah. And the big thing that comes in here is the Sunk Cost Fallacy. You will surely know that from your own life, when you feel like you’ve already invested a significant amount of resources, be it time, be it money, or anything else into something, then you don’t want these already invested resources to go to waste. So you’re much more likely to finish a process when you’ve already invested in it. And we can very much employ that in the progress bar. This is how you shouldn’t do it, which does not have a progress bar at all.

And everyone is completely lost as to where they are on the site. But if we do implement the progress bar we also crucially mark the first steps – step or steps – already as completed. For example, step 1 being the shopping basket. That’s already ticked off. People realize – hey.

I’ve already spent, like, 15 minutes on the site browsing and finding the right products. I filled my shopping basket. Now I should totally check out because otherwise it’s gonna go to waste. And here’s a great example of how it can look. That’s pretty much perfectly done. Step number 1 has already ticked off.

And you don’t have that many steps up there, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. And you’re on a great way to completing a purchase. Off to Jan again.

Jan: 

Yeah. Thanks. So what I like most about the progress bar is that it’s so easy to test it. So you can move it around. You can put it in different ways.

Play around with it. And that is what we always encourage you to do. It’s always part of the low-hanging fruits to encourage our new customers. If they wanna try out VWO, try a progress box. Try to make it better, make it more visible, make it older, whatever, it absolutely helps you to avoid cart abandonment.

Let’s go to things that nowadays, especially those today, where we all live in uncertain times, why trust and credibility have to be cultivated and have to really become a priority. Online retailers,  by default, handle a lot of sensitive and personal information. So, use quality eCommerce check-out UX always to create a sense of trust and to make sure that you care about data privacy and the quality of the promised goods. So trust is a crucial thing. Offer several payment methods, including support features like chatbots. Speak clearly about your return policies linked to your FAQs.

And offer great customer support there. Explain why you need certain information. So when you need information, there must be a reason for it. So you don’t take it for granted that you just throw in a field and say, ‘hey, give me this information.’

Whenever this happens, you should give a little short explanation. Maybe it’s just a sentence, explaining what it is good for and how you will deal with the information. And then last but not least, trust badges. They cost money but they are so highly effective. We do have a number of partnerships going on with Trusted Shops, Trustpilot, TrustedSite, and so on. So it allows you to actually try it out.

You can try it out. You don’t have to make a blind decision. Try it out. You would see that this creates a significant lift very, very easily. Oli, there’s more psychology in this.

Oliver: 

Yeah, there’s a reason why this helps a lot in checkouts and everywhere on the site. And it’s interesting because when it comes to social proof, it’s one of the most well-known topics when it comes to conversion optimization, and everyone says, yeah, I know about it. But then you put a little Trusted Shop badge in your footer and people think, Hey, that’s efficient. I’m showing that I’m trustworthy. But it’s not.

It’s one of those topics that we really have to hammer home to our users at every single touch point that they have on the site. Here, for example, is a check-out. And checkout is the most crucial point because what we see on the right there is €70. Hey, you’re gonna spend €70 here right now. And by that point, Vans is a big brand, but still, I’ve already forgotten how trustworthy it is.

I’ve already forgotten how great the product is chosen. So we need to display trust signals very, very prominently. In every single, basically on every page that we have and where it kind of fits in. For example, here’s a checkout, and we’re reminded, hey, 5 stars for the product that is or what I’ve picked. Or here, a guaranteed safe checkout with a 365-day happiness guarantee.

This is just something we need to put into every crucial step that the user is doing to constantly remind them why it absolutely makes sense for them to continue.

Jan: 

And it’s clearly more important than it was yesterday. So in times of uncertainty, this is twice as important as before. Right. So, lots of optimizations—the possibilities, things that you should try out, optimizations that you should test—and put it into your checkout.

So I’m going to rush a little bit to the other fields because we’re running out of time. The field – micro-copy. So, every potential friction point obstacle in this process can be removed with a micro-copy. Well, well-placed wording can help a lot and can actually give our users peace of mind and make them move forward. I would like to come straight away to the psychological principle here.

Because it’s easy. It’s clear, and everybody will agree to it. Tell us about The Feedback Heuristic.

Oliver: 

Thanks, Jan. So feedback is something that we value very, very much. And there are many, many ways to get feedback in forms. One of them is you let people fill out everything, then they click on the next step button, and then you send them back and say, this was wrong. This was wrong. This was wrong. 

That is not really helpful because we value immediate feedback. We also value knowing which lines we have to fill out and which ones are maybe not compulsory. So here are two examples that are very, very confusing, really telling us a lot, but we could change that up. And we changed that up by giving immediate feedback, both positive and negative.

Here, for example, no feedback at all. You’ve not done stuff correctly. And this is crucial. It brings us back to cheering. Because if you just hop on to the slides please, if we not only give negative feedback when someone’s done something wrong, which is important, but we also give positive feedback every time the user does something right.

Each of these green arrows are the ‘well dones’, which will motivate them to go further based on cheerings. And it’s a very, very powerful tool in forms because everyone finds forms pretty annoying there. 

Jan: 

Yeah. Kind of the positive feedback balances the negative feedback or correction that it’s shown here. It’s really, really a healthy communication flow that we see here.

Oliver: 

Absolutely. And here’s just an example of, reminding people which fields are compulsory and which ones aren’t because maybe I don’t wanna give you my phone number or my date of birth. And if it’s not compulsory, it’s gonna make it feel better. Again, if it’s compulsory, you need to do what Jan said already and explain why it is.

Jan: 

Yeah. Okay. So add feedback to your forms. It’s not complicated. It can be tested very easily. Go ahead. Do it. Shipping sounds simple, but we see a lot of mistakes there. It is an element that can make people wonder if it will arrive in time, and we all know, we are all very concerned about whether it arrives in time before Christmas, etc. So transparency and management of user expectation is key. Using delivery speed instead of delivery date is a pitfall. You should better put a specific date if you can. Surprise costs such as shipping costs that show up only at the very end of a checkout process – This is a killer.

Yeah. I wanna know it, the earlier, the better. And, not showing the cutoff time as a countdown for applicable delivery. So be upfront. I think that would be my bottom line here. And, maybe all of you could tell us a bit about the ambiguity aversion and what people feel.

Oliver: 

Thank you. So people don’t like making decisions when they feel like they don’t have all the information necessary to make that decision. And it’s basically what Jan just said. We need to be upfront about all costs that might be added later. We need to be upfront about what people can expect. And when it comes to shipping days and it says something like usually ships in 1 or 2 business days, it means, hey, if I if I’m unlucky in my case, it might ship in 12 business days, Also, I don’t know where are you guys shipping from? How long does it take to arrive where I am? So…

Jan: 

Absolutely. It really usually means, well, maybe maybe you’re lucky, maybe not. So this is the ambiguity that you have to avoid. Right?

Oliver: 

Absolutely. And we can avoid it pretty easily. So we need to display shipping information early on with all attached costs and that will help people to proceed in the process because they know everything that they need to know. And here’s an example of how it’s done much better. It gives you several options, and you can choose how fast you want the shipping to be attached to it.

Even here, it’s not fully perfect because the best way to word such things is not ‘We ship in 3 to 4 or 5 business days’ because I don’t care when you guys ship. What I care about is in 7 to 8 days it is

Jan: 

When it arrives.

Oliver: 

At your house. So I care about when it arrives where I am. So even here the wording is very, very important. And it doesn’t only take the ambiguity out, but it also helps the user feel like it is about him.

Jan: 

Yeah. So it’s a good first step, but nowadays, you would probably expect to have a specific date, and not have to calculate what is the business date, and today is Friday, so makes things easier. Yeah, the default selection should be the cheapest delivery option, of course, showing delivery date versus delivery speed. That is what we just said.

And using geographical data to display relevant shipping information right on the product page also helps. Now, money matters. Payment methods are a crucial thing. We lose a lot of users when the time has come to take out your credit card and so on. Credit card forms remain the weakest aspect of the checkout flow of many sites.

On average, 25% of sites deliver a very poor experience, users told us. And, the best practices here are autocomplete form fields, pre-field the fields with the city name and state by using geotargeting or displaying clear arrow indicators to avoid typos and, use the field sequence that resembles one that is printed on a physical card. Don’t use a default and have users gain control over the process. There are other best practices we’re gonna talk about in a second, but first, let’s have a look into people’s minds. So what is the illusion of control, Oli?

Oliver: 

So the Illusion of control taps into the feeling that we as humans love to feel in control when we have to do something. In many cases, we aren’t really in control, like a checkout process, which is something where mostly the providers are in control because the provider asks the user for certain information, and they have to give it. However, we can make users at certain points feel like they are in control. The payment option is a very, very important point here because where we want to feel most in control is when we have to part with our most prized possession, which is our money. And we have a site that has already a default.

And, it doesn’t really make me feel like I’ve any control here. They’re trying to push the credit card payment onto me. And really payment options is the one point where we really advise against using defaults at all. So if users are shown all payments in the first view, more of them will convert because they feel like they have freedom of options here. And the next one is a great example that we had to anonymize because that’s one of our own clients.

And we’ve done a few things here. We put all the payment options into the first view. And secondly, we’ve added that headline option. All of a sudden, I feel like I have some sort of control here because I can choose how I want to pay. And it might seem like small changes, but in this very case, it’s been worth well into the 7 figures, almost 8 figures on a yearly basis for one client with a high, average order value.

So It didn’t seem like big changes sometimes, but you need to really think about what is most important to the feeling of my target audience and then something like that can happen very easily when it has to.

Jan: 

Yeah. One more word to it eventually, a good iteration of this test would be to reduce a little bit because this drives us into the Paradox of choice. Right? So, I think I don’t know. I’d love to test it if, with fewer options, it would perform better.

This is really for me, my intuitive reaction is, okay, do I really wanna see all of them, or should we maybe group let’s say some of them under each other? I don’t know. But clearly, I have a choice. I’m in control. I can do what I want. I don’t have a default and so on.

And as a big enemy of PayPal, I would clearly put Paypal last. No. Just kidding. I think that the one that comes first is not necessarily the default, but clearly, the one that might matter to most users might be suitable to most users, should always come first. And this depends very much on the market you’re talking about.

Alright. So, we mentioned these ones. We’ve browsed through 8 experiences during the checkout process – a lot of stuff to be digested. As I said, again, there are a lot of things that we could have done. Every one of them invites you to try out things.

And you will be surprised how many positive results you can actually generate and how many abandoned carts you can actually avoid And, if you wanna try that out and if you wanna walk you through, do this, what we just did with with multiple different sites, and you wanna do this on your own site, just drop me an email, send me an email to jan@vwo.com. And, we’re gonna meet and have a 30-minute walk through your site and find out where your biggest, low-hanging fruits are. Right. So that was my part, Sonia, over to you back again. I’m really excited.

Are there any questions already in the audience? Or is our audience a little bit hesitating? If there is anyone who asks a reasonable question, in the next 30 minutes, I’m gonna invite him for a pizza tonight and send it straight to your home office. And I mean that. It needs to be a good question, though. So think about it.

Think about your site. Think about what is better and what might be a relevant question that is interesting for a lot of people related to the checkout experience. Yeah, that gets us to, let’s say, when all the stuff that we’ve done, we were never coming to a moment that we were not bringing down cart abandonment to 0. And I think Lino and Paul are very happy about this because this means we can take action, and we can get them back on the side. So even if we have optimized, we’ll still always have a significant number of abandoned carts. And, I think our audience is really curious to know, okay, how can we act on them and how can we get them back and recover them? So over to you, Paul.

Paul: 

Okay, guys. Cool. Can you see my screen okay? Can you see the presentation? 

Jan: 

Yes. We can.

Paul: 

Perfect. Okay. Well, look, thanks. Thanks for sticking with us. I’ve really enjoyed the content so far, and I hope you get some great value out of this section too. So, we’re gonna show you 5 simple steps to add 5 to 7% to your bottom line. Now, let’s discuss around 70% of eCommerce carts are abandoned globally, which is an incredible number when you think about it. So this really is a huge problem that we all need to solve. But the good news for us is that because these shoppers are so far down the funnel and at the highest buying intent possible, even getting a small fraction of them back, can make a very healthy difference to the bottom line.

So, to that end, I’m gonna show you 5 easy-to-implement tactics that will make a significant difference to your revenues. A 5 to 7% uplift really is achievable with only a few hours of work. So, the first step is don’t let your anonymous visitors get away. Now, what do we really mean by that? Well, we have 3 types of visitors.

We have registered users, guests, and anonymous visitors. Most marketing automation platforms will target the rest of the users meaning guests, but it’s really important that you try to recover your anonymous visitors too. Because they represent a significant proportion of your total visitors, so providing a solution for them helps you widen your funnel as much as possible. Really effective tactic here is to show your anonymous visitors a personalized exit intent pop-up containing their cart. You can invite them to enter their email address and in return, send them their cart contents.

Now on average, with our client base, we found that this increased the proportion of cart revenues by 8%. So, it’s well worth doing. The second step is to be quick. Your first hour is super important. Now that you captured that email, you just set up your marketing automation platform to trigger the first email sent within 1 hour.

You want to grab the business’s attention whilst you’re still in front of the mind. We studied a hundred thousand abandoned carts from our clients and found that sending the first email within 1 hour rather than 24 hours after cart abandonment resulted in a 2.64 times increase in conversions. So, check that your marketing automation platform allows this. Some only have the feature to batch send rather than use trigger emails, and those delays are costly.

You should follow up with 2 more emails – 1 after 24 hours and the final email up to 72 hours. That’s the optimal strategy. The 3rd step is to keep it really simple. All you need to do is send them the cart and send them their personalized cart content in the 1st email. You don’t want to distract them or worse confuse them, so we advise you to follow the mantra of one call-to-action per email. Always.

Here are a couple of examples for you to illustrate the point. The email on the left is cluttered and doesn’t have a clear call to action. The email on the right is much more personalized. It only shows the summary of the shopper’s abandoned cart. No more, no less. Now, guess which one converts better, and guess which one is a conversion killer? All you need to do is clearly show the shopper’s cart.

You should make it visible without scrolling. So, just keep it really simple and don’t include any of the links or distractions. The 4th step is to take the shopper straight to their cart. Something you need to be mindful of is cross-device hopping. So, we found that 50% of our client shoppers completed their purchase on a device other than the one they were browsing on when they abandoned their carts.

You need to take them straight back to their cart regardless of what device they used to open your email. We found that taking the shopper directly back to their cart was sold to in a 2 to 3 times uplift in recovered sales, when compared to not regenerating this session. Regardless of the device they were using, check that you’re marking the automation platform off of this and don’t miss out this vital step. Here are some examples. Now, the first thing to note here is that this email is quite cluttered, and it’s not personalized because it doesn’t contain the shopper’s cart contents.

Also, to make matters even worse, the call to action button doesn’t pop off the page. You have to go looking for it, which is never a good thing. And finally, if you click through, this is where you land. Obviously, taking a little bit of time to load here. What you’ll see when it loads up is you see there’s already a secondary call to action.

So that’s kind of taking the customers away from completing the purchase, the secondary call-to-action being a credit card offer. And even worse than that, the shopping cart itself isn’t populated, so now the user has to go back into the site, populate their cart, and come back to the checkout so clearly that is a conversion killer. So in this example, the email is actually really good. It is clear. It presents a personalized cart, and it’s only got one call to action.

But, unfortunately, when you click through, they are not even taking you to the checkout page. You’re just taken to a broken link, so even worse, I mean, absolutely a conversion killer. Here’s an example of another well-constructed email. It’s personalized and contains the cart contents, so it’s really clear. And when you click through, you’ll see that the cart is fully populated, and all you need to do is click one button to confirm the purchase and give your credit card details and as you go for other payment methods.

So that’s how you want it. Typically removing all friction for users to complete their purchase. The 5th step is to test, test, test. So, here’s an example from a hotel client of ours. The image on the left is to control, and the image on the right is the variant. We use an image of the actual hotel the shopper will be visiting to really personalize the content.

We also image matches from the eCommerce site. And the result was a 52% increase in conversions, which is, of course, great. Now, there are so many things that can be tested and optimized. We have data from 100 of 1000 abandoned carts, and we found a testing template in the email, descending time, and the email subject line made the most difference to conversion rate. We get too deeply into that because our partners, Visual Web Optimizer, are experts in the field. Suffice it to say, tests should be ongoing to increase your conversion rates.

So, how would applying these tips improve your Christmas campaigns? Now, here’s an example from a client of ours, a consumer electronics giant. The left-hand section is their average sales using their existing marketing automation platform, but not implementing these five tips. They saw an 11% conversion rate for cart recovery and a €300,000 per month uplift in sales compared to not having a solution. It’s a pretty good result, but the middle section shows what happened when they applied these 5 tiers. They saw a 35% conversion rate, cart recovery, and €1,000,000 a month in sales, so of course, a much better result.

And finally, the right hand shows what happened when they applied these 5 tips around Black Friday. They saw a 67% conversion rate for cart recovery. And €1,940,000,000 up in sales, which is, of course, an amazing result. And in general, compared to the rest of the year, we see a 13 times uplift in sales in the 5 days around Black Friday. So implementing these tips before then can make a massive difference to your campaigns.

Would you like to know why shoppers are abandoning your carts? If so, we’d like to offer you a free gift – Follow the QR code or the link below to install a pop-up, and the pop-up will help you learn specifically why shoppers are bonding their carts on your site. With that intel, you can make much more informed decisions to reduce your level of cart abandonment and significantly increase your revenues. We really hope that you get great value from it.

In summary, those are five steps that add 5 to 7% to your bottom line. They only take a few hours to implement. They don’t require any coding, and they will have massive value for you. So, thanks for your time. We really appreciate it. We hope you found the information valuable, and we’re happy to answer any questions you might have in the Q&A session that follows.

Thanks again, and best of success in reducing your cart abandonment.

Jan:

Thank you so much, Paul. That was really encouraging. I must say if I were running an online shop, I’d be absolutely sold. So I would take a photo of your QR code or drop a line to us. As a matter of fact, I think we do have a little poll l because we are, this time we decided to to come up with a joint offer.

So all the panelist people that you see above here are ready to meet you. So, what you saw both in our presentation and Paul’s examples are just general examples that show how big the potential is. Of course, you will have your individual challenges. You have your funnel. Your brand has potentially different priorities, but we’re more than happy to spend some time with you, have a look at your site, and use our experience—also our technology—to really give you an idea of what can be done to reduce the effect of abandoned carts, both avoiding the abandonment and recovering the clients who abandoned your site. So if you wanna do this out there, I don’t know if, Sonya, if you can hear me. Yeah, thank you very much. So a very easy poll here. So would you like to meet VWO double and our panelists to review the challenge of abandonment on your page? Please give us a yes, and or give us, maybe, later, if you can’t.

I have been asked one question a couple of days ago where people said, ‘Isn’t it too late?’ And my answer was pretty structured. So, well, the short answer is no. It is not. Because of what Paul just mentioned. It’s pretty simple.

Right? It is not a big project. You don’t need a lot of implementation hours. You don’t need a lot of developers’ hours, etc, etc. You just need the right tools and the right approach, and then you can actually make it happen before losing a lot of customers because of cart abandonment in your Christmas campaigns. So, it’s actually feasible to run and implement 3,4,5,6 improvements in your checkout funnel and generate more business during the holiday seasons. And so, I think if you’re interested, great. We’re gonna catch up with you. We’re gonna come and we won’t steal your time. We just wanna understand, and be a resource for you, and I promise you that we will not be too sales pushy.

Thanks for that one. And, I think we’re done with that. Thank you, Sonia, for this. So, again, I have a couple of questions. One is about the complexity.

Maybe Paul or Lino, I don’t know who of you, well, can you give us ideas? It’ll be a little bit more specific. Let’s say I’m running an online store. I’m a fashion brand in Germany. I like what you just showed me, and I would like to give it a try.

Can you briefly walk me through it? So, what is the approach? Why is it so simple? What would you do with us if you said ‘We’re gonna try out. So now, please.’. I don’t know. Lino, you wanna take this one? What would be the approach?

Lino Bort: 

I can answer the question. In our case, we are very focused. We specialize in shopping cart recovery. So, a big difference in relation to a marketing automation platform or another shopping cart recovery provider is that we only need a tag and all is done. We don’t need technical intervention on the customer site.

So when you are talking to a big brand, it is fundamental because sometimes you speak with one country and the center of this plant is in another country, and it is you know, time is money. You need to act quickly, to obtain results today and not the next year.

Jan: 

Okay. I think it’s a very straightforward approach, and I can only encourage people to give it a try. This together with a couple of tests that you might wanna run. We also have a free trial of VWO, which is pretty easy. We plug in our script. We agree with you on a couple of tests. We even help you in ramping it up. So, don’t assume that this is gonna be a big project, and we will tell you that we won’t arrive in time to make a big difference. I’m just checking the audience. Obviously, nobody’s for pizza today.

Normally, I always have a couple of pizza questions there, but today, maybe it’s not the right time because people are already heading into the lunch break. I don’t know exactly. But nevertheless, I think that was a really interesting insight. And I think that nowadays when people are not so sure and they are starting to shop for Christmas and so on, and then they give up on it during the last meters. That is something that we can actually avoid.

We will catch up with everybody in the audience. We will share this one once again. Thank you very much, Oliver, for walking us through the crucial steps and exams on how to avoid it. And thanks to you, Paul and Lino for being with us and giving us these insights. I hope that together, we can try out a lot of actions on our audiences’ websites. And, here is my first question.

Listen. James. But if you’re lucky, you’re gonna go away with the pizza. So could the solution be up and running? Oh, that’s a very tough one.

That’s a very tough one. Thank you so much. James is asking, could the solution be up and running before Black Friday? This question goes to Lino. Oh, the moment of truth, Lino.

Lino: 

It’s up to the customer. We can do it as fast as the team of the customer is quick. So, sometimes when you talk to a big brand, there is some bureaucracy. There is some privacy and security compliance that you have to pass. And, you know, it’s only a question. It’s a question of, copying and pasting, a small tag of the transcript. And we only need the tag to be included and then to gather some small requirements about what the customer wants for this campaign. And when we have all of these in a couple of days, we can have this kind of solution running.

Jan: 

Okay. So that gets me to 2 extra questions just to add to what James has asked. One thing is, you mentioned compliance and data protection. We are also used to it. So I assume that Blueknow has all the documents ready to go. And I think it is as you said, basically on the client side.

So, I mean, Blueknow is not new in the market. It’s well known that you are totally compliant. You will have a lot of documentation to prove it. And so on. So it is a matter of speed of the legal department of your potential client.

Let’s face it because you’ve gone through this all the time. There might be questions and so on. My learning is if you have an HR legal consultant, on the client’s side, if you have a commercially driven company in the spirit and not creating more and more obstacles, and so on. So I think it can be done within a matter of days. If it gets put on the pile of things that the legal department has to take care of, you can wait forever.

So that depends very much on the client, I would say. And, the other question is, you know, you said it depends on the client, let’s forget about the legal part, but the other part what would be the other requirement? What does the client have to bring in? So who actually engages together with you on this project or on this kickoff phase, who should be in the room with you, and how will you guide them through the 1st days of using Blueknow?

Lino: 

Yeah, imagine that we are talking to an eCommerce manager who has control of dual tech managers. If this is the situation, they don’t need the technical team. We can send some of them back, they can include the tag in a matter of minutes. And all the work is done by our team. We are very quick to do that.

Jan: 

Okay. That’s a great answer. James, I’ll be in touch with you to find out what your favorite pizza is. So we’re gonna make sure that it arrives, and the pizza will arrive before Black Friday. I’m gonna make sure this is the easiest part of it.

Okay, guys. I think we are good to go. Thanks again. Thank you very much. Oli, Paul, Lino, and thanks to the audience.

Thanks for staying with us during all this time. It’s really amazing. And, I hope we can see first examples, and I really hope that James will try to prove it together with you that they can do it before Black Friday.

Paul: 

Sounds good. Thanks.

Oliver: 

Thanks

Lino: 

Thanks.

Jan: 

Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Bye.