More and more people are inquiring about Abandoned Shopping Cart Best Practices. Maybe it’s because they got wind that the cart abandonment rate increased from 71% to 75% in just over a year and a half and is continuing to rise into 2012? To help you to decide whether or not to jump on the bandwagon and implement an abandoned shopping cart campaign, I will, over the course of a three-part series, offer some abandoned shopping cart campaign facts, tips and best practices to follow.

In the first article I will discuss the top reasons why consumers abandon their shopping carts and how well abandoned shopping cart email campaigns perform when compared against industry averages.

Shopping Cart Completion Deterrents

Interestingly enough, the top 5 reasons for abandoning the shopping cart have nothing to do with the actual checkout process.

1. 44% thought that shipping and handling costs were too high
2. 41% were not ready to purchase the product
3. 27% said they wanted to compare prices on other sites first
4. 25% thought that the product price was higher than they were willing to pay
5. 24% just wanted to save the product in their cart for later consideration

So what were the top two causes? Price & Timing.

So why Bother?

If the top two reasons aren’t personal opinions/choices, then why bother? You need to remember that just because they left, it doesn’t mean they won’t be back!

Engagement metrics for cart abandonment emails are well above that of the email industry as a whole.  Open Rate percentages for abandoned cart messages average around 46% vs. the general email industry average of 22%, while Click Through Rates hover around 15% (vs. 5.6% for the industry). And lastly, of those who actually click through, 21% end up converting over and spending 55% more than those who do not abandon their carts in the first place.

These stats provide solid evidence that running an abandoned shopping cart campaign is not only a great way to reconnect with your customers, enticing them to complete the purchases which they had come so close to doing in the first place, but, you can also learn more about what caused your customers to abandon their purchase in the first place. You can then work to optimize the buying process so that fewer customers abandon in the future.

In part two of this series on abandoned shopping cart best practices I will discuss specific tactics for your abandoned shopping cart campaign, such as, when to send and what type of templates you should think about using.