How the trigger-based customer journey brings undecided customers around

Do customers who visit your website often end up abandoning their shopping carts? This situation is not uncommon. If you remind these users of their shopping cart by sending them an e-mail link, 50% of those who click on the link will still complete the purchase (Moosend, 2021).

For this type of communication, you have to go beyond traditional marketing campaigns and align your messages with customer behavior. Retailers have had a very positive experience with this, and in other industries, such as finance or insurance, high ROIs are also being achieved with trigger-based customer journey management (Martech, 2018).

Key points

• More than 70% of online retail shopping carts are abandoned.
• By using automated e-mail reminders, you can convert more than half of those that abandoned their potential purchases into recommitting.
• To accomplish this, you define the most significant triggers and deliver automated personalized messages.
• This technique is also a valuable tool to use for your customer journeys.

Each instance of an abandoned shopping cart means lost potential

Customers do not always complete the buying process. This is an especially urgent issue in B2C e-commerce. A surprisingly high number of online store visitors abandon their full shopping carts and do not re-start the purchasing process again. The shopping cart abandonment rate stands at almost 70% (Baymard, 2020). In these times of dwindling brand loyalty, the odds are high that your customers will meet their needs later by shopping with your competition (Horizon, 2021).

You can unlock a big part of this untapped potential with personalized, trigger-based actions. Under the right conditions, you can prompt your customers to purchase from you after all.

In addition, there are other behavior patterns that reveal the specific type of support your customers are seeking. If you give them what they prefer, they will likely buy from you again.

The customer experience is critical

More and more, the customer experience is becoming a key factor in buying behavior. Throughout a customer journey, experiences at the individual touchpoints impact the bond between customer and brand.

By far the most important drivers for this include the personalization and relevance of offers and the information you send to your customers (gateB, 2021). It should be noted that relevance is not a permanent factor but often exists only at a specific moment or during a short window of time.

Would you like to meet your customers’ needs with the help of personalization? If so, it will be worth your while to align your messages in real time with your customers’ behavior by using online trigger-based customer journey management. If you have a system that responds automatically to triggers in your customers’ behavior, you can use an omnichannel approach and send the desired information via the best channel. The result? A tremendously enhanced customer experience.

Using the key triggers properly

Your system must meet two requirements to facilitate trigger-based customer journeys:

1. It must be able to determine your customers’ behavior triggers
2. It must be able to trigger the right response automatically

With the help of well-defined automation triggers, you can automate a large portion of customer journey marketing. On many occasions, your customers receive the right message on the right channel at the right time without your marketing team having to manually intervene.

Identifying valuable triggers

If you want to successfully leverage the shopping cart reminder, you need to address the specific reasons why your customers abandon their carts. Typical abandonment patterns you can use as automation triggers are:

• Drop-out during the payment process
• Drop-out during shipping charge display
• Drop-out during account registration
• Drop-out during product description

Even triggers that have nothing to do directly with the abandonment of a shopping cart can be valuable. Reminders of saved favorite items and wish lists or previously purchased items may generate additional purchases. You can find a comprehensive overview of classic and unusual triggers in our White Book about trigger-based customer journey management.

Customer journey marketing continues after the purchase

After the successful completion of a purchase, it is useful to continue to monitor customer behavior and send relevant messages. With post-purchase messages, you can transition directly into the retention phase.

You can engage your existing customers with content using suitable, non-purchase-oriented triggers at every available opportunity. Your customers will appreciate it as long as you only send what they are interested in, at the moment it suits them. With personal highlights and milestones, you can place appropriate promotions, generating true delight effectively and with simple means.

Each trigger for which you send the suitable response is a valuable investment in the loyalty of your regular customers. Customer journey marketing with hyper-personalized engagement succeeds based on a well-defined defined audience and a personal customer profile.

The conclusion

At a rate of more than 70 percent, shopping cart abandonment is a major challenge for retailers. Targeted, trigger-based messages can turn a significant part of it into purchases after abandonment. For this to happen, you need a system that allows you to analyze valuable automation triggers and send the desired responses to your customers in a personalized manner. This is a powerful tool in customer journey marketing.