Encourage Shoppers to Return to Abandoned Carts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the products needed to turn abandoned shopping carts into completed sales.
- Find resources for implementing this solution.
Owner of a Lonely Cart
Thanks to Pia, Charlotte, and their team, Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) can now send helpful emails to shoppers after they make a purchase, to keep them updated about their order. But what about shoppers who add items to their shopping cart, then leave the storefront without buying anything? Let’s say an avid angler adds the Warm and Wacky Waterproof Waders to their cart, but wanders away without clicking Buy Now.
"Why?" wonders Isabelle Givens, NTO’s digital marketer. She worries about these indecisive shoppers. She’d like to find a way to encourage them to come back to their cart and finalize the purchase by sending them a discount or coupon. She knows that discounts can help increase sales and customer satisfaction levels. Even if the incentive doesn’t persuade them, Isabelle would like to gather information about their overall shopping experience, so NTO can take their past purchases and interactions into account when personalizing emails.
Pia has some good news to share with Isabelle: Salesforce created a solution kit for just this scenario.
And because Charlotte set up the Marketing Cloud Engagement Connector for B2C Commerce, much of the infrastructure for this solution is already in place. Catalog, product, order, and customer data feeds are flowing from Salesforce B2C Commerce to Marketing Cloud Engagement. Now NTO just needs to add a way to capture shopper behavior data and send it to Marketing Cloud Engagement, so marketers can build personalized journeys for shoppers who abandon their cart.
What Products Does This Solution Require?
To implement this solution, NTO needs:
- B2C Commerce (SFRA)
-
Marketing Cloud Engagement Enterprise 2.0
- Einstein Email Recommendations
Pia studies the workflow diagram in the solution kit to see what happens when a shopper adds items to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase.
As in the transactional email workflow, shopper activity in B2C Commerce triggers an email send in Marketing Cloud Engagement. The abandoned cart workflow adds a second Marketing Cloud Engagement trigger, depending on what the shopper does after clicking the abandoned cart email link.
Data Feeds and Performance
Pia and Charlotte start digging into the details. Several types of data are already flowing from B2C Commerce to Marketing Cloud Engagement, but for this solution, they take a closer look at the catalog data feed. To make sure Marketing Cloud Engagement can offer the best recommendations to shoppers, they add in product categorization data. They also decide to implement streaming catalog updates, since NTO sometimes hosts flash sales and other events that update product data during the day. Fortunately NTO doesn’t have a large number of product SKUs, since streaming updates aren’t efficient in that case.
Collect Shopper Behavior and Set Up Behavioral Triggers
Next, Charlotte uses the Marketing Cloud Engagement Connector’s reference implementation of Collect Tracking Code as a baseline for her implementation, while adding additional tracking points to satisfy her business requirements. This code captures data about shopper behavior and shopping cart changes, and securely sends the data to Marketing Cloud Engagement. She also implements Behavioral Triggers in Marketing Cloud Engagement to send behavioral data into data extensions that NTO marketers can use in email sends and journeys.
Send Emails to Customers and Track Their Responses
Now that behavioral data is flowing from B2C Commerce to Marketing Cloud Engagement, marketers can author smart journeys that make it easy for shoppers to finish their purchase.
For example, NTO can make sure the Warm and Wacky Waterproof Waders are still in stock before promoting them in the abandoned cart email (if the waders are sold out, and NTO doesn’t plan to backorder them, they can block that product entirely). NTO can also include a URL in the email that recreates the cart in B2C Commerce when the shopper clicks the link. Charlotte simply extends the storefront experience to look for the cart definition in the email link.
Finally, Charlotte enables click tracking to capture information about shoppers who click their abandoned cart email link. Using engagement data, Isabelle (with the help of Einstein) gains valuable insight into shopper behavior.
No more agonizing about the angler that got away!
