Any online retailer knows how significant the issue of cart abandonment can be. For all its many benefits, mobile can be a channel characterized by distraction—and you don’t want that distraction to happen when a large value item is sitting in your customer’s cart. 

According to Statista, 88% of carts are abandoned or not completed, and whilst some of this is unavoidable, reducing that number can still make a huge difference. Here’s how to do that.

• Know it’s happening. Ensure that both carts abandoned in mobile apps AND on websites are tracked. Collect data from both, and share it with your marketing cloud.
• Apply machine learning to understand what ‘true’ cart abandonment looks like—and focus your fire on the minds you can change. By collecting and analyzing enough data, it should be possible to spot transactions that can be completed, and are worth completing.
• Adopt a multichannel strategy, including real-world location:
  • When the user returns to the app, deliver rich in-app messages (at an appropriate time) reminding them of items in their cart.
  • If the user does not return, send rich push and email messages with reminders to return and complete their transaction.
  • If the user enters a bricks-and-mortar store, remind them via push at that moment about the item in their cart—and encourage them to either pick up in store or complete the transaction on their phone.
  • If necessary and appropriate, discount. After a certain amount of time has elapsed, and the prospective customer has not yet responded to your campaigns, consider applying a discount and repeating: if it makes sense for your business.

Get more detailed use cases in our eBook: Contextual CX—Driving Growth by Mining the Customer Lifecycle on Mobile.

To Sum Up…

What each of these use cases shows is how critical mobile is to integrated, cross-channel marketing campaigns. Both as a source of data and as a channel for communication in a variety of formats.

And of course, these examples are merely the tip of the iceberg. The ongoing rise of mobile means that mobile is no longer an option or a nice-to-have. There are thousands of ways in which mobile can add value and help drive loyalty, retention, engagement, and revenue for businesses of all types. 

Meaningful, native mobile experience must be part of the marketing mix.