The Shopping Cart Abandonment solution allows your property to capture additional leads and booking opportunities for online shoppers. This tool captures contact information and trip details from your checkout pages to create leads for potential guests who begin the shopping process online, but do not complete it. This information is then passed from your booking engine to Revinate in the form of a new lead type called Abandoned Cart. Depending on which Revinate products you have, you can have your call center agents follow up on the lead in Reservation Sales* via an outbound call and a robust email automation campaign running via Revinate Marketing to increase your conversion and engage these previously anonymous shoppers. Ask your Client Success Manager for more details if interested in the Shopping Cart Abandonment package.
Reservation Sales Best Practices and Configuration
Process
For a lead to be created, the potential guest must provide an email address while in your booking engine. Additional contact information (name, phone, etc.) and trip details (dates of stay and room type) may also be included in the lead, but the extent of the information provided is dependent on the booking engine used by your property. With Reservation Sales, Revinate then takes this information and converts it to a lead so you can follow-up.
Settings & Assignment Rules
For properties using Reservation Sales, an abandoned cart lead will be created and can be configured to appear in the action center. Each property can choose to auto assign those leads just as you do for email and RezForce leads. There is a group of settings in the ELM Preferences that dictate how leads are routed and assigned when received. Discuss with your Client Success Manager to determine the best account configuration for your team.
Visibility
You have the option to hide unassigned leads. By default, leads will not be hidden.
Reservation Sales > Account Settings > Default HUB Configuration
Booking Time Frame
Abandoned cart leads are not immediately created when booking engine details are captured for two reasons: booking time frame and duplicate leads.
Some individuals may progress more slowly through the reservation process as they research rates and room options. In order to allow potential guests ample time to complete their online reservations and avoid a situation where an agent follows up before the individual has had the opportunity to complete the reservation online, a lead creation delay is used. Each property must specify a time (in minutes) for how long to wait before sending shopping cart details into Reservation Sales as a lead. This delay provides time for individuals to complete the reservation online and helps avoid unnecessary follow-up.
A best practice is to start with a 60 minute delay as the more timely the follow-up, the higher the chance of converting to a booking, but you also want to allow ample time for most individuals to complete the booking before a lead is generated. After 60 minutes, the lead is created in Reservation Sales and triggers Campaigns in Revinate.
The amount of time to wait before the system creates a new abandoned cart lead is in the Reservation Sales ELM Preferences screen. Account Settings > ELM > Preferences.
This can be adjusted based on the property and the market where the property is located.
Auto Assignment in Reservation Sales
Best practice is to Auto Assign Shopping Cart Abandoned leads to agents on the SCA team.
Agents can also open each lead in the Action Center > Unread Abandoned Cart Replies and scan through and review the details of what the guest had in the booking engine when they abandoned including dates of stay, unit type and more to determine the best way to follow-up.
Booked Interface Function
In addition to the configuration tools in your account, SCA has one additional setting that can be configured by Revinate Support. When active, this feature utilizes PMS bookings and automatically changes and leads to ‘Booked’ lead status, if there is a booking in the PMS. If you choose to utilize this functionality, agents will receive the booking credit for the lead. This may not be best for your organization as the attribution is inflating agent revenue. Utilizing this feature will typically require less lead management saving time for agent follow up. If you are using this feature, we advise adjusting the booking time frame delay to 90-120 minutes.
Duplicate Leads
Potential guests may begin their accommodation search online, but then choose to call in to finalize their reservation with an agent rather than submit it via the web or vice versa. If a reservation is found, a new Abandoned Cart lead will not be created. If a lead is found after cart details are submitted, the details are appended to the lead, rather than creating a new one.
Lead Status
Agents will work active leads to a ‘Booked’ or ‘Not Booked’ status. Add a ‘Not Booked’ reason of ‘Shopping Cart Abandon’. To learn how to add a non booking reason, please see this article. All SCA leads will enter the system in ‘Follow up’ status and will behave as any other lead in the system and ‘Auto Complete’ rules will apply to SCA leads.
Agents will only use the ‘Booked’ lead status if they collect payment. Any bookings made on the booking engine will be marked as ‘Not Booked’. Choosing the accurate lead status is helpful for triggering Automated Sends to your SCA contact list.
SCA Follow-Up Strategies
The follow up contact method is unique for each property and is dependent on your property's follow-up policy, however, customers have found that an agent placing an outbound call to a guest after an abandoned cart is well received by potential guests and implies a high level of customer service.
Outbound Calling
Outbound calling is positioned as a high level of service. A sample script may be “Hello Mr. Smith, this is Ben from Bend Resorts. I noticed you were attempting to make a reservation on our website. Are there any questions I can answer for you prior to booking?” Or “Hello Mrs. Smith, this is Sara from Bend Resorts. I was passed a note you were interested in coming to stay with us. Are there any questions I can answer for you?” For the highest conversion of SCA leads, encourage your agents to call.
Reservation Sales Email Template
Create a custom email template in Reservation Sales that agents can utilize when moving the lead to a specific status. This will be most useful if you do not currently utilize Lead Nurture Campaigns If you are using Lead Nurture Campaigns, this contact would be a personal communication between the agent and potential guest.
Abandoned Cart Segmentation
Work with your CSM to review audience logic to maximize your exposure.
Reporting
There are several locations to find lead and booking details and revenue figures for Abandoned Cart leads.
Reservation Sales
Nightly Lead Demand Report – Remember Complete and Auto Complete will not show on this report. Use “show active leads” to see Follow Up and In Process Leads.
Abandoned Cart Conversion Report
Reports > Conversion Reports > Abandoned Cart Conversion
It provides a listing of revenue broken down by agent as well as the conversion rate when the originating contact method was Shopping Cart Abandonment.
Booking Method Report
Reports > Lead Reports > Booking Method Report
You will notice an additional column in the Booking Method report called “Booked Interface”. This will represent ANY lead that had initially been assigned to the agent, however, the booking resulted from the guest completing the booking in another manner not associated with an agent action (completed the booking online, through the front desk, etc.). The revenue represented in the Revenue column is going to include the total revenue from all booking methods, including the interface.
Leads may have begun from an inbound call and the agent put that lead in follow up, however, before the follow up happened, the guest completed the booking online. In this example, the lead will be changed to booked, with the booking method as interface and the booking agent as the assigned agent.
Unread Abandoned Carts
Leads > Leads > My Unread Abandoned Carts
It presents a list of all leads with a Contact Type of 'Abandoned Cart'.
Revinate Marketing
Campaign Performance Report
Reports > Campaign Performance > Automated Campaigns > Cart Abandonment
*If your property does not have Reservation Sales, those email addresses associated with that lead are configured to feed into your Guest Database via an API Contact List. Through Segmentation, customers can create Automated Campaigns targeting that Contact List.