Amidst the holiday season, businesses of all sizes are geared up for the busiest shopping time of the year. One key concern for online businesses is how to reduce the number of abandoned carts. Baymard reports that online shopping has an average abandonment rate of 69.8%, meaning you could be losing more than half of your potential sales during the checkout stage. Every cart rescued can mean revenue for your team!
What is an Abandoned Cart?
An abandoned cart happens when a consumer places items in their online cart and then leaves those items in the cart. An example might be that you are doing some holiday shopping on Etsy where you find a piece you want to buy for Christmas. You then add that item to your cart with the intent to purchase but close your Etsy tab. This action results in an abandoned cart.
Success stories of Rescuing Abandoned Carts with Marchex Sonar
Historically Marchex Sonar has worked with a wide range of companies in various verticals. We have worked with clients who have a shopping experience built on top of Shopify, and they’ve set up automation to rescue abandoned carts from their shopping experience. They’ve captured up to 26% of abandoned carts during Black Friday and Cyber Monday events.
How to Automate Rescuing Abandoned Carts with Marchex Sonar
Clients using Shopify leveraged Zapier to integrate with Marchex Sonar. Zapier is a powerful tool to make integrations when you might not have a software engineer or developer available to integrate things internally. In Zapier, there were two ‘zaps’ set up. The first captured the abandoned cart and triggered an SMS reminder to the consumer to complete their order. The other was set up to track whether the person came back and purchased items in their cart. Such an integration would allow you to understand what follow-ups lead to conversion events and additionally can update your systems to reflect accurate customer account state.
(Note for both Zaps below: you or your e-commerce platform must have captured a record of opt-in and a textable phone number for the customer who abandoned their cart or made a purchase)
Zap 1: Trigger SMS for Abandoned Carts
- Set up the initial Trigger for the Zapier flow that alerts when a cart has been abandoned. This could be a Shopify app integration, consuming a webhook event, or any other e-commerce platform that triggers events on abandoned carts.
- Trigger an API request to Marchex Sonar to create a customer contact. You can either use our Zapier app or hit our API directly using the Zapier Webhook product. API Documentation
- Trigger an API request to Marchex Sonar to create a tracking event that an Abandon Cart event occurred. You can hit our API directly by using the Zapier Webhook Product. API Documentation
- Trigger an API request to Marchex Sonar to send a message to this abandoned cart customer. You can either use our Zapier app or hit our API directly using the Zapier Webhook Product. API Documentation
- BONUS POINTS – Rather than send one static message to abandoned cart customers, set up a campaign and use Step 4 to trigger that campaign message instead. You can then track response rates and utilize A/B messaging options to find the optimal re-engagement language.
Zap 2: Trigger an Event After Purchase
- Set up the initial Trigger for the Zapier flow, identifying when a customer has made a purchase. This could be a Shopify app integration, consuming a webhook event, or any other e-commerce platform that triggers events based on purchases.
- Trigger an API request to Marchex Sonar to create a customer contact. You can either use our Zapier app or hit our API directly using the Zapier Webhook product. API Documentation
- Trigger an API request to Marchex Sonar to create a tracking event that a Purchase event occurred. You can hit our API directly by using the Zapier Webhook Product. API Documentation
Measuring Results
We’d love to help you measure the results of an Abandoned Cart holiday initiative! We can provide insights on the total number of Abandon Cart events and how many purchase events occurred from those Abandoned Cart messages. With additional input from your team on the total or average sales price of purchase events, we can also calculate the total revenue you generated through this simple Zapier set-up.
Contact us to learn more.
