Baymard Institute research shows that the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate for 2023 was 70.19 percent, representing the first time it has climbed above 70 percent in 10 years. The more than 7 in 10 consumers who leave a website without making the transaction translates to about $18 billion in lost sales revenue annually.
Common reasons for cart abandonment include extra (read: hidden) costs, the need to create an account, and a complicated checkout process. Retailers spend a lot of money to increase fulfillment through an improved UX, but cost transparency and a more seamless end-to-end process only go so far in mitigating cart abandonment. Retailers should also consider the impact of a personalized customer experience (CX).
In one McKinsey study, 71 percent of consumers said that they expect personalized interactions. Probing deeper into what consumers expect from a modern, personalized CX, 67 percent said relevant product recommendations, 66 percent said tailored messaging and 53 percent said that a brand should send triggers based on the consumer’s behavior.
Which Approach Should Marketers Use?
Knowing these expectations, which of the three approaches yields the best results? Is it the product recommendations, tailored messaging, or behavioral-based triggers? All three methods can be effective in reducing abandoned shopping carts versus a generic approach that runs the same cart abandonment playbook for every customer, e.g., the same email or offer every time any customer abandons a cart.
An impersonal, static offer or trigger fails to meet the expectation of the modern consumer that a brand provides a consistent, personalized CX. It’s also cost inefficient, as it doesn’t take into consideration customer intent, including the customer’s cart abandonment patterns. For example, will a static email be relevant? Will the customer try to game the system and abandon the cart just to receive the free shipping offer she knows is coming?
Put the Brakes on Abandoned Carts with a Golden Record
In an effort to reduce cart abandonment and recoup some of that $18 billion in lost revenue, many retailers are focusing on the customer data platform (CDP) and its ability to shine a light on customer intent through construction of a unified customer profile. With a deep, contextual and real-time understanding of the customer, retailers respond to cart abandonment with hyper-relevant interactions that align with the context of the customer journey – all triggered by that abandoned cart. A retargeting ad that reflects an in-depth understanding of the customer’s behaviors. A real-time offer on an item that complements what’s sitting in the cart. A personalized message that plays to the customer’s brand affinity, based on recognizing them as a loyal customer.
What was once disparate pieces of customer data stored across business units come together to form a complete picture that can be used to understand and influence customer behavior down to the individual level, but at scale.
All of this becomes possible with a unified customer profile, which is also known as a Golden Record. A supercharged single customer view, a Golden Record includes a full identity graph as well as a full contact graph. It includes customer data from every possible source and of every type, and all of a customer’s behaviors, preferences, transactions and sentiments. It also includes all known devices and IDs, email and physical addresses.
What was once disparate pieces of customer data stored across business units come together to form a complete picture that can be used to understand and influence customer behavior down to the individual level, but at scale.
Other important characteristics of a Golden Record that make it the single source of truth for a customer are real time data ingestion, persistent database key management and householding.
- Real time data ingestion ensures that a Golden Record provides marketers and business users with the ability to engage with a customer in the moment, within the context of an ongoing customer journey. This is key in curbing shopping cart abandonment. Consider a customer who leaves items in a shopping cart and then engages with a chatbot. A chatbot that accesses data from the current browsing session through a Golden Record that is updated in real time is better able to guide a customer journey to an optimal outcome. Not many CDPs can truly manage real time data well, so it’s important to include this when evaluating CDP solutions.
- Persistent key management provides marketers with an all-important contextual understanding of a customer over time. Persistent key management relies on a mechanism for creating a unique ID – a master customer record – and attaching the unique ID to a signal, with rules for keeping it or replacing it over time as the customer journey evolves. This consistency ensures that users do not unexpectedly lose or gain information about a customer over time because of differences in how the customer identifies themselves or how the identity resolution process unfolds. As this capability pertains to shopping cart abandonment, consider a customer who abandons a cart who perhaps last engaged with the brand several months ago using a different device, and is now newly married and using a different name. With a Golden Record that uses persistent database key management, the brand knows it’s the same customer and can personalize the abandonment response based on the complete customer record.
- Householding provides a contextual understanding of a customer within a particular unit. This may be a true “household,” but may also be set up to reflect a customer’s role within a business or as an account holder in a situation with multiple accounts. A feature of advanced identity resolution in the creation of the Golden Record, householding is a valuable tool for mitigating shopping cart abandonment by providing essential insight into exactly who is filling the cart.
In B2B sales, householding reveals if the person filling the cart is the final decision maker in a situation where perhaps a dozen or so employees have access to a shared account. In the more traditional household setting, consider the mother that fills the shopping cart with bedding for her daughter’s dorm room, but holds off on the purchase until the daughter’s approval. The brand that knows if the mother and daughter both use the device is better able to formulate a targeted response. Like real time data ingestion, not many CDPs include householding as part of their identity resolution capabilities. Most only perform basic deduplication, so it can be an important consideration depending on planned analytics, CX and marketing campaigns.
Stop Abandoned Carts in Their Tracks
With the Redpoint CDP, retailers have everything they need to put a serious dent in shopping cart abandonment by being able to respond in real time with a hyper-personalized CX. Redpoint cleans your data as it is ingested, and built-in data quality with tunable identity resolution provides the most accurate, up-to-date Golden Record to power every retail use case, shopping cart abandonment mitigation among them.
For more on how Redpoint helps retailers ignite their customer data to tackle shopping cart abandonment and deliver hyper-relevant experiences that increase loyalty, lifetime value and revenue, click here.
