5 simple cart abandonment solutions for beauty brands

Cart abandonment is a major issue for retailers in just about every vertical. While abandonment rates vary between industries, only a select few brands would not say this is a constant challenge. In this blog, we’re focusing specifically on cart abandonment solutions for beauty brands.

Unfortunately, a perfect storm of competitiveness and low-value carts means these retailers have some of the highest rates of abandonment.

Fortunately, we’re here to help with some suggestions.

How high is beauty cart abandonment?

Home & garden retailers, prepare to close your eyes. Recent studies show that your industry has the highest abandonment rate at a staggering 80.01%.

Nevertheless, beauty & personal care is just a little behind at 74.93%.

Around three in every four beauty shoppers do not complete their purchase. And that’s why we’re here in the first place.

Common reasons why beauty customers abandon

Now for the home truths.

‍Number one: it’s no surprise that many beauty customers abandon their carts.

Many sites stock thousands of products that can be purchased elsewhere. Of course, price comparison is a real worry for beauty brands, but we’ll explain some ways around that later.

Number two: shipping is a major reason for abandonment, and beauty consumers don’t always make big orders.

According to Little Data, beauty sites have an average order value (AOV) of $70 – lower than fashion ($97), health & fitness ($76), and home & garden ($353).

We return a similar reading by taking a core sample from the beauty brands serving intelligent offers via RevLifter. Perhaps failing to qualify for free shipping is one reason why many purchases don’t get completed.

Then we have what we’d describe as the ‘usual suspects.’ You probably know these off by heart:

• Having to create an account to purchase
• Customers getting sidetracked
• Slow site speed
• Clunky checkout process

If you check any of those boxes, you’re probably compounding your problem while facing the usual challenges over competitiveness and shipping.

How to fix cart abandonment: solutions for beauty brands

RevLifter works with beauty brands worldwide to keep more customers on-site and converting. Our approach involves detecting micro-moments that indicate abandonment before it happens.

For Navy Haircare, we identified customers at risk of abandonment before serving a ‘5% off’ deal to rescue the sale.

For Face the Future, we gave customers less of a reason to look for a deal by using the Offers Wallet to present a selection of personalized offers.

For Wet n Wild, which sees lots of customers abandoning after applying an invalid discount code, we delivered a light incentive to close the sale.

There are so many different ways of improving your conversions. Here are five cart abandonment solutions that are super simple to apply:

1. Exit-Intent

Let’s start with one of the most popular cart abandonment solutions out there.

Exit-Intent offers use tell-tale signs of abandonment to detect whether a customer might be about to leave. Think of lengthy dwell times and mouse movements toward the close window button.

You can then use an overlay to deliver a personalized offer, which converts the sale.

It’s worth noting that you should avoid incentivizing all customers. Someone checking out with a cart above your AOV is definitely worth a strong offer, provided it doesn’t cut too deeply into your margin.

You can still incentivize a low-value order. However, it pays to dial down the offer to safeguard your profit.

2. Ctrl+C

We’ve seen it on our sites – and we probably all do it, too. Copying a product name to compare the price elsewhere is a sign of imminent abandonment.

You can get around this by triggering an overlay to appear when the user hits the dreaded Ctrl+C.

Some brands remind customers about the benefits of buying with them. Others go more aggressive with a ‘10% off if you buy today’.

The incentive is down to you. What’s important is that you have a play to combat one of the clearest signs of abandonment.

3. Cart abandonment email

If your first line of abandonment defense falls short, you need a play for reeling customers back in.

Cart abandonment emails are essential for customers that opt-in to receive communications from your brand.

There are lots of brilliant examples of cart abandonment emails out there. We love this one from Lime Crime. Simple; enticing, it checks all the right boxes.

4. Invalid Code

If your brand is well-known, you might want to consider Invalid Code offers.

These work on the basis that customers will leave your site in search of a deal and return with a discount code. Sometimes these are valid, and the purchase is completed. But if they’re invalid, you might lose the customer when it can’t be applied.

As seen on Wet n Wild, Invalid Code offers rescue the sale by exchanging a non-working coupon for a valid one.

Pro tip: keep the incentive light. In these circumstances, the customer is usually happy to accept a compromise, even if they thought they were saving more.

5. Offers page

Customers searching for offers and promotions makes for an interesting discussion.

How do you stop them from browsing sites full of fake and invalid codes? Well, why not make your site the best place to find offers?

It’s simple. First, you create your own Offers Page, hosted by RevLifter or on your own site.

Then you work on a way of targeting customers. PPC is ideal for this purpose. Bidding on terms like ‘brand + discount code’ will have you recapturing deal seekers in no time. Plus, by hosting your own page, you should also get a ton of direct traffic.

The only thing left is to fill your page with offers. Personalization is an option here, as you can use Google Audience data to tailor offers according to the customer’s location.

If the customer has already filled a cart, you can serve deals based on the value of their current order to bring their spend up. Think ‘10% off when you spend $10 more’.

For the same reason, many beauty brands have ‘offers’ sections on their site. Take the example of this page from L’Occitane.

If you can afford to issue a few incentives, it pays to make them easy to find.

The 7 golden rules of beauty cart abandonment strategies

Before we let you abandon this very page, let’s lay out seven abandonment principles for beauty brands:

1. Have strategies that prevent abandonment before it happens
2. Have strategies that save customers after they’ve abandoned…
3. Always make your rescue offers and messages enticing
4. Keep your site quick and your checkout process simple
5. Make your own offers easy to find
6. Don’t underestimate the impact of invalid coupons
7. Don’t rescue every cart with your best deal