As an ecommerce business it takes a lot of work and investment to get a potential customer to land on your website, never mind getting someone to the point of purchasing. Imagine spending all of that time and money driving people in to your website, creating a great experinece and desirable product only to lose that potential customer as they are on the cusp of checking out. All that investment…
This was an opportunity we identified last year for an ecommerce clothing business that we work with. They were losing 8% of potential revenue to people who abandoned cart and on average per month 81% of abandoners were never recovered. Despite having made tweaks to their checkout experience they were still seeing a high abandonment rate.
Cart abandonment in Hubspot
We had worked with this client to onboard them onto Hubspot earlier in the year and identified a big opportunity to run cart abandonment using Hubspot. Hubspot’s tools allowed us to look at tactics beyond the traditional marketing methods (e.g. email) for intercepting people abandoning cart and nurturing them to come back and order with the business.
The first step when looking at cart abandonment in Hubspot is to make sure that cart data is being passed into Hubspot at an early enough stage in the checkout process (just before payment) for us to be able to identify carts which are abandoned. In the case of this business we had made sure that this data was being passed in as part of the ecommerce integration we had set-up when onboarding but we have since worked with businesses to bring this data in after they have used hubspot for years. We work closely with the business’ developers, providing a spec of what is required and feedback and testing to ensure that the ecommerce integration is passing order data from the correct checkout stage and passing all of the line item properties from the order/deal that we need in order to show someone the cart that they abandoned.
A customer service style approach
In the case of this business we started by working with the business to pinpoint why people were abandoning. Anecdotally the customer service team had received calls from older customers who found it easier to speak to someone to place their order, there were others who had called and mentioned struggling with particular payment methods and after working with the business to survey more abandoners there were also people who had just got distracted and had not come back.
From this analysis, it appeared that a more personal customer service style approach could be helpful to customers and potentially fruitful for the business. We came up with a solution combining marketing automation and sales tools that we trained their customer service team to use.
Using Hubspot’s workflow tool we set-up an automation to identify carts that were still pending after a short time delay so we could label them as abandoned carts. The beauty of using a Hubspot workflow to do this is that we can keep checking using If/Then branches between steps that that person hasn’t actually suddenly completed their order or even come back and checked out in a different order.
Once identified as abandoned we then set tasks in our workflow using Hubspot’s sales task function for the customer service team to give the person who has abandoned a call. We worked with the customer service team to create a call script that would be helpful and not too salesy which could be added as a Playbook (script that you can annotate quickly) if you are using Hubspot Marketing Enterprise. We provided the customer service team with training in how to use and check tasks which we then documented in the Hubspot Knowledge base as the business was just using this Hubspot Service functionality for collating and sharing internal knowledge.
Once the customer service person completes their task they update a property in the deal/order to detail what the outcome of the call is. Depending on the response the Hubspot workflow sends anyone who is going to come back in their own time but hasn’t yet a series of helpful emails to allow them to easily retrieve their carts. We can offer support in the creation of these emails using custom email modules and once the templates are in place these are very easy to edit.
Winning back carts & hearts
The customer service team found the process really simple to follow and were pleased as they received really positive feedback from those they were calling. People were happy to receive more persalised product and delivery information if they had been unsure about something or needed help with placing their order and many people appreciated the personalised reminder if they had forgotten but intended to come back, particularly in the Christmas shopping period.
In short, it was a great success! Calling, although not a traditional method of cart retrieval, worked brilliantly well, particularly at peak Christmas period when people start many carts and never come back. We saw the rate of recovered carts increase from 19% to 50% after the new workflow and process was put in place which meant that the average monthly revenue from recovered carts was up 92% PoP after we launched the new process driving a huge amount of additional revenue for the business.
This call method may not suit every ecommerce business but there are endless possibilities in Hubspot to mix the sales, service and marketing tools to create new cart winning strategies tailored to your audience. Sound like something that might be useful to your business? You can arrange a call with Attacat here:
