How to Increase the Value of Your E-commerce Business using Customer Recovery Software
Updated on November 19, 2020
If you caught Empire Flipper’s latest guest blog, “How to Determine the Value of Your E-commerce Business in a Volatile Marketplace,” over on CartStack, you know there are seven key ways to increase the value of your e-commerce business:
- Optimizing your logistics
- Increasing your traffic numbers
- Establishing a well-known brand
- Growing a large email list
- Expanding your traffic channels
- Developing unique products
- Maintaining low hours
A simple but effective tool used for nailing these areas is customer recovery software.
Customer recovery software helps to prevent browse and cart abandonment from happening on your e-commerce website by recovering online shoppers who abandon their purchases. It does this using
- On-site retargeting campaigns that drive conversions and capture leads;
- Recovery campaigns to recapture abandoned sales; and
- Optimization tools that enhance the success of your on-site and recovery campaigns.
In turn, customer recovery software empowers you to increase quality traffic, grow a large email list, boost conversions, and test CTAs, enabling you to increase the value of your e-commerce store with very little additional effort on your part.
In this blog, we take a deeper look at how customer recovery software works and what it can achieve for your e-commerce business.
Increasing the Value of Your E-commerce Business Using On-Site Retargeting Campaigns
As briefly mentioned, the first aim of customer recovery software is to prevent browse and cart abandonment from happening on your website. It does this using on-site retargeting campaigns.
Quick recap: Browse abandonment is when a website visitor leaves your e-commerce site before adding an item to their shopping cart. Cart abandonment is when a website visitor leaves after adding an item to their shopping cart but before finalizing their purchase at the checkout.
On-site retargeting campaigns have two aims:
- Getting customers to and through the checkout before abandonment; and
- Acquiring customers’ contact information and on-site behavioral data should abandonment occur.
These aims are achieved using the three tools below.
Delayed and exit-intent popups
Delayed popups appear after a shopper has been on your website for a set amount of time and exit intent popups appear when a shopper’s cursor moves towards the exit or back buttons.
Both popups contain an offer that either counteracts the potential reasons for abandonment (getting the customer through the checkout) or encourages the customer to input their contact information (to use following abandonment).
Further reading: 10 Abandoned Cart Exit Intent Popup Offers That Actually Convert
Real-time, site-wide lead capture
Real-time, site-wide email capture allows you to automatically capture an email address in real-time as it’s being typed on your website.
This means that you don’t need to wait for a customer to create an account or sign up for your newsletter to obtain their contact information. Instead, you instantly capture email addresses entered into popups, live chat, and checkout forms for use following abandonment or for future marketing.
Push notification opt-ins
A push notification opt-in appears in a shopper’s web browser after they have been browsing your website for a set period.
When a customer authorizes push notifications, you can send them timed messages that appear on their computer screen, regardless of if they’re still on your website or browsing the internet—which is great if they abandon their purchase.
These on-site retargeting campaigns help your e-commerce business with
- Increasing first-time conversions on your website and reducing your bounce rate, enabling you to demonstrate a strong market for your products;
- Expanding your qualified leads, allowing potential investors to test new marketing campaigns and revenue streams; and
- Maintaining low hours by allowing these processes to automatically run in the background, giving investors an attractive business opportunity.
Increasing the Value of Your E-commerce Business Using Recovery Campaigns
The second aim of customer recovery software is to recover online shoppers lost through browse or cart abandonment. It does this using recovery campaigns.
Recovery campaigns have four main aims, known as the “four Rs”:
- Reminding the online shopper about their visit to your website;
- Reengaging their interest in the products they were viewing;
- Returning them to your website and to those products; and
- Recovering lost revenue by getting them through the checkout.
There are three tools for achieving the four Rs.
Abandoned cart and browse abandonment recovery emails
Customer recovery emails are a series of automated emails sent to shoppers who left your website through browse or cart abandonment.
By following cart and browse abandonment email best practices, including timing, subject lines, personalization, and persuasion, you can quickly capture attention, reengage interest, and bring lost leads back to your website and through the checkout.
Recovery SMS
Abandoned cart SMS messages are a series of automated text messages sent to shoppers following browse or cart abandonment.
SMS messages work alongside abandonment emails to target customers who spend a lot of time on their mobile phones and respond better to short, sharp, and persuasive messages of a personal nature.
Recovery push notifications
Another abandoned cart tool that doesn’t require email is a push notification. After a customer opts into your push notifications, you can send a series of recovery push messages that appear on a potential customer’s computer screen following abandonment.
Push notifications are great for reigniting interest and recapturing customers when they are best placed to resume their shopping journey (i.e., on their computer).
Adopting a multi-channel approach to customer recovery helps you to demonstrate the following to potential buyers:
- Traffic from multiple sources, including email, SMS, and push notifications;
- Well-established customer relationships that are nurtured through each customer’s preferred method of communication; and
- High sales figures, with low marketing costs, thanks to high conversion and customer recovery rates.
Increasing the value of your e-commerce business by optimizing your on-site and recovery campaigns
The final aim of customer recovery software is to maximize the success of your on-site and recovery campaigns by squeezing every conversion possible out of your existing website traffic.
It does this using the following additional tools and features:
Abandoned cart session replay
Abandoned cart session replay records abandonment as it happens, allowing you to re-watch them (with popcorn) later on and pinpoint exactly where your customer fell off the conversion cliff.
You can use this information to fuel your on-site and recovery campaigns by addressing and overcoming common reasons for abandonment. For example, if a high volume of traffic is abandoning your website when they click onto your delivery policy, you could use popups and cart abandonment emails to offer free shipping coupons.
Real-time notifications
Real-time notifications automatically alert you when certain purchases are abandoned, allowing you to instantly react with a manual outreach step.
For example, a real-time notification to your sales team for abandoned carts over $2,000 enables them to instantly pick up the phone and nurture that lead while it’s still hot and hasn’t yet been bought from a competitor.
A/B split testing
A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a particular message to see which one yields better results. Doing so allows you to implement the best on-site and recovery campaigns for your specific audience.
Product recommendations
AI-driven product recommendations use on-site behavior to make genuine and useful product recommendations to your customers, for use in emails, SMS messages, and push notifications. The more personalized your product recommendations are, the easier it is to re-engage customer interest and bring them back to your website.
Zapier
Finally, Zapier connects this software with your CRM system to ensure that leads captured with your recovery tools make it onto your main email list. This allows you to continue engaging with leads who are interested in your products, but not yet ready to purchase, and can be done through automated marketing campaigns or manual outreach steps.
These additional tools recover even more lost purchases and can increase average cart size at the same time by appealing to your audience’s specific interests. This further boosts your e-commerce sales and business profits, enhancing your overall business valuation.
Key takeaways
Customer recovery software is a comprehensive tool kit that uses on-site, recovery, and optimization tools to boost conversions, increase leads, and contribute to your overall business value.
And we’ve barely scratched the surface.
Tools such as CartStack also comes with other features, such as automatic customer segmentation, Send My Cart, and enriched contact records, to recover more than 15% of abandoned carts, an attractive statistic for any buyer.
You’ve put a lot of time, effort, and love into your eCommerce business – it’s only fair that you get a decent profit out of selling it.
