Customers abandon shopping carts with items in them for a wide variety of reasons.
What can a business do to draw them back and encourage them to proceed with check out for their purchase?
A well-timed push notification can be an effective way to remind your mobile apps visitors that they have forgotten items.
How do you grab users’ attention and brings them back?
By delivering well written content that takes into account the customers themselves at a proper time.
There are three key parts to get right with this strategy. Make sure you discuss these items with your iPhone application developer or Android application developer before starting your mobile application development project so they can plan ahead to best serve your needs.
Message
Your message needs to not only grab the user’s attention but also give them a reason to come back and re-engage with your mobile app.
Typically the two factors that make the push notifications effective are sound copy and personalization.
Consider the effect a message like “You left an item in your shopping cart” as compared to “Hi Jan, the Stone Band Ring you selected is still in your shopping cart. Would you like to checkout now?” Clearly one is more inviting and likely to encourage action.
Don’t forget to utilize A/B testing with multiple messages to see which message works best for your user base. While the first message you write may sound great it might not be the right message for your audience.
Personalization
Personalization involves so much more than just including a users name in a push notification. With data you can determine the interests and preferences customers have. Customers often choose to opt-in to data programs to allow businesses to deliver content that reflects their interests and a business should not ignore the ability to improve their app by using data.
Relevant messages get results and with data you can make sure you are sending push notifications that fall within the interests of users. Send pushes to customers who have items in their cart that fall within the usual types of items they purchase. If you have a customer that regularly buys books but has a post card in their shopping cart, this probably isn’t the best time to send them a push. First of all, this items falls outside of their usual purchase patterns and it is also a low value item. Developing a set of perimeters to send out push notifications based on customer preferences and appropriate scenarios.
Consider sending pushes to clients with multiple items in their cart or higher value items. You want to send out push notifications that seem significant and not like spam to users.
Timing
The timing of a push notification can have a huge effect on how it is received.
There is no hard and fast rule. Experiment with different time frames to determine what works best for your consumers. Send out your message too soon and you seem eager, but wait to long and the customer may have lost interest in the item. Try sending out a notification 24 hours after the cart was abandoned and experiment from there.
Push notifications sent at appropriate times will be most effective and easiest for customers to open, while apps send in the middle of the night with leave a bad impression. Timing is important as users are more likely to act on messages received at convenient times, such as at lunch time or after work.
Conclusion
When customers abandon items in the cart on your app don’t feel like that sale been lost. With an effective push notification strategy these customers can be encouraged back to complete their purchases.
Photo: Jorge Quinteros (Flikr) http://bit.ly/1TqLahK
Juniper Research estimates in a recent study that mobile phone and tablet users will make 195 billion mobile commerce transactions per year by 2019. This represents a huge jump over the 72 billion mobile commerce transactions expected this year.
With smart phones saturating the mobile phone market there will be an expansion the use of the features on these devices. Juniper’s report expects to see the highest growth rates in the NFC sector, “Here, usage is expected to be buoyed by the launch of Apple Pay, together with a host of anticipated deployments by banks using solutions based on HCE (Host Card Emulation) technology.”
Juniper is expecting to see the largest increase in transaction volumes will occur in the digital goods sector, where they foresee a “surge in micropayments for in-app purchases, notably within arenas such as social gaming.”
As businesses improve user experiences for mobile applications during the mobile application development process, customers will be more comfortable making purchases and not only volumes of transactions will increase but also amounts. But beyond the applications them selves there are a number of factors that will drive growth. Industry innovations will also push the growth of mobile transactions as Walgreens mentioned its mobile wallet payments doubled after Apple Pay came out. Additionally once we see facilities for NFC payments in quick-shopping locations, such as at gas pumps, the growth will skyrocket.
In MEF’s report on mobile money it details how the worldwide growth in mobile payments adoption is strongly influencing consumer attitudes toward mCommerce in a positive manner. MEF’s report goes on to put the spotlight on the importance of mobile money users to the overall mCommerce market as mobile money users are 26% more likely to make purchases via mobile application or mobile web sites on mobile devices.
The report continues on to detail how mobile money users are more likely to make higher-value purchases via mobile devices.
Increasingly markets are seeing a rise in consumers who prefer not to use cash for purchases. Just as markets saw the rise of consumers who made payments via credit or debit cards, markets are now seeing growth in mobile money users and cash use is on the decline.
“With the growth of mCommerce,” says Kimber Johnson, Managing Director, Vanity Point, “we are seeing proactive businesses setting themselves apart from their competition by offering an additional level of convenience with mobile payment options.”