Using Facebook Messenger To Turn Abandoned Carts into Purchases

1
May 2019

Have you ever scrolled through Facebook Messenger and found a message from your favorite retailer sandwiched between a message from your old college roommate and one from your sister?  Chances are, that message may be the result of your interrupted shopping journey.

 

For e-commerce businesses, these abandoned cart notifications are ways to recapture a shopper’s interest where they are likely to open them.  It’s their attempt to get you to complete that purchase.

 

As a business, you have to balance your ad spend on reaching cold audiences and convincing them to visit your website with paying to retarget them to convince them to complete the purchase.

 

One of the big struggles that e-commerce businesses face in their sales funnel is the abandoned cart.  Shoppers bail out on the buying for a variety of reasons – maybe they changed their mind or got sidetracked.  The bottom line for the business is: they didn’t make a purchase.

 

Studies have shown that as many as 70% of shoppers will abandon their cart online, and with more users having increasingly shorter attention spans, this number could rise.

 

That’s where these specifically-crafted messages come in.

 

Abandoned cart notifications are not new; if you shop online, you’ve seen them.  

 

As shoppers, we leave a digital marker on websites that show our behavior.  Websites can track the pages we visit and the items we click on. Additionally, virtual heatmaps can even capture what we’ve moved our cursor over but didn’t click.  If you spent 45 seconds hovering over a sweater to see it enlarged, but you didn’t click to the product page, a retailer equipped with the technology might want to retarget you offering a discount on that sweater.

 

Throughout the shopping process, we begin to add items to the cart.  But for various reasons, we don’t always make the purchase. That’s where automation can trigger more ads directing you back to the website – sometimes with a discount code.  The AI can also send you an email or message. More recently, however, businesses have been seeing success using abandoned cart notifications on Facebook. Space is popular because that’s where many of us are carrying our conversations.

 

There are many tactics businesses can use to reconnect with a shopper who has abandoned a cart.  This simply can be set up in a website’s backend and can be delivered via chatbot, a Facebook pop-up or an ad on a user’s feed.

 

Facebook Messenger communications have proven to be very effective of helping push abandoned carts into purchases. Unlike email, where customers are bombarded with anywhere from 100 -120 emails a day, Facebook Messenger is typically less cluttered and contains fewer meaningless correspondences.

 

Facebook Messenger also has a higher click-through rate for this very reason; many users are spending a lot of their time on Facebook – meaning more opportunity to get them interested.  

 

Sometimes it takes a combination of Messenger chats and retargeting ads to see a higher conversion.

 

Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

 

Do you need to start marketing your company on social media, but aren’t sure how to get started? Or maybe you’ve been posting content, but can’t seem to get the results you want.

CLICK HERE to schedule a complimentary 30-minute digital marketing audit.

 

 

 

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