According to the Baymard Institute, 68.55% of all online shopping carts get abandoned before the order is completed. As an e-Commerce store owner, one of the best things you can do for your business is start working to decrease the percentage of carts that get abandoned on your own site. CartHook is a service built specifically for that purpose and they recently released support for Easy Digital Downloads.
68.55% is a huge number, but let’s put it in perspective. Assume for a moment that you run a store that generates $10,000 in monthly revenue. What would your revenue look like if you increased the number of sales by just 25%? We can use the following example:
Current sales = $10,000 per month Current sales x 0.25 = $2,500 per month $2,500 x 12 = $30,000 extra in annual sales
By decreasing your abandonment rate by 25%, you could increase your annual revenue by $30,000.
What is your abandonment rate? Do you know? A huge majority of store owners have no idea what it is, nor do they realize how much potential revenue they’re leaving on the table. Assuming that your store is relatively average (and that’s a good thing), your abandonment rate is likely in the range of 50-80%.
CartHook automates the sales recovery process by capturing email addresses as they are entered on the checkout screen. Once the email address is captured, it is placed into an email campaign that delivers reminder emails to the customer after set time periods, such as 5 hours after abandonment, 24 hours later, and 5 days after leaving checkout. If the customer completes the purchase at anytime after clicking on a link included in one of the emails, the cart is considered recovered.
Let’s look a bit more closely at what the flow of events looks like.
Customer lands on checkout screen
At this point the customer is pretty committed to making their purchase, so they go ahead and enter their email. The customer is then asked for payment details. Here they either change their mind or get distracted (perhaps get up to go find their wallet) and they end up not coming back.
The cart is abandoned.
One hour later CartHook sends the first email
CartHook automatically detects the contents of the shopping cart and then uses that information to fill out the first email reminder that gets sent one hour after the cart is abandoned. It looks something like this:
If the customer clicks Review Your Cart and completes the purchase, the cart is successfully recovered. If the customer ignores the email or doesn’t complete the purchase for any reason, they remain in the campaign.
24 hours later, CartHook sends the second email
At the 24 hour mark, CartHook sends a second email (as long as the customer has not completed the purchase and has not opted out). Again, this email includes details of the shopping cart:
Five days later, one final email is sent
After five days, if the customer still has not completed the order, a final email is sent.
These emails alone can dramatically decrease the percentage of abandoned carts on your site. The screenshots above are actually from our own CartHook campaign that we started on December 16th.
Since starting our own CartHook sales recovery campaign, we have recovered over $2,400 in revenue, and that was in less than three weeks.
Here’s a screenshot from our own dashboard showing the stats for December:
Remember, we enabled our campaign on the 16th of December, so these stats represent just two weeks. In that time, we recovered 22.12% of all abandoned carts. Previously, our abandonment rate was 28.73%, and we dropped that by 22.12%. This improvement resulted in $2,198.50 in recovered revenue.
If we extrapolate those numbers out, we can expect to recover more than $25,000 this year alone, through a service that costs as little $99 per month. Would you pay $1,200 a year to earn $25,000? Yes, yes, yes.
CartHook is exceptionally easy to setup and configure, and they offer a free 30 day trial. We saw results in less than two weeks so 30 days is more than plenty to determine if the service will work for you.
The installation instructions on CartHook’s website will show you step-by-step details on how to setup CartHook with Easy Digital Downloads.
Don’t you think it’s time you started recovering those abandoned carts?