Converting lost e-commerce customers

We work on a retained basis for one of our clients who manufacture and sell furniture. We run an ongoing campaign of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well as monitoring sales through their site and making ongoing improvements to the site - called Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

As part of this campaign, late last year we recognised that the site had a reasonably high number of abandoned shopping carts, that is people who were adding items to their shopping cart but leaving before purchasing.

When one reads around the subject there is much evidence of being able to convert these potential customers into real orders. So we came up with a small project to set about converting these abandoned orders.

Our e-commerce tool of choice is Tea Commerce for Umbraco, which we find a really flexible tool that we can extend easily. Our first step was to add a new feature to ask potential customers to enter their email address when they add their first item to the shopping cart.

After running this for a few weeks we found we were getting number of abandoned orders with sufficient data to be able to contact the potential customer.

To this end we have developed to additional Tea Commercial tools. Firstly we developed a tool to enable us to automatically harvest abandoned carts and send these customers an email via our emailing software Campaign Monitor. This email apologises for any technical issues that arose in the order process and invites the customer to reactivate their old cart.

We then developed a tool to send the abandoned cart data by email to our customer’s sales office who then make a very personal approach to the potential client.

Its early days yet but the conversion results appear very positive. Our customer is converting around half of the abandoned carts that have actionable data.