It’s happened to all of us. We browse around an eCommerce site like Amazon, put a pair of flip-flops in our shopping cart, the phone rings, we forget what we were doing, and end up not making a purchase.
A few hours later, an email from Amazon hits our inbox with the subject line: “You Forgot Something.” When we open the email, it’s a picture of the same flip-flops (in the same color) with a “Complete Your Order” button.
“How do they do that!”
Our buying (or not buying) behavior is extremely common. It’s called “cart abandonment”, which is just a fancy way to describe when a customer adds an item to their shopping cart but does not complete the purchase. Everyday, dispensaries who accept orders online lose money because of it.
According to the Baymard Institute, 70.2% of shopping carts are abandoned. To put that into perspective, imagine if 100 customers walked into your dispensary, but only 30 of them bought something. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening with your online sales.
To keep the math simple, let’s say your dispensary is currently taking $100,000 per month in online orders. If you were to put a system in place today that recovers just 10% of the abandoned orders, you would make an extra $120,000 each year.
Now, there are a variety of reasons customers abandon their carts:
- Taxes are too high
- They don’t trust the site with their credit card information
- The site wanted them to create an account
- The obvious, “I got sidetracked.”
The reasons don’t particularly matter. We can make small changes to the checkout process on the website, but that will only move the needle a little.
However, there is one strategy that has proven to recapture more revenue than all other strategies combined – “shopping cart recovery emails” (like the one Amazon sent about our flip-flops). According to Moosend, 50% of customers will open a cart recovery email, and 50% of those customers will end up making a purchase, for a total of 25% of revenue recovered.
Using the example above, instead of making an extra $120,000 each year with a 10% recovery, now a 25% recovery turns into an extra $300,000 per year. And the best part? You only have to set it up one time in your email software.
The most effective email setup for cart abandonment is a 3-email sequence:
1) Three Hours After Abandonment: Looks like you forgot something
2) One Day Later: Just checking in
3) Another Day Later: You’re about miss out
That’s it. Set it up one time, and you’re in the revenue recovery business.
Very few dispensaries have a cart abandonment sequence set up. They are leaking tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue every year all because they “never got around to it.”
It’s a terrible financial tragedy. And one that should never happen.
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