More than three-quarters (76.8%) of customers left behind their order instead of purchasing in Q4 2016, based on a review of averages across 500 leading global brand clients. That’s according to SaleCycle’s latest quarterly Remarketing Report, which notes that Fashion (67.4%) had the lowest abandonment rate of the 6 industries highlighted.
By comparison, half of the industries tracked had cart abandonment rates above 80%, led by Utilities (84.4%) and followed by Non-Profit (82.1%) and Travel (81.6%).
In a follow-up blog post, SaleCycle dove deeper into the Travel segment to identify how abandonment rates varied among travel sites, examining data from 100 global clients..
The analysis demonstrates that Online Travel Agents (OTAs; 86.4%) have the highest abandonment rates, closely followed by Airlines (84.8%). Cruises & Ferries also have an higher-than-average abandonment rate (of 83.1%), while the rates were lower for Hotel & Lodgings (78.3%) and Car Rentals (75.3%).
It’s interesting to see OTAs having the highest cart abandonment rates, considering that they’re typically used further along the purchase journey. A recent study from Expedia Media Solutions indicates that as respondents narrow options and move into the consideration stage, the use of search engines recedes while OTAs, airline sites and hotel sites become more prominent.
Citing results from a travel booking abandonment survey conducted a couple of years earlier, meanwhile, SaleCycle indicates that the top reasons for abandonment in travel were just looking/researching and prices being too high/comparing prices.
The company recommends that travel sites therefore provide more pricing clarity, along with helping visitors with research and using remarketing tactics.
As for remarketing, the analysis of 100 travel clients in Q4 shows that click rates were 33.7% among opened emails, 12.1% for on-site remarketing, and 23.5% for SMS remarketing. Conversion rates from clicks were highest for on-site remarketing (32.3%), closely followed by email remarketing (29.5%) and SMS remarketing (28.1%).
Those figures were relatively on par with the overall averages across industries, which broke out as follows:
- 31.4% click rate on opened emails, with slightly more than 28% of email clicked leading to a recovered sale;
- 11.6% on-site click rate, with 31.8% of on-site clicks resulting in a conversion; and
- 16.2% click rate on SMS messages, with 27.8% of SMS clicks resulting in a recovered sale.
