Live Chat Cart Recovery

At best, you are wasting around 95% of your website traffic budget. The best case scenario is around 5% of your website visitors will convert into sales and the rest are missed opportunities. But, that should not be the case.

You can use typical cart and checkout abandonment strategies to recover some of the sales, but a live chat within your checkout process on the website and offsite can have a massive impact.

In this post, we will cover:

1. How to integrate LiveChat directly into the checkout process.
2. How to predict when someone is going to abandon the checkout process so you can engage with them.
3. How to increase the effectiveness of your abandoned cart emails by integrating a LiveChat call to action.

Let’s get into it.

Abandoned Checkout Facts

You spend a lot of time and money getting people to your website and showcasing your products. Many of these visitors are legitimately interested in the products, and you can prove this by monitoring multi-product page view engagement and other deeper engagement metrics.

However, only a small portion of website visitors buy. Typically 2% to 3%, or best case scenario 5%.

We have been able to dig in to the Google Analytics accounts of hundreds of Ecommerce stores, and here are some of the checkout abandonment patterns we see:

1. When someone puts a product into the shopping cart, there is a 70% chance that they will abandon checkout without completing a purchase.
2. As you get deeper into the checkout process, drop off continues. Specifics vary depending on how advanced the checkout process is.
3. A massive chunk of revenue can be lost on the last page of the checkout process which is the credit card entry screen. It is common to see a 30% or 40% drop off at this point.

Huge Lost Revenue

Run the numbers for your business, but here is an example:

1. Let us say you are getting 100,000 visitors per month and around 5% of them are adding a product to the shopping cart.
2. That is 5,000 carts per month.
3. If you have an average order value of $100 that is $500,000 of potential sales sitting in the shopping cart.

If 70% of those were abandoned carts, you are losing $350,000 per month here. To be fair, it is not realistic to save all of those, but you can definitely recover quite a bit. If you recover just 10%, you are looking at over $400,000 per year in revenue.

But let’s dig deeper.

1. Typically, around 20% of the carts will make it to the final payment screen of checkout.
2. With the numbers above, that is $40,000 in potential revenue.
3. If you just have a 30% abandon rate on the final payment screen, you are losing $120,000 per year just because there is something small holding them back from entering their actual credit card information.

The specifics are tough to know without seeing your specific Google analytics data. But in the above scenario, somewhere between $120,000 and $400,000 per year is being lit on fire in the checkout process.

If you want to grow your revenue, recovering this revenue is a great place to focus. 

The Basics of Cart Recovery

We are going to dig into an advanced live chat strategy you can use to recover more carts, but below are some of the basics you should already have in place:

1. Streamlined check out information – when someone is going through your checkout process, make sure you ask for as little information as possible to close the sale. For example, if you are not going to be using their phone number as part of the checkout process or post purchase experience, don’t ask for it.
2. Risk reversal and credibility – showcase your satisfaction or money-back guarantee. The credibility indicators such as number of five star product reviews put directly within the checkout. You do not need to distract them with specifics, but emphasizing that you are a credible company to purchase from and that they have no risk is key during checkout.
3. Abandoned cart email sequence – one of the most basic things to have in place is an abandoned cart emails series that is sent if someone completes enough of the checkout to get their email address but does not complete their order. There are many other blog posts on abandoned cart sequences, but we will explain how Live Chat can integrate with it below.

Address Questions and Objections Live in Checkout

No matter how good your marketing or website is, customers are going to have questions holding them back from buying.

This might include product specific questions around their need, or urgent questions they have about shipping time for a potential gift.

Either way, having a strategic checkout process that does not allow them to engage with a human leaves a lot of missed opportunities to close the sale by not answering quick but important questions.

You can answer these questions by having your team on live chat directly in the checkout process.

1. Set up your LiveChat to show within the check out process. This is typically done separate from configuring LiveChat to show up on your main website.
2. Use Google analytics to quantify checkout behavior that you can use to predict checkout abandonment. For example, the average time in checkout, navigation flow between different sections of checkout, and even engagement with specific checkout fields.
3. Configure a low-pressure and personal looking chat invite to open if it seems that they are going to abandon based on this data. Do not require them to fill out any fields of information to start the chat. Just enable them to engage.

By predicting when someone is likely to abandon checkout and then inviting them to chat, you can be there at the perfect time to answer their questions and win the sale.

Pro tip – having your live chat team available at nights and weekends will drive more revenue significantly, as 30% to 50% of your traffic and sales will typically come outside of business hours. Prospects react really well to after hours support, as it is not something most of your competitors will be doing yet.

If Someone Backs Out of Checkout, Offer to Help

In addition to chatting with someone directly in the checkout process, you can track if they back out of the checkout process and invite them to chat.

For example, it is likely that someone has a question if they start the checkout process, hit the shipping details page, and then click the back button or go elsewhere on your website. Maybe they are looking for shipping time, or curious about something else.

You can track this browsing behavior and trigger a chat invite after someone leaves the checkout process but remains on your website.

But what if someone leaves the website completely? You can still connect with them on chat through your abandoned cart emails.

Trigger Live Chat Conversations From Abandoned Cart Emails

A typical abandoned cart email sequence starts with a reminder email which leads to some sort of discount the next day, and might send one or two more emails to try to close the sale.

The problem with most abandoned cart strategies is that they don’t allow the customer to easily get answers to their questions. They are just discounts and other promotional offers.

Remember that what holds people back from buying are typically simple but important questions. You might be able to get a few people to reply to your emails with those questions, but offering an immediate answer through LiveChat is more effective.

You can integrate LiveChat as a call to action in your abandoned cart email sequence to allow prospects to click a button to open up a LiveChat conversation right away and speak with a human. This is done by adding the custom link to your email sequence that would open up the chat box directly to your website.

This simple tactic can increase the conversions from your abandoned cart efforts significantly.

Pro tip – you need someone on LiveChat 24/7 to ensure that your visitors don’t have to click to engage with LiveChat and then hit an off-line message form. That could hurt conversions. You can technically get Ninja and configure the link to only function during certain hours, but your best option is 24/7 coverage.

If You’re Not Using LiveChat At All, You Should Be

You obviously need to have a LiveChat to implement in your check out abandonment initiatives. But if you are not using LiveChat anyway, you are missing out on a massive amount of revenue.

1. Visitors that chat typically convert 5 to 10 times higher than visitors that don’t chat.
2. Going from no chat on your website to a well run live chat strategy online 24/7, can increase conversions of 10% to 30% statewide.
3. You can drive up average order value significantly with live chat by upselling and cross selling at a much deeper level by using LiveChat since you’ll understand the specifics of what is on the prospect’s mind.
4. Insights you get from live chat conversations can drive your website’s content and conversion optimization initiatives. This enables you to drive massive results for all website visitors.