With abandonment rates as high as 80%, it’s important that merchants set up solutions to reduce and recover carts abandoned by shoppers.
Without any solutions in place, you’ll end up losing almost 8 out of 10 interested shoppers that visit your store.
One of the best ways to recover abandoned carts is with a cart recovery text campaign.
Text campaigns are highly visible, allowing you to nudge shoppers to come back, even when they’re offline.
But hold up, aren’t abandoned cart emails good enough? Well, while we’re big fans of abandoned cart emails, they do have some flaws worth mentioning.
So let’s kick off by understanding why only using emails may be harming your cart recovery rates.
The Problem with Abandoned Cart Emails
Right off the bat, shoppers need to be connected to the internet to ensure that they don’t miss an email.
What’s more, with strict spam filters, many shoppers may end up missing your email altogether.
With SMS, recipients don't need internet connectivity to receive messages and there's no spam filter to contend with.
But it doesn’t stop there; email campaigns have an open rate of 21% while SMS campaigns witness an open rate of 98%.
With higher visibility, SMS is the perfect channel for merchants who want to send abandoned cart reminders.
Unlike email, SMS is instantly viewed, read, and impressively, responded to within 90 seconds of reading. When it comes to comprehending and interacting with an email, it takes shoppers as long as 90 minutes.
With SMS, merchants can send a crisp reminder to shoppers about their abandoned cart and bring back a higher percentage of shoppers to checkout.
Taking all this together, it’s fair to say that if you haven’t created a cart recovery text campaign, you’re probably leaving money on the table.
How SMS Marketing and Automation Helps Cart Recovery
With automation, merchants have been able to send marketing and cart recovery messages in bulk to shoppers based on specific triggers.
And nowadays, pretty much every marketing channel allows merchants to automate their cart recovery and let the marketing app do the work.
Automated marketing has many benefits. It has proven to boost customer engagement by 68% and sales by 47%, increasing opportunities for you to capture sales at the right time, whether by recovering carts or by upselling items to shoppers.
But, each shopper is different. The message within your automated abandoned cart recovery text might not appeal to different types of shoppers.
For example, some shoppers may be more receptive to a discount while others may just want a reminder. To cater to these different types of shoppers, conversational marketing can be a great help.
5 Ways to Upgrade Your Cart Recovery Text Campaign
Okay, so you’re up to speed on how abandoned cart texts and conversational marketing can help your re-capture lost revenue.
Now let's look at how you can super-charge your results with 5 powerful best practices:
1. Use urgency in your copy
Urgency allows you to build a fear among your shoppers that they may miss out on the items they’ve had their eye on.
Use urgency in your copy to make shoppers act faster and convert abandoned carts into successful purchases.
Here are some phrases you can use within your SMS copy to illicit urgency and increase clicks:
Don’t miss out!
Limited offer!
The clock is ticking!
Checkout your cart before it’s gone!
Expiring soon!
2. Make the copy sound like your brand
Oftentimes, online stores make their copy sound too salesy. When your copy is lacking any brand personality and only pushing for profit, customers will be less inclined to buy.
Instead, show who you are in your cart recovery text campaign. Whether you’re a hyper and excited personality or a nurturing figure, distinguishable copy allows shoppers to recognize your brand and build rapport with you.
3. Maximize visibility with a human touch
For consumers, it's easy to spot an automated message since they seem generic with little to no personalized elements to make consumers feel eager to respond to it.
This is why it's important to add a human touch to your cart text campaigns. SMS campaigns sent by real humans make shoppers eager to interact with the message further.
Does that mean you need to employ a team of professional texters? No!
TxtCart is a Shopify text marketing app that lets you convert more customers with human-powered marketing.
TxtCart’s live agents interact with your consumer to remind them about their abandoned cart, finding out why they abandoned, answering questions they may have, and tailoring the offer to convert the shopper by end of the conversation.
For instance, some shoppers might be looking for an additional discount. While others could be seeking free shipping. The only way to know what will make them complete the purchase is to interact with them!
4. Use CTA words to elicit a quicker response
Once you've framed the first part of your text campaign, you need action words to guide shoppers to come back to your Shopify store. CTA or 'Call to Action' words will help you with this.
By using CTA words like 'Checkout now' or 'Act now!', you can successfully bring shoppers back to their cart and get them to complete checkout. Add a CTA at the end of your cart recovery message to effectively drive more clicks from your text campaign.
5. Provide an offer to increasing recovery
Many online stores add an offer within their cart recovery text campaigns to increase their chances of bringing back shoppers and get them to checkout.
You can add an offer too, whether this is free shipping, a 10% off, or even giving shoppers more loyalty points. You can even update your text messages routinely to add any currently running discounts to your cart recovery message.
Incentives like discounts and free shipping are a powerful way to recover abandoned carts better and increase purchases on your Shopify store.
How to Capture Subscribers for Cart Recovery Text Campaigns
Before you can send cart recovery text messages, you need to have subscribers to send these messages to. You can grow your SMS subscriber list through 2 tactics:
1. Customer registration
One of the easiest ways to capture new subscribers within your SMS list is through customer registration.
When shoppers are registering an account on your Shopify store, they drop their phone number, and here, you can ask them if they’d like to receive deals via SMS.
When capturing subscribers via customer registration, you’re also more likely to receive subscribers who have a higher intent to continue interacting with your brand.
2. Capture subscribers on thank you page
Once a shopper has made a purchase, you can nudge them to subscribe to your text messages through the thank you page.
The thank-you page provides shoppers details about their order and enriches their experience on your Shopify store. By placing a subscription widget here, you can easily nudge shoppers who used guest checkout to subscribe to your text messages.
You can add an SMS subscription widget on your thank you page by using the ReConvert app. ReConvert’s thank you page builder lets you customize your thank you page and add a subscription widget with an enticing message to nudge shoppers to subscribe.
Ready to recover carts with text marketing?
As an online store, you need to equip yourself with the best apps to recover abandoned carts and increase purchases.
TxtCart is built to help you engage and convert your shoppers with conversational SMS messages. With dedicated human-powered SMS technology and an easy to use dashboard, the app lets you set up SMS marketing in just minutes!
This post was written by Vanhishikha Bhargava, the Head of Content and Partnerships at TxtCart, a human-powered abandoned cart recovery & SMS marketing app for Shopify stores. You can connect with her here.