If your mobile app is dealing with abandoned carts, or you have ideas to make this better, check us out at www.hipmob.com, or ping us at: ayo@hipmob.com.
Between 66% and 97% of shopping carts are abandoned on mobile. As consumers buy more from mobile and tablets, retailers will need ways to recover sales from the high percentage of carts abandoned in their mobile apps.
For recovering abandoned carts, many ecommerce sites use email. Apps, however, are just getting started. With half of emails now opened on a mobile device, email is much less effective (unless you use deep links).
Push Notifications for Abandoned Carts
At Hipmob, we work with a lot of retailers and mobile commerce teams, and we think about this problem a lot. Mobile commerce apps need a service tightly integrated with their checkout flow, which sends personalized push notifications to shoppers who've abandoned a cart. With this, a retailer can notify shoppers:
- buy within the next hour and you'll get free shipping
- add an accessory and get 20% off
- that BCBG Rosa Dress you browsed, is available in blue
- the Converse Chuck Taylors you looked at are available in your size
The first 2 examples are traditional re-engagement; there's already a product in the shopping cart. The last 2 happen before the customer puts anything in a cart - all they did was select a color or size.
Why Push? Because:
- you can place the shopper right at the checkout, removing friction
- your message and brand are elevated above the noise of their (already crowded) email inbox - no problems with Gmail Tabs here.. If they started shopping in your app, why not finish there?
- you can really personalize and target the message: a single message for a unique user, about a product they recently shop for.
- Done correctly, it's more high-touch than an ad
As a retailer, here's a quick how-to. We'll use the example of Andrea, who wants a BCBG Rosa Dress, in blue. I've included mockups to help visualize.
Step 1: What To Track
- Track the Product: Most analytics systems simply capture a product SKU. To tell Andrea when her dress is available in blue, you'll need to track the size and color of the dress (or the width of a shoe, or the fit of a shirt etc).
- Track the Checkout - all the steps Andrea must take to complete the purchase.
- Track the Purchase - what else is in Andrea's basket. With this, you can measure your ROI.
Step 2: What To Send (And When)
Rules determine what you tell a shopper. Triggers determine when. For example:
- rule: notify Andrea when the blue dress is available
- trigger: when inventory system updates with the blue dress.
- Setting Rules: In our example - Andrea looked at the Rosa dress, but it wasn't available in blue. In cases like this, you want a rule that notifies a user when their size is available (if they picked a color) or when their color is available (if they picked a size)
Now, Andrea gets a push message when the Rosa dress is available in blue.
If Andrea filled put the dress in the cart, but didn't buy it, you'd want to give her an incentive to complete the purchase. These could be:
- if (checked shipping) then (send other shipping options or send deal)
- if (price/shipping/some other decision parameter changes) then (notify of parameter change)
- if (items in cart are almost sold out) then (send reminder)
So for example; if Andrea abandoned her cart after selecting that blue dress in size 8, you can entice her with free shipping.
Entice Abandoned Carts With Offers
2) Choosing When To Send: send push (5 minutes/10 minutes/20 minutes/day later) after (app is closed/page is closed)
3) Composing Messages & Designing Calls-To-Action (CTAs):
You can deeplink to the Checkout, or include an "inbox" (the
Each push would be a rich message including text, images, and one or multiple CTAs. With an "inbox", shoppers can return as often as they like, and you can A/B test different message formats to improve your results.
Part 3: Measure And Improve
1) Feedback: Opening the message takes Andrea to the inbox. From here she can:
a. buy the dress
b. reply with questions (yet another opportunity for you to close a sale)
c. ignore or delete the message
Whatever action she takes, you'd measure it.
2) Analytics: By measuring responses, you can see the ROI for each rule and for the system as a whole, and decide how to improve.
Though the above example focuses on apparel, this approach applies to any mobile commerce transaction. Some other mobile commerce transactions we see at Hipmob where this applies, include:
- Hotels - if a potential guest checks a room but doesn't book it, offer an incentive to fill the room.
- Taxi Ordering/Ridesharing - if a potential rider looked for a ride but sees no drivers, quickly notify them when one becomes available.
- Any transaction where the shopper is buying a product or service they'll consume offline: food, groceries, tickets, and so on. The bigger the order value, the better.
Who Is Doing This Well
Amazon and Gilt do the best personalization that I've seen to date. Though Gilt's iOS apps don't sport deep links (that I've seen), they recently launched a "Personalized Sale" feature, which shows you products they've algorithmically selected for you.
Amazon, of course famously follows you around the web with retargeted ads for almost any product you've ever looked at, but have not as yet brought this to mobile. (Go to Amazon right now, and click on any product. ANY PRODUCT. It will feature in a large percentage of the ads you see in the following days.)
Despite these examples, most are much further behind. Whoever does this well, will be an order of magnitude ahead of the competition; if it yields comparable results to email, you could recover up to between 12% and 16% of abandoned carts.
