On-site conversation rates can be broken down into two parts: product-to-cart and cart-to-checkout. Industry averages tell us that product-to-cart conversion rates average 8.7% while cart-to-checkout averages 25-30%. Overall site conversion rates average 2.5%.

While the 2016 numbers represent big increases over the 2015 numbers – product-to-cart increased 74% and cart-to-checkout increased 78.5% - brands need to do everything they can to not only get more shoppers to checkout during the initial site visit, but attract and re-engage them after they leave the site to recover those lost sales.‍

Increase Your Reachable Rate‍

The average retailer has email addresses for about 20-25% of their site visitors. Increasing that even 10% will make a huge difference to your bottom line.

We worked with one of our clients to increase its reachable rate to 35%, which was achieved by adding a pop-up, new subscription forms and other optimization tactics. This meant that the shopping cart recovery message could reach more shoppers, resulting in three times more revenue and an 18% increase in overall revenue attributed to the email channel. The shopping cart abandonment campaign also had a 14 times higher conversion rate than any other email promotion.

Think a pop-up or lightbox acquisition tactic isn’t for you? Think again. In our recent trend report, we found that 55% of retail sites we shopped used a pop-up to acquire email address. Our clients routinely see annual list growth rates of 45% after implementing a pop-up, with an additional 15% coming through if they also do an exit pop-up. Best of all, 3-7% of those new subscribers convert.

Acquisition rates jumped even higher for clients who tested a full screen takeover.

Personalizing Recovery Campaigns – Use Your Data‍

Browse and shopping cart recovery messages work best when they not only feature the products left behind, but also additional product recommendations based on the shopper’s browse history. If it is the shopper’s first visit and you don’t have much data, show product recommendations using the “browsed this / purchased that” or “purchased this / purchased that” algorithm. It’s no longer enough to show just new or top selling merchandise, or for the CEO or merchandiser to pick out products to show to every shopper, or even for recommendations to be in the same category or sub-category of the browsed merchandise.

Our clients have seen amazing lifts in revenue following these best practices. After just two months, one client experienced a 13% increase in email revenue with 14% of conversions coming from new customers and a whopping 63% of campaign revenue coming from the product recommendations.

No email address? No problem.‍

Even if you focus on acquisition tactics, the sad reality is that you will still be missing the chance to re-engage two-thirds of your site visitors if you rely on email alone.

That’s where Lead Ads and Programmatic Display Ads can really come in handy.

One of our clients set up Facebook Lead Ads through our new Listrak Exchange solution, showing ads to site visitors who abandoned a product page or cart. In six months, they’ve acquired nearly 9,000 new subscribers through this channel at a cost of $ .87 per email address. More importantly, 20.8% have already converted. It saw a 6X ROAS within the first 30 days of launching the program.

Another client tested our new Programmatic Display Ads solution, showing personalized ads to shoppers who only visited the home page, browsed products but didn’t add items to the cart, abandoned a cart, and purchased. The average ROAS of the four campaigns was 7.25x, with the cart abandonment segment coming in a 13x ROAS. Learn more in our Programmatic Whitepaper.

When adding programmatic ads, it is important that your personalization engine powers your online recommendations, email recommendations and display ad recommendations or else the shoppers will have an inconsistent and confusing experience with your brand.