Shopping cart abandonment is often reported to be , up to 74%. Some hotel cart rates show up to 95%. Why are so many shoppers leaving? There are lots of reasons: some are just trying to get a price, some are shopping and want to compare, some dislike or distrust the terms of sale, some get frustrated with process. Those are your best potential customers. Here’s some ideas to improve your abandoned website stats.
For adventure operators, there are ways to help mitigate some loss. Try asking the bare minimum questions needed to close the sale instead of trying to gather everything at once. (AE Summit can be set to email customers after a sale to gather the remaining info.)
Can your terms be modified to lower the sense of risk, or can you provide some credible evidence that their money is safe? Here is something I did once that not only bumped up our pre-tour commitments, but also wound up being a revenue stream. Our customers were in their 60’s and older and health and family was always a big sense of risk: the daughter is expecting a new baby just before the tour date, or someone is getting married, or “I’m on a wait list for an operation”, etc. These were all stumbling blocks to people putting up the deposit money in advance, and many more. I initiated a no hassle, no questions asked, cancel for any reason, optional “premium” that people could buy that would refund all their outstanding deposit, less the premium. The premium was 5% of the price. I also offered a 5% off discount, if they rebooked a tour within 12 months and we would simply apply their deposit to that second tour. That does not catch everyone, but it helps a lot.
The latest tactic is retargetting. Did you know that conversion rates for travel buyers increases dramatically after 6 ad views and peaks at about 35 ad views? So, think about your website visitors and their progression through your site. Once they actually get to the shopping cart, they are serious intenders. If they abandon your website, for what ever reason, you need to keep them in your sites and remind them as many as 34 times.
Are you interested to learn more? We offer AE customers retargetting packages for extremely reasonable rates to grab back those abandoned website shoppers . We have in-house staff that do the creative and the full campaign to save you money. More importantly, we know you and your business, because we work it everyday, just like you. Contact us if you’d like a quote.
Posted by George Duffy