Conversion optimization is a crucial part of increasing growth and revenue for any entrepreneurially-minded subscription entrepreneur — and while there’s many different aspects to conversion optimization, one particular area stands out, especially with the holiday season around the corner: abandoned carts.

Within and beyond the holiday context, abandoned carts are often the result of potential subscribers failing to cross the thin line between being a window shopper and actually making a purchase. That’s why we’re excited to tell you all about our cart abandonment suite!

There’s a lot of reasons people might abandon their carts, but broadly speaking, it’s often due to something that’s made the checkout process unappealing to complete.

Subbly’s powerful cart abandonment tool helps you figure out exactly where people are dropping off:

  1. Subbly sends all events from every step of your checkout flow to Google Analytics (here’s how to set it up).
  2. By adding a Hotjar tracking code and enabling customer recordings (achievable on Hotjar’s free plan), you can watch each subscriber’s checkout behavior and figure out which patterns are leading to abandoned carts..

Now for the fun part. As Newton’s third law taught us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and with this in mind, once you understand why people are abandoning their carts, you can pop in with something to put their mind at ease — or upgrade your process to make sure nobody has the same negative experience ever again!

  • Unexpected costs: Potential subscribers get put off by additional shipping costs or other fees — try offering them free shipping.
  • High-friction experience: Potential subscribers can’t be bothered to create an account — try setting up a password-free checkout flow.
  • Time-consuming journey: Potential subscribers lose interest with a seemingly endless transaction process — try shortening your funnel.
  • Expensive offering: Shipping costs aside, some customers may have concerns about the pricing of your main offering — try sending them a coupon.
  • Lack of payment methods: Not everyone has the same financial setup — try adding Apple/Google Pay or otherwise expanding your accepted payment types.  

Of course, some brands may worry that abandoned cart reminders can be annoying and push potential customers to unsubscribe from emails or other notification channels. 

However, studies show that the opposite is true. According to Salesforce, over 17% of shoppers who abandoned their shopping carts returned and made a purchase soon after receiving personalized follow-up emails. 

This makes cart recovery emails (among other strategies) a particularly powerful ecommerce strategy for subscription-first entrepreneurs.

Here’s some examples of what you can do with Subbly to make your cart abandonment woes disappear, complete with automation:

  1. Set up a sequence of 3 emails to release every other day with customized copy, layouts, and offers – experiment with your subject lines to maximize your open rate
    💡Pro tip: don’t wait around!
    Personalized emails sent 3 hours after a consumer abandons their cart receive significantly higher open and click-through rate. The quicker you move, the better — one of our merchants tripled their rescue rate by configuring their first email/SMS messages to go out 30 minutes after abandonment.
  2. Alter your email frequency using automations and experiment with a more high-touch or low-touch approach.
  3. Integrate with Zapier to use your own email provider.
  4. Add SMS messages to the mix with Twilio.
  5. Reach potential subscribers who haven’t entered their email using Facebook CAPI to create a custom audience of those who entered your checkout but didn’t purchase.

With strategies tailored to your unique context, powered by our cart abandonment tools, you’ll soon be able to recover potential subscribers who would otherwise have moved on — an average of 25% of them, according to our merchants’ experiences. 

Now go forth and explore — our cart abandonment suite is available in your admin page — and if you’re interested to try it out for yourself (and check out our 100+ other features), your first 2 weeks are on us so you can see for yourself. Click here to get started.

By Zaki Gulamani
Editor-In-Chief at Subbly