To say that the holiday season is a busy time of year is an understatement; and for 2017, eMarketer expects eCommerce sales to climb 15.8%. With this comes a dramatic increase in site traffic as holiday shoppers begin browsing your site to find the perfect gifts. However, while these shoppers are busy researching the best prices or products, they don’t always make it to the shopping cart - or more importantly - the conversion. This makes re-targeting a key tool during the holidays.

With a significant and growing number of retailers remarketing to cart abandoners and seeing great success, few are reaching back to the vast number of visitors who don’t get as far in the sales journey. By implementing a browse abandonment strategy, you will be able to re-engage these potential customers.

What is Browse Abandonment?

Browse Abandonment is a powerful behavior-based solution that connects you with customers that have shown interest by visiting your website and viewing product pages. With every visit, view, click and search, your shoppers are expressing various levels of purchase intent even before adding an item to the cart. By looking at this browse activity, you can send timely, relevant messages to site visitors that abandon without converting and remarket to them with campaigns designed to drive them back to your site. This influences shoppers’ purchase decisions and engages shoppers in personalized communications - guiding them down the path to purchase.

Connection Between Browse and Cart Abandonment
More Emails Sent, More Money Made

If you are already sending a shopping cart abandonment series, adding a browse abandonment series is not only quick and easy to implement, but is extremely beneficial. Just like a cart abandonment series, browse abandonment works better when you send more than one email. In these campaigns, shoppers are sent two or three – or more – messages designed to engage customers and take them back to the site.

Simply adding a browse abandonment campaign to your remarketing mix will give you a nice revenue boost:

  • The average conversion rates for browse abandonment and shopping cart abandonment campaigns – 7.8% and 20.7%, respectively.
  • Our research shows that significantly fewer browse abandonment emails feature percentage or dollars off promotions compared to cart abandonment messages (20% vs. 30%), making the profit on conversions from browse messages higher.
  • In addition to being simple to implement for retailers who already have shopping cart abandonment solutions in place, our research shows that browse abandonment campaigns pay for themselves quickly.
  • You can expect your cart abandonment campaigns to make up about 64% of the revenue from your remarketing campaigns and browse abandonment to make up 36% of the total remarketing revenue.
  • Browse abandonment can bring in 8% of total email revenue while shopping cart abandonment accounts for 14% of total revenue.
  • 66% of conversions from cart abandonment campaigns are from new customers, and just about the same – 63% – from browse abandonment campaigns are also first-time buyers.

Clearly the holiday season is a prime time for retailers to leverage increased site traffic to acquire new customers they can continue to engage with and convert with strategic, personalized marketing messages all year-long.

Other Benefits of Browse Abandonment

Timely Messages - Setting the Right Cadence

Through automation, browse abandonment messages are automatically deployed at the right time. After years of research and testing, we found that cart recovery messages that are sent three hours after the abandonment have the highest probability of generating a conversion. Additional messages should be sent every 2-3 days. Browse Abandonment messages, on the other hand, should be sent a bit sooner. The first message should go out within two hours of the customer abandoning the site as there is a bigger chance that the customer is still online and is still contemplating the purchase. Similarly, each successive message should be sent closer to the online visit in order to recapture the interest and attention of the shopper.

Contextually Relevant Messages - Driving Awareness and Product Discovery

Browse abandonment campaigns give retailers the opportunity to reach back to recent site visitors with information that is timely, relevant and helpful in the shopping journey. Broadcast messages are great at driving awareness, but these triggered browse abandonment messages do much more than that. They allow you to build targeted, personal conversations that are based on consumer signals collected across multiple channels. These emails automatically populate campaigns with product and content recommendations based on each recipient's browse behavior and are deployed when engagement is at its highest to maximize conversions. With this, you can deliver email campaigns that are more relevant to customers earlier in the funnel, increasing the chance they will open, click-through and buy.

Personal Messages - Putting AI and Machine Learning to Good Use

If you’re looking to enhance your customer’s shopping experience, consider adding personal product recommendations or predictive content to your browse abandonment campaigns. Personalized product recommendations offer a number of benefits to both shoppers and retailers, including:

  • Increased product discovery
  • Increased loyalty and happy customers
  • Increased average order value
  • Increased items per order
  • Increased time on site
  • Increased revenue

Including personal product recommendations based on the same category or sub-category or items related to the merchandise viewed will greatly increase the conversion rates of your browse abandonment messages.

We found that browse abandonment campaigns that do not contain personal product recommendations have an average ROI of 13.4x while those with recommendations have an ROI of 17.3x, a 29% increase.

Conclusion

With the 2017 holiday season fast approaching, retailers should consider implementing browse abandonment into their marketing strategy. With the use of browse abandonment emails, you can use data from your customers’ browse behavior to remind or recommend different products allowing you send timely, relevant and personalized messages designed to re-engage and convert.

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