How To Recover Abandoned Checkouts In E-Commerce With SMS Marketing

As an eCommerce store owner, you’ve probably had people come to your online store, add items to the cart, move to the checkout process, and abandon it in the process, for one reason or another. You are not alone: nearly 70% of online shoppers don’t checkout! This means that for 100 people visiting your store, only 30 of them will proceed to checkout. This also means that as a business, you can do so much better.

Luckily, there are ways to improve these numbers, and SMS marketing, a rapidly growing platform in the digital world, is one of those working methods. Accessible, far-reaching, and engaging, SMS is a great tool for brands to help their customers make it through the purchasing process. But how exactly can you do this? In this article, we try to answer this question by taking a look at what SMS strategies can help you recover the abandoned checkouts on your website.

Abandoned Checkouts: Why Should You Recover Them?

Abandoned cards are a goldmine for businesses! Remember the 70% of visitors who don’t proceed with the checkout? That's a 70% loss in potential business, and 70% fewer people benefitting from your services!

Recovering abandoned carts will take time and strategy, but there are many benefits for it for your brand. Here are some of them:

• Increased sales - Through recovering the abandoned checkouts on your eCommerce store, you increase the revenue of your business. This is probably the most obvious benefit of abandoned checkout recovery. What is less obvious is that getting people who are already interested in your products to make a purchase is much easier than attracting the interest of new customers.
• Improved customer relationships - Through your attempts to recover abandoned checkouts, you connect with your customers and try to re-engage them. As you understand their reasons for abandonment better, it also improves the quality of your communication with the customers, offering them better service, and forging connections between them and your brand.
• Better insights and data - Understanding the reasons behind why people abandon the carts on your website can help you eliminate them and ensure better performance of your store. For example, if particular products always stay in the cart and the customers don’t proceed with the checkout, you might want to offer discounts or free shipping.
  

SMS Marketing As Remedy For Abandoned Checkouts

When it comes to dealing with abandoned carts, most brands still prefer to use emails. While emails work fine, they have an open rate of only 18%. So, if you are looking to improve your checkout rates, relying only on email won’t be the best strategy. SMS, on the other hand, with 98% open rates, might just do the trick. We have combined a list of SMS marketing tips and tricks that can help you improve your sales and decrease checkout abandonment.

Use Visuals

Humans are visual creatures, and we respond to images better than to text. When you are sending abandoned checkout or card recovery texts to your customers, make sure to include an image of the product that you want to remind them about. For example, they wanted to buy pizza and for whatever reason didn’t move forward with the purchase, hit them with an appetizing photo of a pizza alongside with your catchy SMS. Chances are, this will work better than just sending them generic texts reminding them that they forgot to checkout. A photo of the product reminds them of what they are missing out on, getting them back into that shopping mindset.

Personalize Your SMS

Coming back to the topic of generic messages, you want to avoid them at all costs. SMS is a personal marketing channel, and you can simply leverage it for the benefit of your company.

A straightforward and effective way of personalization is through addressing your customer by name. This simple trick can go a long way when it comes to catching the attention of your customers, and it will instantly make them more interested in what you have to say. Here’s an example:

Generic SMS: Hello! Looks like you forgot something!

Personalized SMS: Hey Alex! Looks like you forgot something!

The second one is more catchy, right? Seems like a small detail, but it’s the details that matter and set the tone of the communication.

Luckily, personalizing your SMS shouldn’t be a tedious task. Text message providers often offer personalization options. YooTelco, for one, allows you to set up simple text customization with a few taps of the button, and then all your texts will address your subscribers by their names. You can also go deeper in your personalization, and add other personal details to your texts to make them more relevant.

Send a Cart Abandonment Link and a CTA

Next to our link, we have the cart abandonment link. Make sure to include it in your text, to make it as simple as possible for the customers to get back to where they left off. Furthermore, seeing the products they abandoned once again may spark the desire to buy them again, leading to a purchase.

Ideally, your cart abandonment link should be right above your call-to-action (CTA. Your CTA is what triggers the action, so make sure that it is powerful enough to excite the customers and make them act.

Include Personal Discounts and Coupons

People love deals. With a plethora of eCommerce stores at their fingertips, people want to spend as little on a given product as possible. Naturally, offering them a discount or even free shipping in your first abandonment SMS is a powerful trigger to make them act. It saves them the time of researching other options and concentrates the attention on your offer. Creating a sense of urgency is another small touch that you might want to add, through phrases like “limited time only” or “only 10 available.”

Be A Human

If you are looking to improve the relationship with your customers and invite them to make a purchase, being on good terms with them is a must. So, when crafting your SMS, make sure to craft your text in a friendly way, so that the recipients can feel that there is an actual person behind these texts. Use emojis, make a small joke when possible, and overall try to seem that you are inviting your subscribers to a nice small chat with you, and not just trying to upsell. This will assure your customers that your brand values them and is ready to invest time and effort to ensure they have a great experience.

Conclusion

Abandoned checkouts are harmful to businesses, and they are something that should be addressed. SMS offers an immediate channel for your brand to reconnect with the customers who have abandoned the checkout process on your app or website. Carefully plan out a strategy and then set it to work to reduce cart abandonment rates and boost your brand performance.

Looking for an SMS service for your eCommerce store? YooTelco boasts 14+ years at the top of the telecom industry and worldwide coverage. Contact us if you are interested, and our specialists will be happy to offer you solutions for your SMS needs.