How to improve the purchase rate of e-commerce platforms through SMS marketing - message marketing
message marketing If you've been in e-commerce for a long time, you've probably run into cart abandonment -- when people put items into their online shopping carts and never actually complete the purchase.
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To illustrate how serious a problem this is, just look at the average cart abandonment rates across industries.
What is the cart abandonment rate?
The cart abandonment rate tells us the percentage of initiated purchases (people putting an item into a cart) that actually become completed purchases (people buying an item).
Cart abandonment rate
Purchases Completed / Purchases Initiated x 100 = Cart Abandonment Rate %.
If you have 10 people putting items into a cart on your website and only two complete the purchase, your cart abandonment rate is 80%.
Depending on your industry, your cart abandonment rate could be anywhere from 64% to 84%! As of March 2021, the national average is 69%.
When you see numbers arranged like this, it paints a stark and shocking picture. Imagine if ⅔ of people walking into a brick and mortar store walked away without buying anything!.
Or imagine if ⅔ of people brought an item to your checkout and then changed their mind and didn't buy it? This is what is happening when we see such high cart abandonment rates.
What causes cart abandonment?
There are three main reasons why people do not complete a purchase after placing an item in their cart.
- unexpected cost
The first is the unexpected cost. Maybe they forgot to include sales tax on their purchase, or more likely, they didn't factor in shipping costs.
Whatever the reason, customers at the end of the buying process see a higher price than they expected and abandon their cart. According to one study, this problem accounts for 55% of all shopping cart abandonments.
- Buy
The second reason is that the buying process is too difficult. This is called buying friction or buying friction.
In 21% of cart abandonment cases, shoppers leave because the buying process is complicated or confusing.
Instead of trying to figure out the process on their own, shoppers left their carts, presumably to try another site with an easier buying process.
- lack of trust
The third reason is trust. In 17% of cart abandonment cases, customers leave because they don't trust the company they purchased from.
How can text marketing help reduce cart abandonment rates?
Mobile Text Alerts provides text marketing software for small and business customers.
We've seen customers have great success addressing cart abandonment by using text marketing (or SMS marketing) to remind people to complete a purchase.
Why does texting work so well? message marketing
Ultimately, the reasons for cart abandonment given above are not black and white.
People have varying levels of trust in the checkout process, varying levels of tolerance, and so on.
So while you should absolutely do everything you can to simplify the buying process and build trust with your customers, there are plenty of other ways to try and drive people to complete a purchase.
Most businesses rely on three approaches:
- Reta rgeting ads
- Short message - message marketing
We believe SMS ( message marketing ) will generally be your most powerful method, although there are still places for redirects and emails.
Why texting is best
- It's simple: get involved.
The SMS activation rate is around 98%.
In comparison, the open rate for marketing and advertising emails is about 17%.
At the same time, retargeting ads can sometimes work, but can also cost you a lot of money.
In fact, the CTR for retargeting ads typically hovers around 0.7%.
That's better than average for display ads, but still incredibly low. A CTR of 0.7% is simply not good enough if you apply it to an abandoned cart audience.
If you send a text message, your customers will see it because everyone will read their text messages.
- Ian Sells, co-founder of RebateKey, explains it well:
“SMS Abandoned Cart Messages work really well right now. The urgency and close to 100% open rate is really great when the user leaves the cart page and then gets a text message with a code to complete the checkout before the stock runs out protrude."
There are other reasons why SMS works.
Why Text Marketing Works-sms marketing
Text marketing messages can be anything you need to motivate people to close a sale. If it's a simple reminder message to nudge them back, then you can. But you can also do other things with your messages.
- Reduce sticker shock
Let's talk more about price and sticker shock. If people quit your site and abandon their carts due to unexpected costs, this is a major problem, and an easy way to win them back is to offer some sort of modest discount code to bring the price down to what they expected.
So, if you've already sent your customers a text marketing message, why not add a note to the message about a discount code that they can use to get free shipping or 10% off the item's price?
- build confidence
Likewise, you can use text marketing messages to build customer confidence with simple verbal cues. Remind people that they can return to your website to complete a purchase "using our secure checkout system". Obviously, it's a simple technique, but these little queues can sometimes be all people need to reassure them when they're buying.
- Participate in two-way dialogue at scale
Text marketing allows for simpler two-way communication with customers. This is especially useful for larger purchases that may have more fear of customers and may require more assurance.
Amy Hage of Strategy Maven has seen this strategy work for her clients:
For larger purchases, we use SMS to talk to people and ask open-ended (questions) to understand what their hesitancy is and offer options, such as payment plans.
Integrate text marketing with your marketing suite
Thanks to its partnership with Zapier, Mobile Text Alerts is able to integrate with thousands of popular applications, including the most common ones in e-commerce. You can sync your Mobile Text Alerts account with Shopify, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Hubspot, and more.
What does it mean? Here's an example: If you want to start using SMS to send quick reminder messages 24 hours after someone abandons their cart to buy below a certain amount, all you need to do is connect your shopping cart software to Mobile Text Alerts via Zapier. With the two pieces of software "talking" to each other, you can identify potential customers who have abandoned their carts and communicate that information to a mobile text alert app, which will then send them a text message.
There are many other possible uses for texting based on the integration provided by Mobile Text Alerts. If you want to learn more about how the integration works, you can read this support article or schedule a time to speak with one of our text marketing experts.
What else can be done to reduce cart abandonment rates?
Ultimately, all of the above reasons can be solved with some relatively simple responses.
- Be transparent to your customers
First, your e-commerce site should have a general bias toward customer transparency. This means your online shoppers should easily find information about pricing and the company. Shoppers will be more likely to buy from you if they are relatively confident that you are not hiding anything, and if they know the price on that page before they reach the final checkout page.
- keep things simple
Second, the buying process should be kept fairly simple. If a customer creates an account to make a purchase, your site can store payment information and shipping information, and your buying process can be reduced to just one or two clicks. However, if you're having trouble encouraging your customers to create an account (or if your user base may be more reluctant or unlikely to create an account), you should still try to make the guest buying process as easy as possible.
Alan Spurgeon of Hedgehog Digital explains the issue well, saying:
“It sounds so obvious, but it’s incredible how many sites expect you to give them money through elaborate or complicated procedures. No one likes to fill out forms, so make them as frictionless as possible. Avoid asking any disagreements Questions that need to complete the checkout process.”
- establish trust
Third, you can introduce elements into your website to help your customers build trust and understand the buying process.
- If your website is secure (as it should be) and you process payments through a trusted online payment platform, you can include a small button to tell customers this.
- You can also add a progress bar to the purchase process to tell the customer how much is left to complete the purchase.
- Finally, you can simply try to make your website load a little faster.
According to Chris Campbell of The Charming Bench Company, simply speeding up their website can have a huge impact on their customer retention and cart abandonment rates:
“One of the things I found very effective was reducing the load time of our website. We moved our website to a server with a better time to first byte rate and cut down on redundant plugins that would slow down load times. These are very Simple steps can improve our customer retention rate."
in conclusion - message marketing
If you're tired of losing ⅔ or more of your sales just because customers abandoned their carts, try text marketing ( message marketing ) today and see for yourself how it can help reduce cart abandonment rates and increase sales. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial and get started right away. We won't even ask for your credit card when you sign up. The only way you will be charged is if you decide to upgrade your account after you try it first.
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