Fight Browse Abandonment with SMS Marketing

Shoppers have more options to buy than ever before, making it harder to get them to convert. This means more abandoned sessions, as customers leave online stores in search of similar products with more bells and whistles or at a lower price point.

 

Let’s talk  about browse abandonment — what it is, why it matters, and how you can use SMS strategies to win back customers and move them further along the path to purchase.

 

Browse abandonment is the digital equivalent of window shopping. A customer comes to your store, checks out one or more products, and then exits your website without adding anything to their cart or making a purchase.

 

According to SEMrush, here’s the breakdown of what shoppers typically do when they visit an eCommerce site:

A browse abandonment strategy is essential

 

Some revealing stats that put this dilemma into stark context:

 

 

Nearly 50% of eCommerce store visitors are just browsing

 

Given this context, if you don’t have a strategy for getting these visitors to purchase, then you’re losing out on a lot of potential revenue.

 

Though a shopper hasn’t shown purchase intent when they abandon your site without adding an item to their cart, they’ve given you some powerful data. You know which products and categories they’re interested in, and you can bring them back with the right SMS engagement strategy.

 

SMS is a unique channel with very high responsiveness, something that makes it really efficient in reaching out to customers, getting their attention, and bringing them back to complete a purchase.

 

In fact, our research shows that clickthrough rates for SMS are more than 39%, and as a result, ROI is upwards of 25x. Compared to emails, SMS has 6-8x higher engagement. It’s a highly effective channel for winning back customers.

 

 

In order to deploy a successful SMS browse abandonment strategy, you have to have a shopper’s phone number. Exit intent pop-ups are an effective way to capture a shopper’s phone number before they leave your store.

 

Pop-ups get a bad rap, but when deployed correctly, they can be highly effective. Our internal research shows that the average opt-in for pop-ups is 4.78%, and that has yielded our customers a collective 10 million new conversions every single day.

 

The key to a successful pop-up strategy is to provide value to the customer. You can do this by offering a discount, like in this example:

 

In addition to discounts, you can utilize messaging to be notified of sales and new or similar products. By testing different offers and messages, you’ll learn which ones are more effective for your customer base. And once you’ve captured their phone number, you have an opportunity to utilize all of the browse abandonment strategies discussed above.

Conclusion

For many shoppers, the grass is always greener — they may like a product, but what if another store has one they’ll like better? Or at a lower cost? Or one that will ship faster? This leads them to abandon stores and carts.

Remember that every person who visits your website is giving you valuable data points. And even if a customer abandons your store without buying anything, you can collect their phone number and use that data to craft personalized SMS flows and incentives that will help reduce browse abandonment and boost sales.

Cloud Marketing offers brands affordable solutions to help you leverage SMS flows to drive engagements and conversions at every stage of your online sales funnel.