Recovering Lost Customers (and Revenue) with Kissmetrics

BI Intelligence estimates that $4 trillion dollars worth of merchandise is abandoned in online shopping carts.

$4 trillion dollars!

That $4 trillion dollars either winds up with offline retailers or just flat out never gets spent.

And we know that shopping cart abandonment is a big problem with e-commerce retailers. Almost every online shopper has at some point put a product in their cart only to never return to complete the purchase.

Given this large amount of money left on the table, it seems to me that most e-commerce marketers would be wise to spend their time working to optimize their shopping cart process (each funnel performance differs, of course) for customers.

One of the better, more reliable ways to improve a e-commerce funnel is by remarketing to those abandon customers. And fortunately, if you're a Kissmetrics customer there's a pretty easy way to do it. Here's how.

Using People Search to Find Cart Abandoners

The Kissmetrics People Search is one of our best tools. It allows you to find anyone on your site who fit a specified criteria. So, maybe if you're a SaaS marketer you want to find the people who signed up but haven't used a feature yet.

Or maybe an e-commerce marketer wants to find the people that have put an item in their cart but haven't proceeded to purchasing. Here's how to find those people.

The first step is to choose to find the people who did these events in order. We'll stick with the last 7 days as our date range.

Next we'll add a condition by finding the people that have added a product to their cart:

We'll add another condition by looking for people that have not purchased. So this essentially tells People Search to find the people that have added a product to their cart but haven't purchased.

We want to see when people last added a product to their cart (we don't want to send emails to people who just added a product). To do this we'll add a column to this data by looking at when people last added an item to their cart.

The last step is to run the report and get our list of people:

We'll get a few anonymous IDs (those that aren't email addresses) from people that haven't been identified yet. Once they register for an account or purchase, they'll be identified and all previous activity under that anonymous ID will merge with their new identity (which is an email address).

From here we can export this data to a CSV or export the list to MailChimp. Anonymous IDs will not be transferred to MailChimp (for obvious reasons). In MailChimp we can send an email reminding customers that they still have items left in their cart.

We can also utilize CRM retargeting in an attempt to get customers back on the site.

Lastly, we can click on each email address or ID to see each person's latest activity.

What You'll Need to Get This Data

This is all possible in Kissmetrics, but before you can can get this type of data you'll need to have a couple things in place:

• You'll need to properly set-up events and properties. There are some things that work out of the box in Kissmetrics, but for any custom events and properties you'll need help from a developer. We do have Click to Track which can help tremendously in setting up events.


• You'll have to identify people by email address. Any other form of identification (ie username) won't return a list of email addresses. People Search will only return a list of however you're identifying people, and most of our customers identify people by their email address.

Conclusion

This is just one way we built Kissmetrics to help you optimize your marketing. If you'd like to learn more about how Kissmetrics can help, check out our industry pages. We have one for SaaS, e-commerce, and agencies.

Questions? Leave them in the comments.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.