Abandoned Shopping Cart Strategy

Life on the farm often consists of getting up before the sun rises and working until there’s no more daylight. It means long hours—for the farmer and the equipment. When a part breaks or needs immediate attention, work comes to a grinding halt.  

Since 1977, Shoup Manufacturing has been a leader in providing quality aftermarket parts for farm equipment from its headquarters in Kankakee, Illinois. Known for their customer service and expertise, Shoup puts the buyer at the heart of the process providing an online shopping experience where farmers can quickly search and reorder products. They pride themselves on quick shipping—frequently getting farmers their replacement parts within one to two business days, an industry rarity. However, sometimes parts are added to shopping carts and then never ordered.  

When it comes to abandoned shopping carts, it’s a misconception that users are price shopping and need to be incentivized to complete their orders. With the average nationwide online shopping cart abandonment rate exceeding 70%, it often makes sense to dig deeper to determine why  website visitors are abandoning their shopping cart experiences in the first place. 

In the case of Shoup, we discovered it wasn't simply the price that was driving much of the shopping cart abandonment, but the timing of the orders. Often, farmers are in the field when they are in need of replacement parts. They will browse the Shoup website on their phone, place items in their shopping cart, and simply forget to order them when they get back to the shop. From a customer service perspective, Shoup's goal was to offer guidance to these customers without overwhelming their customer support staff. While everyone understood that offering this level of personalized automation was going to be complex, the potential for revenue growth could not be ignored. 

To get started, the Diagram and Shoup teams collaborated to understand past, present and future marketing efforts and revenue goals for the website. This discovery phase included writing buyer personas, delving into past email marketing campaigns as well as understanding Shoup’s customer experience online and in their Kankakee store. When research indicated that the total value of a single month of abandoned carts was equal to an entire month of actual online revenue, Diagram put a plan of action into place.  

 “We knew that if we could help Shoup recover even one-third of those abandoned carts, it would be worth the investment,” said Chris Osterhout, senior vice president of strategy at Diagram.  

Using a custom connector built by Diagram, our team combined data from Shoup’s Episerver eCommerce platform and their marketing automation platform, HubSpot — the first step in a seamless customer experience. Next, a custom email marketing strategy was implemented which used Episerver data to build out personalization tokens, product  recommendations, and custom calls-to-action in a series of three HubSpot emails. Lastly, a workflow was built to remove contacts who decide to return and purchase the items in their abandoned cart. 

One month of this campaign alone yielded more revenue than the entire cost for Shoup to migrate to Episerver. 

The industry average abandoned cart recovery rate is around 4%. Each month, Shoup recovers more than 15% of their abandoned carts and that is without using a discount code as an incentive to return to the website. Additionally, Diagram and Shoup were honored to win an award at the 2019 Episerver annual conference for Best Lead Generation and Nurturing Website due in large part to the implementation of this abandoned shopping cart strategy. With this ongoing, automated campaign, Shoup continues to provide a highly personalized customer experience while nurturing leads and bringing in additional revenue.