As holiday buying steams up, a popular consumer practice known as showrooming – when buyers visit a retailer offline to check an item but prefer buying it later online – comes forward as a challenge for business owners.
The opposite is also true – people visit online stores, check available products, and then leave without buying with the intent of buying the same or similar products offline. The higher cart abandonment rate that results from such consumer behavior is worth your attention.
India is one of the largest consumer markets in the world in terms of both offline and online retail. Out of the two, offline retail has a significant contribution to India’s retail therapy but is now losing ground to online retail, especially post pandemic. As per stats, the offline retail market shrunk by 5% in the financial year 2021. On the other hand, the Indian e-commerce market witnessed a 25% growth during the same period.
The real question that comes forward to many business owners like you is –
How do you want to benefit from the dynamics of the Indian retail industry? By selling only online, only offline, or with an omnichannel presence?
In relation to showrooming, you have no way to remarket to the visitors once they leave your offline store before buying.
This is where abandoned cart emails come into the picture to help you build an omnichannel presence. They have the potential to help your business spread its wings across channels and be available wherever your targeted customers are.
More about Abandoned Cart Emails to Win Back Customers in 2023
With abandoned cart emails, you can interact with indecisive shoppers via an engaging email that can be triggered based on the products they seemed interested in while browsing your online store. Similarly, you can send an equivalent email to in-person shoppers at your retail store. With these emails, your sales team can follow up with the buyers who were interested in buying certain products when they came to your retail store but left without buying.
With a system to deliver abandoned cart emails in place for both offline and online shoppers, you can also incentivize your team members for the visitors they helped convert into buyers.
A report also found that businesses investing in recovery emails for abandoned carts earn back 3-14% of their lost sales. Merge them with thousands of abandoned carts that come up in a year and it’s clear that this tactic can earn you more revenue.
By utilizing the benefit of abandoned carts emails toward both online and offline visitors, you can proceed toward strengthening the omnichannel presence of your brand.
1. Increase in-store and online conversions
Prospects who leave your store without making a purchase typically follow one of the following two routes:
- They explore other options and buy from your store at a later date or visit your online store to buy the products they were earlier interested in
- They will leave you for some other store and buy from there altogether
In either case, you have no control over the buyer’s journey toward a sale once he/she leaves your store unless you proactively capture the sale with an email covering the products. Using cart abandonment emails and their equivalent for your offline stores, you can recover lost sales. Rather than leaving a sale up to chance, use such emails to gently remind the buyers of the products they were interested in.
Interesting Read: How to Attract Customers to Your Store?
2. Attribute revenue to the right conversion channels
An omnichannel survey found that 73% of buyers utilize more than one channel to shop. Clearly, sales can happen anywhere and anytime. But if you want to track which online or offline channel contributes to a sale while selling both online and through local brand outlets, you are in for a challenging experience.
Consider this example –
A customer visits your retail outlet and leaves without buying any item. A few days later, he visited your online shop and bought the product he found in the store. Here, you will give 100% of the credit to the online store for this sale since it was the last touchpoint where the customer gets converted (also known as last-click attribution).
Reminder emails covering the products that a customer looked for in an offline store will help give your retail stores the credit for sales even if it eventually happens online. Think of them as a way to track offline customer interactions and attribute the right sales channel as the point of purchase.
3. Encourage staff to invest efforts in increasing sales
Like the provisions for most sales teams, you might be using a commission-based structure for your offline sales team. If there is no incentive included for higher sales, the team members may feel less inclined to help the showroomers, which is not a customer-focused approach.
This is where you can set up a system in place using which each store staff member can send an email to the prospects based on their preferences and likes. If an online purchase is completed via the email sent by the store staff, they can receive the credit for the sale, just like they would if the transaction happened in store.
4. Improve sales reporting
Each sale made by reminding your customers or prospects to buy what they considered earlier will count toward the overall revenue in sales reports for your offline stores. This will also resolve a blind spot that omnichannel merchants have been vocal about for long.
Effective tracking of sales data for both online and in-store channels get you a complete view of the business performance. Before the store staff sends an email to any buyer, they can also be made to follow a journey to support showroomers and guide them to buy from you. This way, buyers can explore products in-store, pay for them when it is convenient for them, and get the items delivered to their doorstep.
5. Accelerate the overall in-store checkout
If yours is a popular offline store that has long queues at the checkout, it may discourage some buyers from making a purchase because of the time it would take. With emails equivalent to cart abandonment, you will also make the buyers free to discover products in your store, place an order online, and have them shipped.
This will result in a more convenient buying experience on both offline and online channels that are connected together to retain sales you might have otherwise lost.
As detailed above, engaging with the prospects via email will help increase both store and online sales, attribute revenue to effective sales channels, and even reward the employees for converting more visitors into buyers. But there’s one side that still requires your attention for a delightful omnichannel experience, and that is simplified payments.
You need an omnichannel payments partner that can cater to business-specific payment needs and have a solution you can count on.
Interesting Read: Steps to Set-up Omnichannel Payments Infrastructure
FAQs
How to increase in-store conversions for your business?
The first thing you need to understand for higher in-store conversions is the reason(s) why customers fail or do not want to purchase. For example, check whether they abandon carts due to price differences, long waiting time, unhelpful store attendants, or anything else. You can then plan to attract them back to the store via follow-up emails.
How to improve the working sales staff to get more sales?
You can provide the required training and motivation to the store staff members who assist customers in buying the right products. You can also incentivize their efforts by offering commissions for higher sales. You can also encourage them to follow up with the customers based on what they were looking for during their store visits.
Can email reminders help regain lost customers?
One of the many reasons why a potential customer leaves without buying is that they were only looking forward to checking the collection and purchasing preferred products at a later date. For such scenarios, reminding customers via an email about the availability of product ranges they were interested in can make them come back and complete the purchase.
Does available payment options affect customers’ buying decisions?
It does impact the final purchase decision and can be better understood with an example – A customer reaches your store, selects a few products for the checkout, but later realizes he only has a credit card to make the payment. In case your store does not accept payments via credit cards, there is a high risk that you will lose the customer.
Having maximum payment methods supported at your store can help such customers proceed with the checkout process without leaving the store at the last moment.
Support Sales Via Different Channels with Paytm’s Payment Products Suite
Letting your customers choose how they buy and pay is one of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities that omnichannel retailers face these days. Whether your buyers prefer paying for purchases in person or online, Paytm for Business offers a range of payment solutions to help you ensure a seamless customer experience and convert more visitors into customers.
