Black Friday is around the corner. This year shoppers will flock online and in-store to take advantage of limited time specials on their favorite brands. Creating a frictionless shopping experience is more important than ever, with impatient and ready-to-buy shoppers demanding a quick and seamless checkout experience. Our web design company team know all too well, that having the best website design is simply not enough to stop shoppers from abandoning their cart.
Want to know how to prevent shoppers from walking away from their cart before they’ve had a chance to checkout? Here’s our top 3 tips on how you can convert more shoppers this Black Friday. Let’s start with some stats!
- In 2020, Black Friday online sales hit a record $9 billion, a result of pandemic shoppers, skipping the brick-and-mortar experience and shopping from home.
- 1/3 of Black Friday sales took place from mobile phones.
- An average of 70% of online shopping carts were abandoned (queue mini violin music).
In case you missed that, approximately $6.3 billion worth of online orders were left at the checkout. That’s a lot of missed revenue. How do your conversions and e-commerce numbers compare? If you’re like us, you’re probably wondering what could possibly cause of such reluctancy? If you think there is money left on the table, the first thing to do is speak to your web developer about implementing heatmaps and conducting session recordings. These e-commerce audit tools can help you pin-point the precise point in the buyer journey where shoppers experience cold feet – otherwise known as cart abandonment.
What can I do to reduce cart abandonment?
Did you catch our recent article on Differentiating Your Winery Online? Here we talked about the importance of creating a frictionless shopping experience.
People abandon their carts for many reasons. Window shopping, price comparison, exploring gift ideas, or simply saving items for later. However, the biggest contributor to shopper bottleneck at the checkout include factors such as having to sign up for an account or extra costs including shipping, taxes, hidden fees. The techniques involved in identifying pain points is called “Conversion Rate Optimization”.
1. Provide a Personalized Post-Browse Shopping Experience
There are many ways to reactivate abandoned carts. One of the highest converting marketing strategies to remind and entice shoppers back to your store include Retargeting Ads and Cart Abandonment Emails – these function in different ways but have the same purpose.
Google and Facebook together offer a robust means to of serving an advertisement to shoppers who may have visited your store but didn’t check out. This is made possible by having your web developer or social media agency install a tracking pixel on your website. This monitors website visitors by anonymous IP address and can allow you as a business owner to put these potential customers into a “retargeting audience’.
Cart Abandonment emails are another form of post-browse advertising, allowing you to personalize the shopping experience. A pre-requisite to this, however, is that you have obtained the customer’s email at some point along the customer journey. See below some ideas on what to include in your cart abandonment email.
2. Incentives to Sweet the Deal
Many marketers will use these two techniques to serve post browse advertisements. Ads or emails can be set up using MailChimp or a more advanced marketing automation solution like VBOUT.
We have assisted our clients in creating Facebook and Google retargeting campaigns as well as cart abandonment emails showing customers the products they may have browsed or added to their cart. You can also convert more shoppers with a Black Friday discount code or promotion for free shipping to entice the shopper to complete the checkout process. Remember that 80% of shoppers are more likely to shop online when there’s free shipping involved.
An advanced layer of cart abandonment emails includes dynamic “Cross Sell” or “Down Sell” promotions. Emails can be created to showcase specials on similar products based on product category (e.g. Red, White, Light or Rich wines). While Down Sells may sound redundant, people like to save money and if they can secure a gift for a few dollars less, they may just be incentivized to jump back to the checkout.
3. Improve Load Time
57% of shoppers will abandon their cart if they have to wait three seconds for a page to load. Of these would-be wine buyers, 80% will never return to your store due to the bad experience. Think about it, have you ever lost your patience due to a lagging load time? We all have, and your customers have too!
Ensure that your website performs well with high performance website hosting which ensure smooth page transition and load speeds right through the payment process.
With more Black Friday online buyers shopping from their smart phones ($3 billion in 2020), your e-commerce experience must be quick, convenient, and mobile friendly. Remember, if a potential customer leaves something in the cart, the sale isn’t always lost but you and your web developer may have some work to do. When was the last time you audited your checkout process? Need some help? As Napa’s leading website design firm, we’d be happy to assist you in conducting a website audit to help you convert more online shoppers this Black Friday and holiday season.