Justin Premick of Aweber has an article about a better approach to convert shopping cart abandons to customers. I agree wholeheartedly when he says that a coupon or well-worded follow up is all that separates these abandons from your customers.

How do you follow up with these hot prospects without spamming them?

Discount and a Better Approach

The now-or-never approach lures prospects into acting immediately by offering a discount. Although this approach has proven to convert, there are a few weaknesses:

• It devalues the product.
• There is no way you can follow up.

A better suggested approach would be to prompt them to opt-in to a list using an exit pop-ups. This list should be specialized to follow up for shopping cart abandons.

You can get feedback about their purchase indecision or questions about your product.

In the messages, you can provide information to educate them more about your product or service and overcome their objections to buying from you.

Shopping cart registration

Another approach I have used and seen personally is shopping cart registration. This method forces would-be buyers to register an account with you before they checkout.

The benefits of such approach are three-fold:

• You gather all important information up front. As would-be buyers register, you have immediate access to their emails and other information.
• It saves product purchase history for the the customer. Customers can login to their account and see what products they have purchased from you. This information is valuable for customer support and also product follow up.
• Users can save and return to their shopping cart anytime they want. This is a convenient way to help users remind what products they have decided to buy. Of course, they may never return unless you remind them.

Using this method, if 24 hours since registration, a user had not decided to buy or otherwise, you want to follow up and sell the benefits to her. This helps conversion rate.

For registered users, you can notify them on items on their shopping cart that are on-sale, or any related product.

[Aweber]