How do you handle people that abandon a purchase on a regular basis?
If you are running abandoned purchase trigger emails you have two types of serial abandoner; those that use the follow up emails you send, and those that don’t (more on them later). Clearly the issue concerning many online marketers at the moment is the people that use the emails as the means to complete sales.
As abandoned purchase emails become standard in the online world, people are getting used to the idea of receiving them and more than ever are realising there are advantages to abandoning baskets. Many retailers in particular (and I’m starting to see the same in gambling, travel and finance as well) are starting to offer discounts and free delivery on the second email in a programme of follow up emails to an abandoned purchase.
Ultimately for those that pick up on any offers you do in these emails you have two choices, either remove them from your on-going programmes or decide that they are worthwhile customers even at these permanently discounted prices.
Just deal with it like any other sale offer
That might sound like an odd statement, but genuinely how you manage these people comes down to your approach to sales and discounting. If as a business you have a general policy of not giving offers too often, then the best thing to do is remove people from these campaigns after they have been through the programme once.
If however your business has a background in using offers online, then you should see these people as an opportunity to run targeted sales campaigns.
You can be clever with how you handle these people. Take them out of the standard abandonment programme and create a separate customised programme for them. This way you can give them different discounts to the normal offers, potentially changing over time based on how often they use the programme. Think for example about a customer that abandon’s their basket every month for 3 months in a row, this tells you so much about their requirements and habits that you can better judge the level and type of offer you give them.
What about the other guys
So what about those people we mentioned at the beginning who are serial abandoners and don’t interact with your follow up campaigns. Don’t ignore them. Behavioural follow up emails have proven to improve deliverability because of their targeted nature., However if you ignore this sub set of emails you could eventually affect the deliverability by repeatedly sending to non engaged users.
Here are a few ways to deal with this sub set:
- Monitor them for a few emails to see if they are genuinely uninterested in this type of message
- If they do continue to be disengaged, remove them from future abandoned basket programmes
- However, before cutting them off completely provide a different type of engagement such a survey. This may provide you with some useful feedback, and present you with further ideas on how to engage this customer in the future.
Don’t view it as a problem
So to conclude, don’t see serial abandoners as a problem to be feared. Instead look at the positive things that can come from them and if you follow a couple of the points above, I’m pretty confident you’ll find they can be a positive part of your online business.
In the meantime, if you want to understand more about behavioural email please email me at blog@redeye.com