Summer Sales: 5 Tips To Avoid Abandoned Carts

Summer Sales are coming! The craziness, the desire, the madness. It’s one of the most important events in the retail calendar. Here are some tips from Splio on how to rock summer sales and avoid abandoned carts – the biggest challenge that gives marketers sleepless nights.

In 2017 nearly 70% of customers left the online store without completing their purchase*. It means that even though your products caught your customers’ attention, the purchase was not finalized. Follow these 5 tips to get your customers to purchase your products both online and offline!

1. Wake up the desire to buy before Summer break.

Your customers should know your offer long before the first day of Summer Sales. The aim is to wake up their interest, make them wait and build anticipation for the Big Day. To do that, prepare tailored marketing campaigns across every channel. Provide both clear and fun messages to your customers with all information they would need to prepare their wish lists. 

Remember that you’re not the Last Brand on Earth and before Summer Sales people are bombarded with so much information that it’s difficult to catch their attention. That’s why, you should do it wisely! Target your customers according to their previous behaviors, personalize your communications, and monitor the marketing pressure.

2. Optimize the checkout in e-commerce.

Once the customer’s attention is caught, the real challenge begins! If you don’t believe that your checkout needs an optimization, the stats speak for themselves: people are abandoning carts because of extra costs (60%), the requirement to create a new account (37%), too complicated check-out process (28%), lack of trust for payment (19%), slow delivery (18%) and other reasons like website crashes, weak return policies and lack of payment methods choices**.

If your brand doesn’t delight the customer during the purchase journey, it will not only miss the possibility to boost sales, but will also miss the potential long-time customer or, what’s even worse, lose a loyal one. Think about your checkout process before Summer Sales and make it easier, faster and user friendly.

3. Develop successful follow-up campaigns.

If despite all your efforts your registered customers don’t finish their shopping, you still have the chance to get them back! Develop trigger campaigns based on abandoned carts. Send emails with a personalized subject, content of the abandoned cart and catchy call-to-action (e.g. “Finish your order”, “Restore my cart” or even “Teleport to my cart”).

If you have both online and offline stores, you could use follow-up emails to drive traffic offline. Just put in the email the address of the nearest store and redirect the customer to the estimated product availability information. Change the €50 abandoned online cart into a €100 in-store purchase!

4. Rock customer experience in-store.

Yes, abandoned carts happen offline as well. Why do offline customers give up on their carts before the purchase? Firstly, because the process is too long. The huge line to the fitting room? The never-ending line to pay? Customers’ patience ends when they have to wait too long. Secondly, the always busy in-store staff who doesn’t have product knowledge. Even if a customer is willing to buy your product(s), sometimes they leave your store because of a lack of information about available sizes or because of the mess in the store.

It’s extremely important to anticipate the above situations and provide your customer a unique in-store experience during the Summer Sales. Increase your staff resources and empower your teams with customer knowledge. Make the payment possible everywhere in the store to reduce long checkout lines. Let the quality of your in-store services delight your brand’s customers and get them buy not only during the crazy sales period.

5. Engage with a loyalty program.

It’s a fact that loyal customers buy more. Create a C2B loyalty program to recognize and reward your existing customers’ engagement, especially during Summer Sales. To make them feel special during every step, reward them with the access to secret or VIP sales just before the Big Day, give them an additional unique discount code to use both online and offline.

You can also use the Summer Sales traffic increase to gain new loyalty program members. Offer the possibility to join your brand community and clearly present the benefits! Train your in-store staff and give them powerful tools to manage all new subscribers in a quick and friendly way. And never forget to reward them for joining your program!  

Follow Splio’s tips to avoid shopping cart abandonment and rock Summer Sales! We’re keeping our fingers crossed for your success!
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* « Online Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Worldwide », Statista, 2018.

** « 40 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics », Baymard Institute, 2017.