This is the first in a two-part series about a retailer’s biggest pains: cart abandonment and returns. Here’s Jack from remarketing experts SaleCycle with what you need to know about fixing abandonments. Find part two, about how you can reduce returns, here.

Everyone in ecommerce suffers from cart abandonment – and over the past 5 years, it’s been on the increase.  Our latest stats show that over 75% of online shopping carts are abandoned, up from 61.4% in 2010.

Gone are the days, though, where high cart abandonment rates are an inevitability for retailers. Some interesting techniques are being used by forward-thinking brands to bring those numbers down and increase their bottom line.

Some of the reasons for cart abandonment are relatively simple to solve such as displaying shipping costs upfront where possible, offering multiple payment methods or helping quicker check-outs by only asking for key information.

However, using personalised online customer engagement such as on-site remarketing can cut cart abandonment even further and boost your online sales. Here are some of our favourite ways brands are engaging their customers online to try and save the sale.

Creating a sense of urgency

Perfect for the perennial window-shopper, we’ve seen some great examples of brands engaging with these types of shoppers as they’re contemplating whether to pull out their credit card or not. Is there a limited stock of certain items? A flash sale that is set to expire? Or other people pining over the same dream vacation? Just a gentle nudge to “get em before they’re gone”, if you will.

One of my favourites comes from Air Arabia who make sure their booking abandoners know their seats might be snapped up by other travellers.

Incentivising to buy now

I don’t mean offering discounts to every cart abandoner, but I’m talking about prompting customers with the right offer at the right time. For example, finding an unexpected shipping cost is a top reason for online shoppers abandoning their purchase, so delivering a message that reminds your customers that they can get free delivery with a certain value order will help stop this type of abandonment.

Another great use of incentives to abandoners is the concept of a trade-off for their email address, which will add value to your future marketing efforts too. Dyson use this to great effect by offering a 5% discount promo code via an email.

Building Trust

With over 3/4 of consumers actively seeking out customer reviews before making their purchase it’s an obvious decision to use this uncensored feedback where possible, and B2C brands across the globe have been using them for while. However, it’s not something that’s as widespread in the B2B world… yet!

At SaleCycle we’ve been proudly displaying our Reevoo client reviews on our website, and it’s been a great addition to our marketing. We’ve recently taken it one step further and added them to our very own on-site remarketing campaign targeted to those visitors who don’t quite follow-through with their demo request.

Part two: Stopping returns

Coming soon!