Abandoned Cart Recovery With Facebook Messenger
Whether you have just gotten started with your e-commerce store or have already established, you are always spending money to drive users to your websites on ads, referrals, affiliates and what not. Yet there will be a vast majority of visitors who leave the store without buying. Leaks are common for all online businesses and there are various ways of winning those prospects back. For e-commerce stores, the biggest group are shoppers who add products to their cart, but then abandon them at checkout.
As much as 74% of online shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. The most common ways of getting back their attention are by implementing an abandoned cart email strategy and ad re-marketing. You have seen stores send text messages and app push notifications as well when they are an option. Having a good abandon cart engagement strategy improves your overall conversion-rate ultimately helping recover lost revenue. Marketers have traditionally turned towards emails to help recover these abandoned sales. After all, email marketing is the cornerstone of every online business. But there’s another channel which has become increasingly popular in recent years, i.e. Facebook Messenger.
Messenger has existed as a feature for as long time, but it was only in the last 3 years that the focus has shifted toward making it more useful and accessible for businesses. Like email, you can now build an audience from scratch and do all sorts of broadcasts and automations with Messenger. This with Facebook’s own API or with the many Messenger Bot builder softwares available in the market. Here’s why Messenger engagement messages work better than email, specifically for abandoned cart shopper recovery:
- They’ll give you 50–80% open rates. [yeah, tired of hearing this too. :)]
- Shoppers are more likely to chat/reply. A conversational tone can help you address apprehensions quickly.
- It can generate 15–20% more revenue than abandoned cart emails
- People spend more time on Facebook. How many times do you open Gmail in a day?(I guess, this explains point 1)
- You establish an emotional connection with the customers and give them a more positive experience by displaying the humans behind the curtains
We Understand You
Just look BetterBack’s win back message (below). The message is personal and seems to be sent by the founder. Katherine with her story appears thoughtful, genuine and empathetic and these are customer-service wins.
Shoppers can leave due to reasons like the appearance of an unexpected shipping cost, payment or technical error, trust issues or because they had to walk away from their devices for a while. There are the “casual browsers” and shoppers who feel the process is too long.
Is This Yours?
It’s best if your first message is a just a ‘reminder’ that’s send in an hour since cart-abandonment. Like the one we see at Ivory Ella — they send a message personalized with the specific item that the visitor abandoned and a link to the saved cart. Makes sense, since Ivory Ella don’t really know why the visitor left and they can continue from check-out page directly.
An Incentive
We noticed Tipsy Elves — the colorful and fun clothing brand doing something different. They send personalized saved cart link along with a discount code. Discounts obviously get people’s attention but do you want to assume that the visitor left the products were expensive? Depends on your brand really. You may also try with a free shipping offer if you had displayed the shipping cost in the cart page.
Letting Them Go
This should be the last message that you send to the cart abandoners. Introduce urgency by reminding visitors of their expiring saved cart.
Chat messaging as a UI doesn’t give you a lot of flexibility. Which is a good thing and users expect you to get to the point quick. We’ve seen multiple brands using their email copy in Messenger and this will not give the success it should. If you really have more to say, try sending multiple messages(in successions) instead of sending an email-like paragraph.
Has Facebook Messenger help you increase revenues? What tools do you use? Share your shopping cart recovery strategy in the comments.
