Five Ways to Defeat Basket Abandonment (for good)

With around three-quarters of baskets being abandoned, there’s a pressing reason to take action – Jay Radia, CEO of conversion rate optimisation experts Yieldify, explains five simple solutions.

Basket abandonment is still a huge problem for digital marketers; a staggering 74% of customers abandoned their baskets before making a purchase in 2016. That’s 3 out of every 4 shoppers who were interested in filling a basket but didn’t end their visit with a purchase.

We all know why: online shopping gives customers freedom to decide how they navigate their purchases. Unlike brick-and-mortar shopping, an abandoned basket doesn’t require secrecy or embarrassment and if there’s a cheaper offer elsewhere, it can be found in a few clicks. This adds up to more of a demand for instant gratification, meaning that marketers have to compete for shorter attention spans.

Given that your marketing budget has been invested into driving pricey traffic, how can you convert those carefully-chosen baskets and get results?

Here are 5 ways to defeat basket abandonment and get those much-wanted conversions:

1. Be clear with your costs

56% of shoppers have cited “unexpected costs” as part of the reason why they abandoned their baskets – with visitors also citing not being able to find the returns policy as a reason for leaving. Shipping and delivery costs, which tend to be noted only once the item is about to be purchased, are the worst offenders.

Avoid presenting your visitors with ‘nasty surprises’ at the last hurdle by being explicit with your policies and charges. Ways to do that include:

• Highlighting a USP like ‘Free Delivery’ makes a big difference; make it prominent as you’ll be surprised how easily missed this can be
• If your delivery policies mean discounted or free delivery over a certain spend threshold, highlight it to those visitors who qualify – again, many will go on (and may even abandon) without knowing that they’re in for a perk.

Being clear with your policies and fees aids conversion and could turn that visitor into a lifetime customer. That’s a small price to pay for being completely transparent

2. Build trust during checkout

Understandably, many visitors will abandon their basket because of worries over checkout security. In fact, 74% of shoppers worry about online security and 34% do not like online retailers having their details. Here are some simple ways to mitigate those concerns:

• Include trust signals and logos that your customers will recognise.
• Pre-empt any concerns with reassuring messages, such as letting shoppers know that their security and data privacy is guaranteed.

3. Ensure timing and functionality

Modern consumers are short on time and liable to steal moments to shop during the day: 31% of millennials make a purchase whilst in the bathroom and 43% from their bed! As time is of the essence, you’ll need to take steps to ensure a seamless and clear customer journey on your website:

Have a professional, clean and easy-to-navigate checkout process; make sure your visitor knows the steps they need to take from the outset and use tools like progress bars if your checkout is multi-step

• Try a guest checkout: it not only increases a feeling of privacy for visitors who are concerned about sharing information but will also speed up the payment process, which is likely to encourage that conversion.
• Make your functionality intuitive. Ensure calls to action are clear and prominent, signposting your visitor towards checkout in a linear and easy-to-follow fashion.

4. Make use of multi-channel

The future is mobile. With 75% of 18-24 year olds using their phones as their visual information source, any good marketer knows that this is a device you should not be neglecting.  However it should be noted, that whilst mobile browsing continues to grow, it only represents 16% of conversions – a sign that there’s still work to be done in improving UX:

• Optimise your pages for mobile and tablet, with simple and easy-to-navigate pages and easy-to-fill forms that pre-populate wherever possible.
• Use basket abandonment emails and offer your visitor the opportunity to ‘save for later’. On mobile – as with any device – sometimes your shopper just isn’t ready yet. Give them the opportunity to save their basket and have it sent to them via email, giving yourself the chance to follow-up and encourage them to return and convert.

5. Make the customer experience personal

Modern shoppers, especially millennials, have come to expect personalised incentives and messages. Delivering this kind of extra touch can help deter basket abandonment by making the experience relevant to each individual website visitor.

• Differentiate between first-time and returning visitors – offering a discount to a first-time shoppers to earn a potential lifetime of loyalty can pay more dividends than doing so for an already-loyal customer. Check out how The Fragrance Shop did this and achieved a 52% conversion rate increase as a result.
• Timing is everything. By triggering messages based on each visitor’s individual behaviour, you can show the right message to the right person at the right moment and catch their attention and encourage conversion.
• With Yieldify Conversion Platform, one of the ways our customers engage with abandoning visitors is when they show intent to exit the website. It’s a critical moment where, if you can connect with your shopper effectively, you can turn a lost cause into a new customer.

Getting started

Remember that those visitors who abandon their baskets showed a high intent to purchase – this close to the bottom of the funnel, even the smallest interventions can yield a result.

Before you dive in, your first step to implementing any of the above strategies should be interrogating your website data to really understand where – and therefore why – your visitors are abandoning their baskets. For example:

• What do your abandoners ‘look like’? If you’re losing out on a large proportion of new visitors, it’s worth considering a special incentive for them to make their first purchase.
• What do abandoned baskets ‘look like’? If the baskets being abandoned are high-value, your shoppers might need time to think about it before they commit – consider a ‘stretch and save’ incentive where you notify them of how close they are to qualifying for free shipping or a discount.
• Where in your checkout process do shoppers drop out? If it’s the third page, that’s potentially a sign that your checkout process is too long – if it’s the first page, your visitors might have concerns about trust and security that are putting them off engaging at all.
• Are visitors abandoning baskets on the page where their shipping costs become clear to them? Maybe you need to be clearer upfront about your cost.
• Do you have significant basket abandonment before visitors even get into the checkout process? Not all problems lie in the checkout funnel – if your visitors are abandoning baskets before they even get there, there’s a chance they’re comparison shopping. Consider emphasising your USPs and guarantees so that they know why they should make their purchase with you.

Every website’s challenges are unique – make sure you take the time to understand what yours are before you start implementing a solution. Need some help doing it? Our experts can take on the heavy-lifting for you – drop us a line to discuss how we can turn more of these baskets into completed orders.