Building a Cart Abandonment Real Time Journey in SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Introduction
Many E-Commerce platforms lose out on revenue by not following up on incomplete sales. This post demonstrates how to build a Cart Abandonment journey in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This real-time journey will send a personalised reminder message to customers who have added items to their cart, but not yet completed the purchase. We have used an SMS reminder for this example, but other delivery methods such as email and push notifications are also possible.
How to Approach
Create an "Add to Cart" Trigger Event
The journey begins with an "add to cart" event as the trigger event. We use the fictional “SAS Store” website for this demonstration and set a click of the “add to cart” button as the trigger event.
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The real-time journey will start when the add to cart button is clicked. As we can see from the event attributes, the event also captures the product name. This will be used later to help personalise the message.
Create a Purchase View Event
Now we create an event based on a purchase view. This will be the primary indicator used to determine whether the cart was abandoned or not. The event occurs when the purchase page is viewed.
We also set some attributes for this event. In practice, these attributes won't be used, but all events need attributes to be valid.
Instead, we will use the attributes from the “add to cart” event in this journey. This way we can still have personalisation for customers that have added items to their cart, but did not make a purchase.
Create a Cart Purchase Task
We want to create a split node to apply different tasks depending on the checkout status. A split node cannot be added to an event. Therefore, we need to create a task. We also use this task to deliver a discount offer for bags on the purchase page. In the insights tab, we also add the purchase event we created previously as the primary metric.
Create Personalised Message Creatives
We then set up two creatives; one to remind the customers that they have products still in their cart; and the other to thank the customer for making the purchase. As they will be delivered with an SMS, I set the type of creative to plain text.
Merge tags are used for both creatives. The first name comes from the customer table. The product name comes from the product attribute in the “add to cart” event.
Create SMS Message Tasks
We create two triggered SMS tasks to deliver the messages; one for the abandonment message, and the other for the thank you message. On the content tab, we add the respective creatives. We add the recipient number to the delivery tab.
Build the Journey
Once all the individual items have been created, we then add them to the journey map one by one. This is a very easy process as it uses a drag and drop interface. The completed journey map will look as follows:
Additional points to consider when building the activities map are as follows:
Creating Split Nodes.
A split node is added to send the journey down a different path depending on whether the purchase was made. We use the purchase event as the metric to split on, and add a conditional split. We change the condition to “user did not” and we input 18 hours for the conditional metric. This means that after 18 hours it will be treated as a cart abandoned situation. This value can be changed to suit the typical response times of your customer base.
Adding merge tags from the event attributes.
As event attributes are propagated down the journey, the journey map must be completed before the product merge tags can be added to the SMS creatives.
Results
You can see from this demonstration that it is easy to build a Cart Abandonment real-time journey using SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This journey will provide a good customer experience for the website visitors, as well as maximising revenue for our clients.
There is a demonstration of this feature in the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription for Customers. The demonstration can be found in the “Creating Activities with SAS Customer Intelligence 360” section, specifically the “Building Real-Time Journeys” lesson.
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