Launch Remarketing to Win Back 26% of Abandoned Orders

Key Takeaways

• A complicated checkout process drives people away; streamlining the steps can lift conversions by 35.62%
• Too much information or too many external links causes customers to leave
• A single-page product sales flow keeps buyers focused on completing the order
• Track customer behavior and use social platforms and email to prompt them to return

Cart abandonment is the eternal nemesis of every e-commerce store owner. In our experience, offering a compelling enough incentive in your sales funnel will often spark a prospect's interest, only for you to discover that after successfully drawing them in, they never complete the purchase. This "so close, yet lost" phenomenon is genuinely frustrating.

Let's start with a few statistics, and you'll quickly see that cart abandonment is, in fact, unavoidable.

1. The average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 69.57%
2. On mobile, the abandonment rate climbs as high as 85.65%
3. A complicated checkout process drives people away; simplifying the steps can lift conversions by 35.62%
4. Extra fees are the #1 reason shoppers abandon their carts
5. Being forced to create an account is the #2 reason people abandon
6. 55% of users abandon when they have to re-enter credit card or shipping information
7. 57% of users abandon after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load
8. 46% of users abandon because a discount code is invalid
9. 39% of mobile users abandon because entering their personal information is too difficult
10. Retargeting ads can bring 26% of users back to your website
11. Personalized retargeting ads can deliver an ROI of more than 1,300%
12. Facebook and Google are the best platforms for retargeting
13. Too much information or too many external links distracts users, and they leave without coming back

While cart abandonment may be hard to avoid entirely, we can still reduce how often it happens, and even when it does occur, we can use the right tactics to win back the customers who are slipping away.

Drawing on the data above, we can neatly group the discussion and the remedies into two areas: how smooth your website is, and your remarketing strategy.

Key points for improving smoothness:

1. Choose a reputable sales platform to ensure fast, reliable performance on the technical side
2. Set the right expectations for customers by clearly stating any extra charges, such as shipping fees
3. In the checkout flow, avoid page jumps, added links, and unnecessary fields wherever possible, and keep the form fields minimal; for marketing, a single-page flagship product sales flow works best, letting users stay focused and breeze through a simple ordering process without distraction

Key points for planning your remarketing strategy:

1. Advertise to prospects who have browsed your sales pages
2. Email the users who clicked to check out but never completed their order

Running retargeting ads through Facebook or Google is fairly straightforward: simply add the Facebook pixel and Google UA when setting up your sales page, then select the right audience when you launch your ads.

As for the second tactic, emailing prospective buyers who never completed their order, you'll need a system to help you filter and identify them, so it can automatically send a reminder email hours or days later. That email can point more directly to which products they left in their cart, ask whether they forgot to check out, note that they're just one step away from finishing easily, and so on. By that point, they may already have finished comparing your brand with others, or they may have genuinely forgotten. You can even use the opportunity to introduce additional products or offers. This little trick can absolutely win back customers who are slipping away.

Getting remarketing right only sets the goal of recovering 26% of your lost customers. The more important focus should be on how to raise your conversion rate. Recovering abandoned orders is, of course, one path to higher conversions, but what we really want to do first is reduce how often orders get abandoned in the first place. The three smoothness improvements above are all about preventing people from leaving during checkout, especially point 3: raising your conversion rate means reducing the chance that a user quits partway through ordering, which in turn means fewer abandoned orders.

In the article 【Landing Pages — How They Differ from Websites and Shopping Carts】, you can dive deeper into why a single-page sale, as a goal-driven landing page, carries such marketing significance. Higher conversions aren't just about more sales revenue; more importantly, they let you grow your customer base quickly. Even if you use an entry-level, low-margin product as bait just to bring customers into your database, remember that customers are a company's greatest asset, and what you truly earn is their enormous future spending.