It can be disheartening to invest heavily in attracting visitors to your site, only to find that many who start the checkout process don’t complete their purchase. While there are various reasons for cart abandonment, some are preventable. Identifying these can help you save cart abandons and improve conversion rates.

Sure, you're probably doing abandon cart emails and maybe running some ads trying to target people that abandoned. But you're still losing people. That's because questions are ultimately what caused people to abandon. They get confused or just want to confirm something before buying. However, your reminder emails and discount offers trying to save them usually won't convert if there's a question holding them back.

You might already be using live chat to do customer support on your website, but you're probably not using live chat strategically to save cart abandons. There's a number of things you can do with live chat to save cart abandons, both on the website and off the website, including a way to supercharge your abandoned cart recovery emails.

At HelpFlow.com, we run 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores and specifically focus on converting sales from visitors that are likely to abandon or have already abandoned. In this post, we'll explain how we do it so you can do the same on your website. 🥸 #PartnerThursday

Save Cart: Predict Abandons Before They Happen

Before we get into how to save someone that has abandoned, let's focus on saving the sale before they abandon in the first place. We've gone deep into this in other posts, but in short, you can monitor someone's browsing behavior to predict that they're going to abandon. Once you have the data model right, you can set up your live chat system to invite them to chat a few steps before they start to abandon.

This enables you to be there at the perfect time when someone starts to get confused and save the sale before they abandon.

Convert Email Readers to Chat

You're probably already sending out cart recovery emails. These work up to a certain point, but sending reminders and discounts will not convert somebody with a question that held them back from buying. Rather than sending emails over a series of days, add live chat as a call to action in the emails to spark up live conversations with customers that abandoned.

The customers that abandoned will appreciate instant access to your team to get answers to their questions, and you'll be able to save a lot of the sales by removing the confusion that caused them to abandon in the first place. That's not going to happen with just emailing someone.

Use Live SMS Close to the Abandon

You should use a mix of SMS and email for your automated cart recovery outreach. Of course, you can add live chat as a call to action in emails like I mentioned above, but using SMS to spark up live conversations shortly after they abandon can be incredibly powerful.

If you get your timing right close to the abandon, the customer will appreciate your SMS and reply with whatever questions held him back from buying. This puts you into a light conversation and will enable you to close a lot of otherwise lost sales. The trick here is to use SMS close to the abandon and email as you get farther from the abandon. Don't use SMS too far after the abandon.

What's Next?

The lesson here is simple. Don't just have one-way communication strategies to try to save abandon carts. These can work up to a point, but sparking up conversations with people before and after they abandon is the easiest way to identify why they abandoned and to save those sales.

Want to see a deep dive into how to predict and save cart abandons with live chat? Here's a post we did with LiveChat.com.

Would having our team live on your website 24/7 engaging and saving sales help you? Book a strategy call here to talk through how this might work for you.‍