Business Messaging
Turn Abandoned Shopping Carts into Revenue with WhatsApp during Seasonal Sales
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October 30, 2024
Nothing ruins a party like when a customer loads their digital shopping cart full of products they intend to buy, but they never check out and complete their purchase. It’s estimated that about 70% of online shopping carts get abandoned,1 which can quickly take the joy (and profitability) out of Mega Sales Days and other peak holiday shopping moments for businesses.
With cart abandonment so common, re-engagement campaigns are an essential part of any merchant’s marketing strategy, and especially so around busy sales peaks. WhatsApp for Business can help make strategies to recover those abandoned shopping carts both efficient and effective. Read on to learn how.
Friction, FOMO, and the fickle seasonal sales shopper
Why do shoppers so frequently add products to their cart only to stop short of completing their purchase? Motivators range from simple distraction to checkout friction, unexpected shipping fees, or last-minute fear of missing out on a better deal. In 2023, value remained a top priority for many consumers, 52% of whom felt less secure financially than in previous years.2 That means many seasonal shoppers are actively seeking out discounts, which they may continue to do even after loading up a cart.
To address these various scenarios, merchants need a personalized approach to cart recovery that adds value—not more friction—to the purchase experience to reach the desired outcome of conversion.
WhatsApp gives you a versatile and familiar channel to re-engage shoppers, link directly to their abandoned carts, and encourage them to complete their purchases with targeted incentives when necessary. Best of all, with the WhatsApp Business Platform, you can automate the process at scale.
And with a persistent conversation thread with your customers on WhatsApp, shopping cart reminders can be one of many ways to deliver value and effectively re-engage customers. These valuable connections can add up over time, and help create stronger relationships between your business and your customers down the road.
How to convert abandoned carts into sales (and happy customers)
Once customers have opted-in to hear from your business on WhatsApp, you can bring them back to help generate sales by reminding them about products they left behind in their shopping carts.
WhatsApp enables you to deliver highly personalized marketing message campaigns automatically driven by abandoned cart events from your website or app. Messages can feature images and details of cart contents to remind customers what they’ve left behind, and they can link directly to the shopper’s cart. The goal is to make it effortless for your customer to complete their purchase.
You can easily send sequenced messages that culminate with a discount, free shipping, or other incentive to seal the deal.
A Meta Business Messaging Partner can help you create a seamless and engaging experience on WhatsApp that guides shoppers to complete their purchase. Your partner can help you automate key steps, enable in-thread purchases (where available), or integrate with your website.
Here’s how the end-to-end messaging experience might look to your customer:
How they did it: Lojas Renner saw a 50%+ increase in online conversion with WhatsApp
Faced with high cart abandonment rates, fashion and lifestyle retailer Lojas Renner needed a communications channel capable of delivering personalized messages designed to rekindle customer interest and encourage them to complete their purchases.
WhatsApp helped deliver 70% higher read rates than other channels they tested and increased the number of customers who returned to finalize purchases. In some instances, customers even significantly increased the number of products in their cart before checking out.
Explore more ways to drive growth during seasonal sales peaks
Cart recovery is a must during big sales moments, and it’s a vital component of any ecommerce strategy. But it’s only just the start.
Do you want more customers to take advantage of your promotions? Or maybe you want to convert more digital traffic into in-store sales? WhatsApp for Business can support many of the business outcomes you care about most by helping you:
- Run personalized promotions
- Increase lead generation
- Automate consultative selling
- Level up cross-selling and upselling
- Optimize fulfillment communications
- Boost online-to-offline commerce
Check out all these use cases in our WhatsApp for Business playbook, and find a wide range of additional holiday and Mega Sales Day resources here.
Not yet using WhatsApp for Business? Take the first step!
1Baymard Institute, 2024.
2“Seasonal Holidays Study” by YouGov (Meta-commissioned online study of 17,906 holiday shoppers aged 18-64 in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, UK, USA, Vietnam), Dec 2023.