Cart Abandonment: Why Customers Leave Us and How Can We Get Them Back?

Remember your studying days at the library? Finals are approaching and you have all night to make sense of all of the semester. Suddenly, a good friend of yours approaches and asks for a 15 minute coffee break. Next time you check, you already spent 2 hours chatting and very little ambition to learn about math formulas.
Carts are what the finals are for students to your customers. A message from a friend or arrival of dinner could distract them from the cart and leave them abandoned forever. This is what we call cart abandonment: Number of carts that are not checked out and make you wonder what is the issue with your store.
Don’t worry, you are not alone in this. Cart abandonment is a trend that all other boutiques are having right now. According to SaleCycle, cart abandonment rate in fashion is 84%. Consider all your efforts to recruit customers, wait for them to like some products and at the end, almost 5 out of 6 carts they created stay unordered. Even a slight improvement on this could make you a fortune. But first, let’s understand the most common reasons that your customers leave their carts abandoned.
Diagnostic: The Why
According to Statista, the number one reason for abandonment is high shipping costs. Coupon errors, shipment time and reentering information are the other top 5 reasons.
Coupon issues and data reentry could be handled with a couple of fixes. Test your coupons before launching your next campaign and store your customer information so that they don’t need to reenter the information again and again.
Shipment cost and time are related to your operational processes that might take longer to fix. 
Discuss with your vendor to decrease both the cost and shipment time. This could help you fix your shipment cost and time. As an example at Lonca, we give a 7-10 days shipment guarantee and offer free shipping for all orders. Our boutiques love it!
Solution: The How
Is a proper diagnostic enough to avoid cart abandonment? We have bad news: It is impossible to decrease cart abandonment to zero. But you could make significant improvements by following our guideline on how to build an effective cart abandonment strategy. Here are the three steps you should take to address your cart abandonment issues:
Step 1: Track Customers and Their Carts
You have a great checkout experience now but is it enough? Unfortunately not. You will still have products stayed in the cart. Do you know which carts are abandoned? If not, do not skip this step.
If you are using a website builerder like Shopify or Wix, they automatically track abandoned carts for you. You can simply go to the orders page to review and recover these abandoned carts.
If you are using your own software, the best way to track carts is to integrate Google Analytics. It enables you to follow which customers visit your website, add products to cart and leave the carts behind.
An alternative to Google Analytics is Facebook Pixel. If you are running ads using Facebook, it should be integrated with your website. Just check out the cart metrics and you will find the cart left idle.
Step 2: Create a Cart Abandonment Email (Yes, Email Works!)
Now that you know which customers have their carts abandoned, you need to put them into action to turn it into an order. Best way to induce an action is by sending emails to customers. 
According to SaleCycle, 30% of customers open these emails, 20% of those clicked the email and 30% of clicked customers make the purchase.
What is the best way to create an email? The answer is addressing a customer issue. Your email should speak of a specific issue that forces customers away from making the order. They will perceive this as you are making an effort to satisfy them and turn back the favor with an order.
As a fashion boutique, you need to create an email that reflects your style. We brought four best-practices from global fashion players that you could get inspiration from:
a. 'Don’t Forget About Me' Email from Asos
Asos attracts their customers by putting the emotions in front. Message is very clean and pushes customers to take action.
They also highlight a potential stock-out for the item, a good reminder for the customer for a limited stock availability. Free delivery and easy returns marks at the bottom encourage customers to finish the order. If you don’t like it, don’t worry, delivery is free and you can return very easily.
b. 'Don’t MISS OUT' Email from Net-A-Porter
Net-A-Porter perfectly highlights the punchline at the header. They put the image of the product at the center and showed the price to remind shoppers about the details.
An important detail is their emphasis on call-to-action. They place call center info at the bottom with full contact details to encourage customers to act if they have any questions.
c. ‘Remember This?' Email from Wayfair
Remember this? A perfect question to ask yourself and check that tool set you put in the cart a while ago.
On top of the first feeling, Wayfair did a great job of simplifying the email. Very few buttons exist other than ‘Shop Now’. Hard to get away from going to the cart if the customers take action.
d. ‘Abandonment Issues’ Email from Dote
This is a very creative abandonment email. Dote comes up with a headline as if you have a technical issue. When you get the joke, it is hard to resist not pushing the ‘View my order’ button.
The email shows what you need to see to complete the order after the entertaining header and subtitle. Keep in mind that the clickbait is there to let customers open the email but you still need necessary cart information and an action button to make the order happen.
Step 3: Do Not Hesitate to Send Follow-Up Emails
You created a great cart abandonment email that you think is the best in the industry, then you sent it to your 10 customers but only 2 of them has opened it. What is the problem? Well, your customers can be just busy or they missed your email. Therefore, you need to send 3 emails to make an impact.
Your first email should be within 1-3 hours after customers left their carts. Second email should be within 24 hours and the third one within 72 hours. According to Unific, this schedule could help you increase your click rate from 20% in the first email to more than 40%.

You could use a slightly different version of your template in the second and third email. A change in the headline will test your customers and their appetite. You could highlight that stocks are going out, you can give a coupon or tell them that they won’t be reminded again. Don’t forget! Whatever strategy you use, always align it with your fashion style and boutique positioning.
Final Words
Cart abandonment is still a major headache going into 2023. Yet, there are certain actions you can implement to reduce the pain. Cart email is an easy-to-implement solution that we suggest to boost your sales and decrease your cart abandonment rate.