Marketing Examined - 🔍 3 Tactics For Your Abandon Cart Flow

Hey friend,

I’ve started my French learning journey on Duolingo. We’ve shared links to case studies on how Duolingo’s gamification reunited user growth + retention (link in the end). Having been a user for over a week, I can tell you it is indeed impressive.

I want to keep my streak, and I don’t want to upset Duo, the mascot. I am still in the free version to see how long I can keep myself from paying. The temptation is constant, as they are designed to be.

Is retention really the new acquisition? Are brands pulling back on paid advertising? Should you diversify and reallocate your marketing budget?

In the midst of a historic economic downturn, making smarter decisions around marketing resources is a critical component of e-commerce success.

But it can be difficult to navigate a way forward amid a mass influx of conflicting information and perspectives across the industry.

Klaviyo’s 2023 marketing mix survey polled 750+ marketing leaders to discover how e-commerce businesses of all sizes are putting together their marketing mix for 2023—so that you can make more efficient budgeting decisions based on what’s best for your brand.

Check out the full report for free here.

69.99% - The Average Cart Abandonment Rate.

It is a scary number given all the effort and money spent to bring traffic to your site, go through the conversion funnel, only to have nearly 70% of them drop off at the end.

A standard cart abandonment series would include a discount, like 10% off to nudge customers over the hurdle. It is so prevalent that users on Reddit advise others to not buy until try abandoning a cart to snatch up a discount.

Let’s pause and think for a moment. Is not having a discount the only thing that prevents customers from purchasing?

Many researches, including the one done by Baymard.com, showed that there is a range of reasons, top 5 include:

• Extra costs too high: shipping, tax, fees (48%)
• The site wanted me to create an account (24%)
• Delivery was too slow (22%)
• I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information (18%)
• Too long/complicated checkout process (17%)

A discount offer that seemed to work for cart recovery prevents you from understanding the various underlying causes of cart abandonment.

It is critical you are aware of the reasons to address your customer’s specific objection head-on.

You could leverage the tactic Ashwarya Garg shared to collect these insights.

Ashwarya moved their abandon cart recovery to an AI-driven WhatsApp Bot to offer a concierge-like personalized experience. It is an invaluable opportunity to identify what's preventing the customer from buying, collect the relevant information, and offer help.

If you notice that price is a major concern for the customer, don't just offer a discount. Instead, try to identify the real reason behind their hesitation.

Perhaps they're unclear about the return policy, given the amount of money they're about to spend. In that case, you might want to highlight your risk-reversal options, such as "30-day free return, no questions asked".

If they're hesitating because they're unsure of the product's value, you could show social proof through customer testimonials or press coverage.

Once you identify these underlying reasons, prioritize addressing them during the customer's shopping journey to reduce cart abandonment instead of focusing solely on cart recovery. You can also incorporate these reasons into your recovery series to touch on different objections.

Even if you don’t have a fancy AI chatbot to do this at scale yet, customer service rep outreaches, or surveys could be quickly set up to collect these data points.

For some users, they are right on the edge of their seats about to buy, like having their addresses already filled out. This is a group of people that are already bought into your product and unlikely to be big in size; the ultimate cart recovery tactic for them is to JUST SHIP IT TO THEM.

Randy Mchhugh shared a photo of his friends receiving a free product from Hard Ketones after abandoning their cart.

This is an especially cool tactic for acquiring the first 1000 customers, or rather, more valuable 1000 true fans.

If your math is mathing, the cost of these free products should be way less than the LTV this cohort of user brings through being loyal customers and referring more businesses.

A simple tactic Adam Robinson shared for a browse abandonment flow could be as simple as ONE emoji: 👀

It could route users back to the cart.

It could help customers initiate conversations with your customer experience team.

Marketing is all about attention-grabbing as a first step. This one emoji text is something unique that makes you stand out in a crowd and sets you apart from other text in the inbox.

Before we end this case study, we want to highlight one more thing:

Not every cart is recoverable.

Baymard.com research also found that 58.6% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart within the last 3 months because “I was just browsing / not ready to buy.”

• How Duolingo reignited user growth
• Structuring a marketing team for any company size
• Substack crowdfunding from users
• Some important yet ignored trends
• The free learning list

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Which of the 3 tactics are you going to start testing out? Do you have any cart recovery strategies that lead to amazing results? Let me know, and we’ll feature it.

- Chi out