Melanie Matias — October 24, 2017 — October 24, 2017
Tumisu / Pixabay
With all of the different ways brands can interact with their customers, it can be hard to decide where to focus your marketing efforts, but one thing is clear: abandoned cart email campaigns are the low-hanging fruit of recovering online revenue. Want to pull that branch a bit closer? Take abandoned cart emails to the next level with one of the most effective tools for increasing conversion and brand engagement: user-generated content (UGC.)
UGC has proven to be a vital asset in the online shopping experience and incorporating it into your email campaigns will delight your customers and lead to increased revenue.
Abandoned Shopping Carts, A Lucrative Opportunity
Of course, ecommerce continues to thrive. In the second quarter, digital sales grew 14.7% year-over-year to $ 105 billion in the US. But there’s even more online revenue potential for retailers in the form of items abandoned in cart- approximately $ 4 trillion worth of merchandise more.
Across, desktop, tablet, and mobile, customers cite unexpected shipping costs, poor mobile shopping experiences, and security concerns as their top reasons for leaving items in cart. To address these hurdles and streamline your checkout experience, there are many tools and strategies available. Yet, according to the Baymard Institute, the majority of online shoppers abandon carts because they are “just browsing” or “not ready to buy.”
To further educate your shoppers and encourage them to make the purchase, consider setting up and optimizing abandoned cart email campaigns.
Abandoned cart email campaigns are the low hanging fruit in terms of money left on the table. Abandoned email campaigns have doubled the open rate and quadrupled the click-through rate of typical email campaigns. But, what further differentiates abandoned cart campaigns is that they can also be relatively low maintenance after initial setup.
While abandoned cart emails can serve to remind shoppers of their items and inspire them to return and buy, they often lack the context needed to educate shoppers along the customer journey. Shoppers who have abandoned items in cart need to be nurtured through personalization and relevant context is the key to conversion.
Adding customer testimonials to abandoned cart emails can provide additional context for abandoned products that go beyond the product description. This additional layer of product education is key to inspire browsers who may not be ready to buy.
These customer testimonials can come in the form of reviews, user-generated images, and videos. All of these forms of user-generated content are powerful. In fact, a study by Dimensional Research shows that 90% of consumers claim that their buying decisions are influenced by peers’ online reviews.
However, most marketers know that visuals can be more powerful than text. Emails with personalized visual content, such as UGC of the abandoned products, can deliver 6X higher transaction rates.
“Mastering email remarketing through a series of personalized content can have a real and direct impact on a brand’s bottom line,” said Peter DeNunzio, general manager for cross-channel marketing at Experian Marketing Services.
The quickest and most optimal way to recapture online revenue is through abandoned cart email campaigns, and the best way to optimize abandoned cart email campaigns is with user-generated images and videos. By making your abandoned shopping cart emails an extension of your brand’s web experience, your emails will resonate more strongly with subscribers and result in higher clickthrough and conversion rates.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(92)
