Increasing abandoned cart conversion by up to 21%
Overview
Despite Bolt Checkout’s streamlined and efficient purchasing process, the current abandoned cart feature lacked sophistication and efficacy. By failing to effectively re-engage customers and point them to items previously added to their carts the existing feature led to missed opportunities in recovering potentially lost sales.
The primary issues with the current abandoned cart feature include inadequate retainment of items in the cart, and the lack of personalization in recovery emails. Additionally, the current analytics did not provide detailed insights into cart abandonment data for our merchants, hindering the ability to implement targeted improvements.
Existing abandonment ranged from 45-70%
Checkout abandonment ranged from 45% to 70%, depending on the industry, leading to substantial lost revenue.
Existing AC email notifications only linked to the merchants home page, creating a critical gap in the checkout experience and revenue recovery.
Defining Requirements
A few simple updates for a dramatic change in conversion.
1. Optimize Send Time for Abandoned Cart Notifications
We defined the path and timing of notifications based on the platform a shopper abandoned on. Based on competitive research looking at product features, abandonment by industry, peak months, and benchmark performance metrics, we determined best practice was 2hrs and 24hrs after abandonment. TCPA also dictates that SMS notifications cannot be sent between the hours of 8pm and 8am.
2. Redesigning the branding and content in abandoned cart emails and SMS
Emails were updates with new Bolt branding and Merchant branding. We worked with our tech write to optimize the subject line and email copy, and included a preview of the email notifications for the merchant within their dashboard.
The Checkout Now CTA in the emails used order tokens to pre-load the cart contents and any of the saved shopper information at the time of abandonment to main a one-click checkout from their email notification.
3. Merchant Dashboard & Analytics Experience
Abandoned carts was previously a hidden tab in the dashboard with very little control.
We created a dedicated homepage to upsell value prop of the solution and allow them to configure the feature once enabled.
When active, we provide detailed history and demonstrated the value by highlighting Hero Metrics (Abandon Rate, Recovery Rate, Recovered Revenue).
4. Explicit shopper consent for SMS messaging
As mainly a checkout provider, we lacked the surfaces merchants usually have in order to gain consent to send SMS messages to shoppers.
I knew we needed explicit consent from users in order to send them SMS messages and provide a way for them to opt out once they have received a message.
I worked with the legal team to construct this messaging that would appear within our checkout surface to gain consent from shoppers during their checkout flow.
This was definitely not ideal because it meant we could only send SMS messages to previous shoppers or shoppers who abandoned on a later step after consent, so we worked out a way for future iterations to be able to tap into merchants existing SMS consent base.
