Using Last Minute Coupon offers to get “Recession Shoppers” to convert

What your shopping cart looks like most of the time

With the current economic downturn, online shoppers are becoming less and less impulsive and are spending more time getting information on the online purchases they are about to make. This change in behavior is brought about not because  online shoppers have become more astute but simply because they have to given most people’s financial situations becoming progressively worse.

A couple of months ago, LinkShare, a performance marketing network (who I’m proud to be working with), commissioned Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates to do a study on this new demographic segment they aptly termed to be “recession shoppers”.

The key finding are as follows:

• 68 percent of “recession shoppers” (and 79 percent of “weekly shoppers”) purchased something online they wouldn’t have otherwise because of a coupon or discount.
• 64 percent of “recession shoppers” (and 70 percent of “weekly shoppers”) said they purchased something from a particular online retailer they wouldn’t have otherwise because of a coupon or discount.

The good news:

Thirty four percent (34%) of those surveyed plan to make more online purchases in 2009 than they did in 2008.

Okay, what do we know so far? Well, two things: First, coupons and discounts have become more powerful tools as far as converting site visitors would go and second, even with the recession looming, online shoppers are still willing to increase their online shopping spend this year. Now, what are you, as a merchant going to do given this information?

Wait, before you abandon that shopping cart!

Most merchants already promote coupons through

1. A “deal of the day” section on their site
2. Coupon sites
3. Their affiliate’s sites
4. Email marketing campaigns
5. PPC campaigns

But, with some of the projects I handled, I found that some merchants are averse to distributing coupons for reasons that range from already incurring costs through the marketing channel the visitor arrives via and not having a big enough margin to offer, what they feel are attractive coupon offers.

One solution I’ve found to be effective is to reserve aggressive coupon offers to a segment of site visitors most online merchants rarely tap: People who abandon their shopping carts.

I feel that this is a particularly good segment to tap because a good percentage of people who add items into their shopping carts and eventually abandon them have excellent transactional commercial intent. This means that this segment of your visitors were the most likely to have bought from you but, for one reason or another, had a last minute change of heart.  (i.e. got turned off with the shipping and handling costs they weren’t made aware of prior to reaching the cart or decided to do more comparison shopping)

There are numerous way to extend coupons to this segment. One way is by spawning a popup window with an aggressive, urgent and time-bound offer when a user tries to navigate away from your site. (i.e. “Wait! We’ll give you an INSTANT $10 discount and FREE SHIPPING if you check the items out in your shopping cart right now”)

Another way to do it is to spawn an exit chat window (virtual OR live) to engage the customer when they try to abandon your shopping cart. This is particularly good because your chat agent can, in the process, answer additional questions the visitor might have while offering that visitor a new incentive to buy (a more aggressive coupon than what the visitor can find on your site’s Deal of the Day section or Email campaign). Upsellit.com is a vendor who provides such a solution.

Some considerations:

1. Initially, you might want to limit your implementation to Organic Traffic. This way, you are not encumbered by additional marketing costs (as is the case with the Affiliate, Email or PPC channels) and allow you to offer more aggressive discounts.
2. If  your margins require your visitors to meet a certain threshold, as far as the value of items they are going to purchase is concerned before you can extend a discount, You might want to selectively spawn your popup or exit chat window only to visitors who have added items whose aggregate price meet your threshold to their carts.

I, personally, have implemented a cart abandonment coupon offer solution to one of the projects I handle and, so far, it has been performing rather well “saving” 6% of visitors who would’ve, without it, left the site without purchasing anything.

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