#117. 5 Abandoned Cart Mistakes That Cost You Thousand | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello everyone and welcome to Flowium podcast. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. Today I’m joined by our very special guest, Cassidy. Cassidy is our client services director here at flowium, but also she is a very talented email marketeer herself. Say hi, Cassidy.

Cassidy: 1:01

Hello.

Vira: 1:02

Oh, we’re so excited to have you. Cassidy is just like one of us, one of email marketing nerds. And for those of you who don’t know, Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. And we specialize in delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s how we like to put it here at Flowium. And today, Cassidy will help us to figure out what are the most common abandonment cart mistakes that you guys want to fix before Black Friday Cyber Monday? Because this mistakes probably cost you thousands. Cassidy, are you excited about it?

Cassidy: 1:36

Yes, I am excited.

Vira: 1:38

But before we go there, before we go to all of the juicy stuff, all of the serious stuff, let’s do a little this or that kind of questions. Just like blitz Q&A to get to know you better. Okay?

Cassidy: 1:50

Okay, sounds good.

Vira: 1:51

Let’s do this. Okay, Cassidy, so texting or calling?

Cassidy: 1:56

Calling, definitely. I absolutely hate texting. In fact, if you text me, I know I hate it. If you text me, I probably will take about six hours to respond to you.

Vira: 2:10

Okay, fair enough. It’s like very, very like 90s, you know, or like the 90s 90s kids. Online shopping or offline shop?

Cassidy: 2:22

Offline shopping. Because I like to touch and feel. I know.

Vira: 2:31

Guys, I mean, Cassidy is in her 30s, in her early 30s, so that’s just unexpected to hear all of this.

Cassidy: 2:38

I really. Well, yeah, I like both actually. To tell you the truth, I do like both. If I really need something, I order online. But if I’m enjoying shopping, I like to be able to touch and feel everything. So.

Vira: 2:49

Okay, I’m really curious about the next one. If you had an option to choose in 1969 or in 2069, what would you choose?

Cassidy: 2:59

Oh, definitely 1969. It was way more fun back then.

Vira: 3:05

Oh, gosh. This episode kind of have a theme now. Right, like back to the beginnings. Okay, cool. Cake or pie?

Cassidy: 3:12

Pie. I love pie. Yeah, see, I’m an old lady. Right.

Vira: 3:16

You sound like a pie kind of person to me. Gummy worms? Or gummy bears?

Cassidy: 3:23

Neither. Chocolate all the way.

Vira: 3:25

Yay. Yay. Okay, the last one. But I’m really curious to hear what you think about it. So if there was like a theme song playing every time you entered the room, what would that be?

Cassidy: 3:39

Oh my God. I don’t know. Total Eclipse of the Heart. I’m just kidding.

Vira: 3:47

That’s a good one. No, I like it. I mean it’s a good one. It’s a good one. Cheesy, but it’s a good one. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, Cassidy, so that was a bit of a warmup, but now we can discuss all of the juicy email marketing stuff. So abandonment cart emails. You have like a lot of clients? I do have a lot of clients and very often they come to us with like some email life cycles in place already. And I’ve noticed some key mistakes that they are making and I’m sure you have too, but I’ll probably start because mine is kind of like an obvious one, but a big one too. So very often when we start working with different accounts, believe it or not, people don’t have an abandonment card sequence in place or just have one email. And I think this is definitely a mistake that costs you thousands of or like hundreds of thousands of dollars. For sure. Because I mean, here are some heartbreaking numbers and I’m sure you guys, maybe some of you have heard them before, maybe some of you haven’t, but research suggests that actually between 47 and 72% of consumers, they experience checkout friction while shopping online. And 47 to 72% of people actually abandoned the purchase in the process of the purchasing. I mean when I’m like reading this numbers out loud. 47 to 72%, right?

Cassidy: 5:17

Yeah.

Vira: 5:18

I mean it hurts, right, to hear this numbers.

Cassidy: 5:21

So much effort to get them there. So.

Vira: 5:23

Right, yeah. Right. So much money, so much effort. So much like thought usually people put into the conversion and everything and then 72% of those people were like, eh, I’m not sure if I want to do that. And they abandoned the card in the process. Well, the good part is that actually you can recover a big portion of that emails. And I have this numbers, they were actually from 2019 holiday season season. I’m sure these numbers are even higher now. But during the 2019 holiday season, approximately $8.6 billion were lost in e-commerce sales due to checkout cart abandoned. 8.6 freaking billion dollars. Can you imagine?

Cassidy: 6:07

It’s so sad.

Vira: 6:08

Yeah, and especially like around the holiday season. Right. It doesn’t mean though that you have to admit the defeat. The good news is that even though a lot of people abandoned their cards, you can still basically, you can’t eliminate the cart abandonment completely entirely, but you can minimize the likelihood of it happening. And email marketing is your secret weapon when it comes to checkout abandonment recovery. Well, the common mistake that we’ve seen in the industry is that some people only have one email. One email that is sent like an hour later saying, hey, you forgot something in your checkout, come, come back and purchase it. Well, that’s a big missed opportunity because you can upsell things in email number two and three of the sequence. You can also provide the discount code. But also sometimes people do need more time to research stuff. Right. So not having an abandonment card sequence or having just one email is pretty much leaving money on the table as well. Especially around the holidays. Well, when people tend to compare different options, they tend to go to one website, then they go to a competitor and they check different options and then they maybe forgot about you and then you come back to their inbox with a cute little reminder. So definitely, definitely have at least three emails in your abandonment email card sequence. What do you think, Cassidy, of this one?

Cassidy: 7:39

Absolutely. And I think that you’ve mentioned that they need to be a cute little reminder. That’s also really important. Make sure it’s cute.

Vira: 7:47

You don’t want to, you don’t want to feel like a stalker, you know. Yeah, especially people get creeped out. And let me know if it the same with like your clients. But like browse abandonment is the one that creeps people out the most because.

Cassidy: 8:02

You browsing ourselves.

Vira: 8:04

Right. For those of you guys are who, who don’t have this sequence in place, Browse abandonment is another excellent email automation to have around the holiday. And like in generally speaking. So basically it’s like similar to abandonment cart, but basically the browser abandonment. It happens even before you place something into the cart. So you go to the website, you check out few products and then like few minutes after that or like an hour after that you get an email saying like, hey, thank you for checking us out, here’s an offer or something like that. But this emails, they can really, really creep people out. But they are still one of the biggest money generators for most of my accounts. I mean it’s definitely cool.

Cassidy: 9:17

Browsing abandon for sure. Yeah, you just want to make sure that that tone is in a non, non creeper way so.

Vira: 9:25

For sure. Okay Cassidy, what’s your sort of like mistake that you’ve noticed in the industry?

Cassidy: 9:32

Yeah, failing to consider the order value. So keeping with that theme of personalizing your abandoned cart emails, you want to consider distinguishing between customers that maybe just pick up an item or two or those who leave behind a big purchase. So these are two very different types of customers. So when it comes to segmenting by cart value, you want to offer those big spenders an exciting deal or discount and this is going to incentivize them to complete that significant transaction. While smaller purchases, you might want to consider adding more of a minor discount or maybe even just rewards points. So yeah. So if deals for small purchases aren’t an ideal option for your business, you can choose to simply send the standard your cart is about to expire message. So don’t feel like you always need to add a discount for every single offer. And when it comes to your high rolling customers, these are the ones that are willing to spend a little bit more money with you. You want to treat these people very differently. Right. They’re your special special customers. So consider offering them a little bit more time to think about their potential purchase. So consider delaying that initial email by a day versus say a couple of hours. You might even consider offering a higher discount because the value of their car is a lot higher than their average order value. So here’s an example. This is from one of our clients who was selling furniture. So we had a client that asked us if we could set up an email with a sales call for the customers when that order value was above a certain amount. And this. Yeah, and this gave the company an opportunity to personally speak with the potential customer and offer that white glove service to them. But certainly this wouldn’t make sense for all of the abandoned car emails. So segmenting is super important. Right?

Vira: 11:27

Of course. I mean if you’re selling socks, it’s probably a bad idea to have a customer representative who would call you every time you’re leaving the car, I think. But these guys that Cassidy is talking about, creepy about those stocks, definition of the creepy. These guys that Cassidy mentioned in the example, they were actually selling like a pretty expensive furniture. So like $7,000 couch. Yeah, you kind of expect a bit of a different service. And in that case you also might need just like you Cassidy said, like more time to consider whether or not you want to purchase or like to place the order. You need more time to research, more time to decide. Cause like spending 20 bucks on the socks and spending five grand on a couch, it’s like not, not the same. You know what we mean?

Cassidy: 12:14

Yeah, it’s a different game. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so definitely. Yeah. Consider changing those time delays depending on the value of the cart. Another thing that I see is make sure that you don’t offer these special discounts more than once every month or two. So you don’t want people to get accustomed to getting these discounts all the time and intentionally abandoning their cart in the hopes of getting some kind of free offer.

Vira: 12:40

Oh, I do that all the time.

Cassidy: 12:43

I think we notice it more now that we work in email, but yeah.

Vira: 12:47

No, I abandon my cart. Like, I never purchase stuff without like abandoning the card and like waiting for like up to four hours because in the hope of receiving some sort of discount, you know, it’s like worth trying. But I like that you said that like having that once a month kind of filter and it’s really easy to do in Klaviyo too. Right? You just literally add the filter. So. Yeah, yeah, I abuse it all the time. I know it’s very bad of me but what can I do?

Cassidy: 13:18

You’re the worst consumer.

Vira: 13:21

Actually. I’m like, I’ve noticed that even though, like, I understand all of these tricks, I understand how marketing work. Right. It still gets me every time, so.

Cassidy: 13:32

Right.

Vira: 13:33

Yeah, I get so excited when I see the discount. I’m like, whoa, that’s an opportunity to save money. I don’t even think that I could have spent those money at all in the first place.

Cassidy: 13:44

Or they’re going to send you a higher one in a week or something.

Vira: 13:48

Right? Yeah, I know. Yeah. And I mean, that’s definitely failing to consider an order value in the band. Cart is a big one. And I feel like people don’t necessarily personalize their emails usually. And that’s a bad practice to. To have one size fits all kind of emails. The more advanced you are as a brand, the more advanced you are as a email marketer, the more sort of like segments and personalization you can add to your strategy. Getting the timing down wrong. That’s a big one as well. And a cart recovery email strategy is definitely different for different brands. Right. Like we just discussed, the abandonment cart strategy for socks business will be very different than abandonment card strategy for the furniture business. Yet as a general rule of thumb, if we’re talking about like most businesses, usually the sequence that we recommend to have is a minimum sequence of three emails and email number one is your basically like a reminder. And the primary focus of that first email is to remind your customers that they abandoned their cart. And we do not necessarily recommend giving the discount right away. In email number one, we don’t want to. You don’t want to train your customers to expect some sort of discounts from you all the time. Right. But kicking off with the first email, and that’s like a good place to start with that email is like an hour after they’ve placed something into the cart. It’s very typical for customers to browse your competitor websites before buying any product. In fact, I found this number that about 85% of online customers or like people who purchase things not physically but like online, they conduct some sort of like research before making an online purchase. 85%, which means that sometimes they place something into the cart and they need to go and do their research and come back to your cart. And it’s a natural that after the first few online stores the customer may not even remember your product or your brand. And that’s why about one hour from the time of the cart abandonment hits, it’s like a sweet spot for that email. Right? Then we recommend to have to follow with the second email. And the second email is the classic crowd pleaser because usually it’s a discount email and I mean of course if it fits into your email marketing strategy because as Cassidy mentioned, incentive does not necessarily mean the discount. But this email is the one that we recommend usually for hardcore selling. And it can be a nice place for the incentive to create or to create a sense of urgency with words. And we usually recommend about 24 hours from the time of the cart abandonment is the best time to send this email. Of course you can always like A/B test. There’s a different time delays and sometimes I remember one time for my client who was selling like serums for like eyebrows and eyelashes, we tested out two different time delays and two hour time delay purchased performed better than one hour time delay for the first email, which was very like surprising. So that’s something that you can always A/B test. And the same can be done with like second email, the third email. And here we sort of have two approaches. The third email can be either sent 24 hours after that like to remind about the discount code if they haven’t used that. And that’s, that’s something that we normally do with most of our brands or if you don’t want to go like too, too aggressively with your discounts, you can also, instead of sending it 24 hours later, you can send it maybe like five days later. Right. And instead of just trying to sell the abandoned product, you can also maybe showcase some like, similar products or related products that the customer may like. So for example, if they express the interest in this like particular white T shirt, chances are they might be interested in like black T shirt. And maybe you can recommend some like jeans as well that go well with that, with a T shirt, you know. So instead of treating this email as the last email of the cart recovery strategy, you can treat it more as the first of many lead nurturing emails that will finally or hopefully result in sale. So getting the timing down wrong is a very big problem. And you still guys probably have enough time to test out different time delays. I mean we’re recording this podcast today is what, beginning of October. You still have like two to three weeks before that high high season starts. So that’s like a good time to test out different things. So you have the perfect strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday because that’s when, when the strategy should shine, basically. Yeah. Yeah. What’s your experience with time delays, Cassidy? Like what’s, what’s your take on that? Do you think one hour is too early or do you usually start from like two hours or like one hour? What’s your typical, typical thinking when it comes.

Cassidy: 19:08

Yeah, I mean I think a dump generally around a one to two hours is good. I mean you kind of have to consider, you really have to consider more the product. Is this a product where people are going to need to be shopping and comparing lots? If it’s a larger product, it might take them a little bit bit longer. They might be looking at lots of different, different products, so from different brands. But if it’s a quick product, they might just have gotten distracted. So maybe a shorter time delay for something smaller.

Vira: 19:37

Right, right. And I mean, just like we discussed the incentive, it doesn’t have to be the discount code. In fact, one of the most popular reasons why people abandon their cart is actually the shipping cost. So. And I know that because I’m like one of those people, even if I spend like, I don’t know, I can spend like 50 bucks on Uber Eats, but when I have to pay like $3 for shipping, hell no. You know, it’s like I just like don’t like paying for shipping. That’s. I know that’s the popular reason why. Popular reason why people abandon their cards. Right?

Cassidy: 20:19

Yeah. Yeah. So offering free shipping can also be something that can be a really good incentive. So.

Vira: 20:25

And by the way, December 14th is the national free shipping day for those of you who Started planning for like December. And I remember last, last year I have this client who always offers free shipping. Like always, it’s like year round thing. But then on December 14, we were like, hey, we are offering happy free shipping day to you. Free shipping on all of your orders. And that email, it was like one of the best revenue emails for the entire Q4.

Cassidy: 20:53

That’s hilarious.

Vira: 20:56

It’s just like interesting. People don’t like paying for their shipment.

Cassidy: 21:00

Yeah, yeah. And I think the truth is a lot of consumers don’t necessarily remember that the company always offers free shipping. It’s not really something top of mind. So yeah, you can definitely advertise there that you always get free shipping and they’ll probably still be going to be really excited about it.

Vira: 21:16

Exactly, exactly.

Cassidy: 21:18

All right, so another common abandoned cart mistake that I have found is not having mobile optimized designs. This is kind of a common. Yeah, this is common across all different kinds of flows, but particularly an issue in the abandoned cart flow. So did you know that 72% of customers between the ages of 18 and 64 now check their emails on a smartphone device? I think we probably all.

Vira: 21:46

Except Cassidy. Probably. Right?

Cassidy: 21:48

Except me. Yeah.

Vira: 21:52

You need a good old mall to get your a mall to get your shopping done. Right, Cassidy?

Cassidy: 21:59

Yes. All right, so it’s super important if you’re not designing your emails for mobile devices, you are compromising the experience for a sizable chunk of your audience. Yeah. So at least just make sure that your images are rendering correctly so you’ll want to look at how they appear in that mobile view. You want to make sure that your call to action is easy to push. So don’t make it too small and that your copy is easily readable on small screens. So you don’t want people to have to be an inch away from their phone to read your abandoned cart email. Another thing to keep in mind is make sure that you stick to that single column layout. So I’m sure. Think back. Have you. I think we’ve all probably been on a website or opened an email where there’s multiple columns and you’re reading like you know, back and forth of one sentence on one side of the column. Yeah. It looks really bad.

Vira: 23:00

So inconvenient. Especially on the mobile device. Right. It’s like on desktop it’s okay. Although I’m not a fan of those either. But on mobile devices it’s a big problem, I’d say.

Cassidy: 23:14

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Another thing to remember, I think this kind of goes without saying, but you use large enough font make sure that people can read it and make sure that your call to action button is large, large and clear and keep the color in contrast to your background. So make it really stand out. Make it easy for them to take that action which you want them to take.

Vira: 23:39

And actually when you mentioned that, I remember we had the episode with one girl who’s creating emails for people who have some like vision issues and stuff like that. And apparently red and green are the worst colors to use for your cta because colorblind people do not necessarily can see red or green colors. And like. And also it’s a terrible color for your main font. Right. Because like some portion of people will not be able to read it. And now when I said it, I think about all of those like Christmas themed emails that are like primarily red and green. You know, it’s like right. The color. But that’s, that’s interesting.

Cassidy: 24:27

That’s an interesting point. Yeah, I think it might be surprising too how many people might are. Are colorblind. I don’t remember the statistic off the top of my mind, but I think it is actually quite a, quite a large amount of people. So.

Vira: 24:39

So definitely consider, consider using something different. And, and yeah, definitely do something that have like a higher contrast, especially for this CTA portion. That’s a good thing to consider as well. Cool. Okay, so that was more like a design sort of like recommendation. But let’s go back to the incentive. We kind of covered it already. But not offering an incentive on my opinion is a big, big problem that you can. That can easily be fixed in your emails. Right. So personalization and limited time discounts, it’s a timeless strategy for creating a sense of urgency and increasing the conversion. After all, we all love a good bargain. We all love a good discount. And also the added benefit of offering a coupon code to the abandonment card shoppers is that it doesn’t actually reduce the value of your brand up front. So you’re not like giving them the discount right away in email number one or like even before the email you don’t discount the product right away, but more you’re only discounted it to people with a higher intent of purchase. It’s also worth pointing out that offering discount code to repeat cart abandoners can actually work against you. Just like Cassidy mentioned previously, we do not recommend to give the discount too. Too often you don’t want to train your customers to expect the discount codes from you. Even though as a customer I love that I always abuse this like disc, this abandonment card discount thing. Yeah, I mean sometimes offering two too many discounts can actually work against you. And also, I mean don’t forget about the cross sell. Cross sell is also a great opportunity of giving similar offerings to what client originally wanted. It can actually be a good strategy as well. And just like we discussed earlier, incentives, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a discount code. You can offer free shipping, you can offer bundles, maybe like exclusive bundles. Especially around the holidays. It’s sort of like a big theme, right? To purchase like a bundle of two products. So you can give one product to your mom and another one to your sister or something like that. Bundles are a big one. Some of our clients and I absolutely love this strategy, we’re just like discussing it it with our colleagues before that. One of our clients, every year around the holidays they have this like exclusive paper wrap or like packaging for the products. So. Wrapping paper? Yeah, so they have this like exclusive wrapping paper that they can add to your order if you buy the order within that holiday time frame, you know, so.

Cassidy: 27:31

Not necessarily, oh, sorry.

Vira: 27:33

No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead.

Cassidy: 27:34

Yeah, like not necessarily offering a discount but some kind of freebie or something that you have in stock that you can add on to add onto the purchase. If you have like a surplus of supply of something, you can always throw those in in these emails.

Vira: 27:51

Yeah, freebie is actually a good idea. And sometimes you have just like inventory that you want to move around. Right. Or sometimes you want, you have like some products that have to be sold by the end of the year or something like that. So that’s a good way to either sell them as bundle or just like add them a freebie just like you guessed the set. But not offering an incentive. Especially around the holidays when you’re like competing for attention with like thousands of other brands, it actually might be working against you not offering the an incentive. So that’s pretty much our five tips short and sweet. So we have not having an abandonment card sequence. It’s a big, big problem. The second one was failing to consider order value. The third mistake that we’re seeing all across the indust getting the timing down wrong, not having mobile optimized designs and oh my God, I cannot tell you how many times we’ve seen this like emails coming into our inboxes. So definitely not be one of those brands with two columns in the abandoned card email. And number five, not offering an incentive tip. Number six will be more like a bonus tip is that use dynamic links in your logo. Like use dynamic links in your logo using naming link like Ideally in your hero image if you are not doing that yet. And of course include the dynamic product blocked into the abandonment card sequence. That’s an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many times customers are forgetting to do that. So, yeah. So that’s your tips. How was it, Cassidy?

Cassidy: 29:26

It was fun. Thanks for having me on. Super fun.

Vira: 29:31

You were like so nervous about it. I told you it’s going to be amazing. I told you it’s going to be fun. Yeah. We loved having you here, Cassidy.

Cassidy: 29:38

Thank you. Yeah, it was fun.

Vira: 29:40

It’s a busy time of the year for us and I mean, I hope you guys learned something new. We had a lot of fun recording this podcast. I hope you had a lot of fun listening to this podcast. And of course, as always, don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your e commerce friends, with your family, with your loved ones. No, seriously, we just love, love having good crowd listening to our podcast. We love to hear your feedback, we love to hear your questions, we love to hear back from you. And if you guys still working on your email marketing strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday, go to flowium.com/holiday and check out the Flowium email Marketing Holiday guide that we have put together for you guys. It’s a book that our CEO wrote, but he put a lot of thought and research into it and we shared like a lot of our strategies there as well. That’s a good book. If you guys haven’t checked it yet, you should definitely do that now before the holiday starts. So thank you so much for listening and thank you, Cassidy, for coming. It was so much fun having you here.

Cassidy: 30:48

Thank you.

Vira: 30:49

Thank you. Take care.

Cassidy: 30:50

Bye.