How to rescue lost sales online

Picture this: you’re scrolling through your favorite dispensary’s website, and you come across an Olympic Edition, limited release preroll you thought was only a rumor, so into your shopping cart it goes. A minute later, you get a text, “Hey, are you joining this Zoom call?” Dang! You pop open your calendar, click on the link, and your preroll is left lying lonely and afraid at the bottom of your cart.

A few hours later, your inbox pings with an email from that very same dispensary with a Subject Line: “Oops, you forgot something.” And when you open the email? A picture of the exact Olympic Edition preroll you had, only hours ago, put into your cart. Below it…a button with a simple call-to-action, “Buy Now.” Of course, you click on the link, complete your order, and 30 minutes later, you’re enjoying the sweet, sweet aroma of Olympic gold.

That little eCommerce dance happens all over the internet millions of times per day. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying a preroll, pizza, or shoes. For retailers who take orders online, “cart abandonment” is what keeps them up at night.

According to the Baymard Institute, 70.2% of online shopping carts are abandoned once an item is put into it. Imagine if 100 customers walked into a dispensary, browsed the store, consulted a budtender, found what they wanted, then 70 of them just left at the register without making a purchase or saying a word. That would be a huge cause for concern, and it’s happening online right now.

To drive the point home, let’s say your dispensary is taking $100,000 in online orders each month. But, because of abandoned carts, only $30,000 is collected. That is $70,000 in lost revenue each month, or $840,000 per year. What if you could recover just 10% of that lost revenue? 10% of $840,000 is an extra $84,000 per year in recovered revenue.

How to Fix It

There are some small tweaks you can make to your checkout like simplifying the process, more transparent line items, and 3rd party logos that can result in incremental changes. But the real MVP when it comes to abandoned cart revenue recovery is a simple sequence of emails. A sequence like the one that got you to purchase the Olympic preroll.

In my experience, using a 3-part cart abandonment email sequence can usually recover 20% of revenue (I’ve seen as high as 30%+). Below are the timing and general theme of each email:

Email #1 (sent three hours after initial abandonment) –

Hey, it looks like you were looking at [SKU]…

   

Email #2 (sent 24 hours after Email #1) –

Just making sure you didn’t forget about [SKU]…

Email #3 (sent 24 hours after Email #2) –

You’re about to miss out on a lot of fun if we have to reshelve your [SKU]…

The best part? You only have to set this up one time. That could be $84,000+ of revenue that’s just been sitting there waiting to be collected.

“I just haven’t gotten around to it yet” is costing dispensaries tens of thousands of dollars every year, and it’s an eComm tragedy. One that should never happen.