Gift Focus - Jan/Feb 2020 (Issue 117)

184 Don’t leave! Nick Cole, managing director of Go Inspire Group, discusses abandoned basket reactivation techniques for your business With Christmas fast approaching, many of us are fully engaged in the scramble to find a gift for our family and friends. Every year, the UK spends £24 billion on gifts over the festive period, totalling 760 million presents each year, according to the M&S, Psychology of Gifting article on its website. Unsurprisingly, an increasing portion of this shopping is taking place online, with 58 per cent of people stating that they would opt to do their Christmas shopping on the internet rather than in-store in 2019. But with this rise in online shopping comes the need for retailers to gain an understanding of why a vast number of online baskets are being abandoned. We know that seven out of 10 online shopping baskets are being left behind before check-out. Being aware of these abandonment issues is not enough. If gift stores are to improve their reactivation rates, they must delve further into the factors that push customers away or towards the check-out line. Today, only 27 per cent of marketers claim to dedicate energy to analysing the online perusal trends of their customers. With the gift-giving season being rife with frenzied consumers, retailers should not miss out on the chance to guide consumers to the check-out – by utilising the valuable data at their fingertips to determine at which stage of the purchasing journey consumers decided to exit their website. Perhaps it was the fact that the retailer didn’t offer gift-wrapping that caused the consumer to shy away? So how exactly can gift shops entice their customers to retrieve their deserted items and swipe their card at the till? At media-neutral Go Inspire Group, we thought that supplying retailers with concrete numbers about the accumulated value of their abandoned baskets and hard evidence about the impact of various reactivation techniques may also provide them with the necessary incentive to retrieve this lost stream of revenue. Presently, e-mail triggered campaigns are widespread but very few businesses diversify their reactivation efforts or broaden their reach by integrating other available channels such as postal mail. We therefore decided to conduct a control trial that would compare the reactivation success rate for both e-mail and postal reactivation measures. More concretely, we hoped to measure the added efficacy of reactivation methods when offline techniques were integrated into the overall strategy versus the impact of exclusively electronic ones. From this control trial, we hoped to derive valuable data that could then assist gift-selling stores with selecting which channels to use when implementing a reactivation strategy, and effectively, help them increase their sales revenue by motioning their customers to pick up their shopping venture where they left off. The test involved sending an automated postal note to customers who, having deserted an item in their shopping basket within the last week, had also not responded to any e-mail reactivation prompts – nudging these email non-respondents to complete their transaction. From there, the comparative effectiveness of postal techniques could be deduced. While standalone triggered emails tend to produce a conversion rate that clusters around the five to seven per cent mark, when later followed-up with some postal activity, these rates were 113.5 per cent in excess of the e-mail outcome. This means that the output of an omni-channel strategy amounted to more than double the commercial result of reactivation emails