How to Reduce Cart Abandonment and Boost Sales with Urgency Marketing

If you had to share your major pain points as an e-commerce business, it’s likely that cart abandonment would land pretty high on your list. The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is over 70%. This means that for every 100 visitors to your website, only 30 of them will actually complete a purchase.

As you know, high cart abandonment rates aren’t something to gloss over. They represent a significant loss of potential revenue. And when your goal is to maximize online purchases, cart abandonment is the last thing you want to happen.

Offer fresh, on-brand consumer promotions

So, how can you reduce cart abandonment? Of course, you can count on consumer promotions as a key tactic, but you must be strategic. Your promotions must be engaging and carefully thought out, or you may encounter risks like offering too many, discounting too deeply or causing fatigue among customers. 

The goal is to offer fresh, innovative ways of generating increased response rates and maximize site conversions overall. Your solution should be unique, yet aligned with your brand identity and existing marketing efforts.

Urgency marketing can help transform the way consumers perceive promotional offers. This tactic is about crafting marketing promotions in a way that drives immediate consumer response. It leverages consumer psychology principles to help not only create promotions that earn your audience’s attention, but motivate them to take action..

Urgency marketing is comprised of consumer psychology principles, such as: anticipation, scarcity, FOMO, social proof and competition. You can use these elements separately or you can combine them to supercharge your promotional campaigns.

How to incorporate urgency into your marketing

Here’s one simple way you can leverage urgency marketing: First, think of a reward that would be attractive to your audience and/or the consumers you’re hoping to reach. If you’re a fast-casual restaurant that specializes in American-style pizza, that reward might be free pizza for a year.

To build up anticipation, send a marketing message to your audience base (you can do this using whatever marketing channel you want to leverage engagement in - email, SMS, social media, mobile app, etc.). Let them know that an exclusive, limited-time reward (that free pizza, perhaps) will be released to a select group of consumers who interact with your campaign the fastest. The quicker they interact, the better the reward will be.

And the results for your brand can be huge. When one e-commerce brand used urgency marketing to drive excitement and anticipation around their promotions, they gained a 90% increase in daily peak orders per hour within eight days of their urgency marketing launch.

By offering exclusive, limited-time rewards to customers who take action quickly, you can tap into human psychology and encourage customers to complete their purchases.

Why urgency marketing works

In the ever-evolving world of consumer marketing, one thing never changes: human psychology. Urgency marketing works, because it taps into some of the most powerful human emotions, such as anticipation, scarcity and FOMO.

Humans are naturally curious and enjoy the anticipation of something exciting happening. Creating a sense of anticipation around your promotion makes you more likely to get people interested and engaged. And when you combine that anticipation with an offer that is scarce or exclusive, you increase its perceived value and the likelihood that your audience will want to act quickly to avoid missing out.

When used effectively, urgency marketing can be a valuable addition to your e-commerce marketing strategy. It's a simple, but powerful way to tap into human psychology, boost your sales and reduce cart abandonment.