An abandoned cart is when a visitor of the website ads items to their cart and then leaves the site. The checkout page is where almost 75% of visitors leave the site. That is why the majority of e-commerce companies put the most effort into optimizing it.
Besides customizing the checkout page, there are other ways of getting the visitor to complete their order, even if they leave the site. This is done by remarketing via social networks, sending text messages, and/or emails. More about how to recover abandoned carts with text messages in our blog post: Recover abandoned carts with text messages.
Why do abandoned carts happen?
There are multiple reasons why your visitors abandon their carts. The most common reasons are lack of trust, high shipping costs, and a complex checkout process. The checkout page should be simple to understand and easy to complete as fast as possible. This includes not needing to register, having the smallest amount of obligatory fields as possible, and not distracting your customers with unnecessary information in the header and footer of the page.
Even if these conditions are met abandoned carts will happen and nothing will bring the visitors back to the site if you do not do anything about it.
How to recover abandoned carts?
There are multiple ways of recovering abandoned carts using different marketing channels. One way is retargeting them on social media, like Facebook, and offering them discount codes, but you can’t target them at the exact time you want. The second way is to send them abandoned cart emails but the open rate for emails is low and usually, the emails go to the Promotions or Spam folders. That is why we recommend using text messages to optimize abandoned cart recovery.
Sending text messages as notifications to recover an abandoned cart is the best way to guarantee that the message will be seen. But let’s get into the statistics of abandoned cart text messages.
To optimize conversions, check our article: When to send abandoned cart text messages?.
What did we test?
At Cart Boss, we support different kinds of text messages. One of them is abandoned cart text messages meant for recovering carts on websites.
We set up 2 different text messages, one after 15 minutes of cart abandonment and the other after 3 hours. In addition, the second one offered a 20% discount. The test was done with 10 of our clients in different countries in the EU. The text in the messages was the same for all clients. Testing was done over a span of a month.
We compared the Return of Investment (ROI) and the Click-Through Rate (CTR) overall and for each text message. ROI is calculated based on the revenue generated from text messages (a completed order based on clicking on a link in the message sent by Cart Boss) and the money spent for sending text messages. The CTR is the ratio between the number of text messages sent and the number of links clicked on in the message.
If you want to read more about text message statistics overall check out our blog post: Text messaging statistics for marketing.
Abandoned cart text message CTR statistics
Let’s first take a look at the Click-Through Rate of the sent text messages. The overall average CTR for abandoned cart text messages was around 40% which is high above average. The lowest was 29% and the highest 45%.
We suspect that this is due to the carefully selected time delays in which the visitor receives the message.
They receive the first message just 15 minutes after they have shown interest in buying your product. This is a great window where they are still interested in the product and most prone to impulsive completing the order. Even more so, if the checkout fields are already pre-populated so that they do not lose any time.
The second message, which is sent 3 hours after cart abandonment, has a different approach. This text message included a 20% discount on their cart. Because they might not be interested in the product due to its price, this is a great way to get them to reconsider.
The average CTR for the first text message was around 44%, where the lowest was 29% and the highest was 47%. The second text message, which was sent after 3 hours, had lower results. The average CTR for it was 34%, where the lowest was 22% and the highest was 37%.
Abandoned cart text message ROI statistics
With ROI we must take into account the different prices of the products each of the clients had. The products they sold were similar but the prices vary by 10-15%.
On average, the ROI was around 2500% but the differences between various clients were noticeable. The lowest average ROI was around 1500% and the largest was at almost 4400%.
The first text message, which was sent after 15 minutes of cart abandonment, has the highest ROI. On average this text message has a ROI of around 3500%, compared to the second one whose ROI is around 1200%. However, with the second text message, we must take into account that the value of the cart is also lower due to the applied discount. Still, there is a significant difference between these two text messages.
Future testing
Seeing that the second text message has a lower CTR and ROI, it would be interesting to see what would happen if we reduced the time delay of the second message. Would the CTR get higher because the receivers of the message are still more interested in the product that they checked out? Would the conversion rate get any better? We will definitely test this out in the upcoming tests.
