Cart abandonment might be one of the most frustrating experiences when selling on Shopify. It’s a near-sale without that important final click.
You’ve done everything right when it comes to converting a potential lead into someone who clicks “purchase”—only to see that would-be transaction come to a hard stop.
Reaching out via SMS is a smart way to reach out to these potential customers.
And yes, there are plenty of automated tools for doing this. Using automated SMS campaigns, you can send cart abandonment messages that say something like: “We noticed you left something in your cart. Click here to complete your order.”
But there’s a problem with this approach: People abandon shopping carts for all sorts of reasons, including price comparisons, unexpected shipping costs, and lack of customer support. An automated text message isn’t going to respond to any of those needs when it comes to abandoned carts.
So how can Shopify store owners reach out via SMS with a human touch to reach customers and address their specific issues? We’re going to get into that here.
First: Let’s look at the cart abandonment issue as a whole. Most Shopify sellers struggle with e-commerce cart abandonment to some degree: It’s clearly a wide-spread issue with the global average for cart abandonment sitting at about 70%. Simply put, the vast majority of online shoppers just don’t finish their purchases.
What’s most frustrating for Shopify sellers about this issue is that they know there’s customer interest: The shopper went as far as adding the product to their cart. They were almost ready to make a purchase. But then they didn’t.
So what happened? Shopify sellers have no way of knowing...unless they reach out to them directly.
However, if you’re going to re-capture some of those nearly 70% of e-commerce shoppers who drop off before checking out, you need a way to reach back out.
Enter SMS for cart abandonment.
1. It has amazing open rates: We all have stuffed email inboxes, but SMS open rates are as high as 98% and 90% of texts are read within three minutes. Those three minutes are critical. That’s the window in which you can connect directly to that shopper who’s still thinking about buying from your Shopify store via SMS and bring them back to do it.
2. It’s more effective than email: Many of us are familiar with email reminders that nudge us to complete a purchase. But what about SMS? It’s still fairly underutilized; especially when manned by real people (not automated bots.) When used with a human touch, SMS messaging has a 21% recovery rate for cart abandonment, while email comes in at a mere 7%.
Bottom line: With SMS working for you, an abandoned cart on Shopify doesn’t have to be the end of your interaction with shoppers. It might actually just be the beginning.
The numbers make a compelling case for SMS as your primary strategy for reducing cart abandonment on Shopify. But which tactics are going to drive the most customers back to your carts?
Here are three main steps needed to send SMS messages that reduce Shopify cart abandonment:
1. Get permission to text your customers.
Allow customers to opt in to your SMS program, because you’ll only irritate customers who never gave you the green light to text them. Be sure they’ve granted you permission to send them texts.
2. Integrate a Shopify app for recovering carts over SMS.
LiveRecover uses real humans and highly personalized SMS messages to win back customers who abandoned their carts, but there are other SMS e-commerce apps as well (like SMSBump and Attentive) that use automations to send more canned responses with bots.
3. Start sending text messages to bring back shoppers.
Sometimes, all a customer needs is a little nudge in the right direction. SMS messages create a direct line between you and your Shopify customers at the most critical point in the customer journey, so use this communication tool to reach out when they inevitably abandon carts (and bring them back to complete the purchase.)
SMS might be effective with its 98% open rate, but that doesn’t matter if your messages are dry and robotic.
How do you combat this? Use real people. LiveRecover uses real people for SMS cart abandonment campaigns, which is one reason 46% of customers reply to those texts.
Being pushy and forcing a sale isn’t very effective, which is why we take a helpful, friendly approach to our SMS messages. With a real person behind the text, personalization and conversion optimization comes naturally. It also builds trust with your shoppers who’ve abandoned carts.
Real people on the other end of the SMS mean you can also address specific questions and concerns via text. LiveRecover takes answers from Shopify sellers’ FAQs, product descriptions, or can even forward customers to a support team if no good answers are available.
This way, Shopify cart abandoners will receive a specific answer—not a clearly automated message forwarding them to an FAQ page to find an answer themselves.
Finally, you can offer a small discount. When someone abandons a cart, they might be hesitant to buy because of a pricing issue. But around 20% of the time, a small discount or shipping incentive with a link back to a customer’s cart is enough to give them the bargain they needed to complete the purchase.
Targeting customers for your Shopify store who’ve abandoned their carts gives you instant access to the warmest possible leads (and lets you specifically tailor a message to bring them back to your products.)
But automated messages or emails aren’t enough. An SMS strategy with LiveRecover will make sure your recovery texts are targeted to each individual’s needs and have that human touch that brings back as many lost sales as possible.
