How to reduce your retargeting costs and optimize your efforts
As Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve never lost a game; I just ran out of time.” This mindset of quickly bouncing back after a setback is crucial in e-commerce, where retargeting serves as a strategy to recover from lost sales, especially following a failed transaction.
Reminding them of what they left behind
Retargeting is a powerful strategy to remind customers of what they left behind and bring them back to complete their purchase. Companies like AdRoll and Criteo excel in this, using cookies and tracking pixels to craft personalized ads based on users’ previous interactions, significantly boosting conversion rates and enhancing brand recall. Retargeting is a key strategy for converting “window shoppers” into buyers by leveraging their initial interest and keeping the brand top-of-mind.
However, are you considering whether retargeting is always the most cost-effective solution after a failed transaction? This practice is particularly common, where businesses instinctively turn to retargeting to recover lost sales. While retargeting can be effective, it doesn’t address one of the root causes of lost sales: false credit card declines.
While retargeting can be effective, it doesn’t address one of the root causes of lost sales: false credit card declines.
False credit card declines continue to be a significant issue for merchants, costing billions in lost revenue. But is it really so significant? In 2019, merchants in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany collectively lost $20.3 billion due to false credit and debit card declines, according to a study by Checkout.com and Oxford Economics. This figure represents a substantial increase compared to earlier estimates, underscoring the growing impact of this problem. For every dollar lost to actual fraud, around $25 in genuine transactions are falsely declined, which is a substantial burden on businesses. These false declines cause immediate revenue loss and necessitate increased spending on retargeting efforts to recover these lost sales. Instead of constantly solving the problem after it occurs with expensive retargeting, businesses can prevent it in the first place by addressing the root cause -false credit card declines.
What are false declines and why do they happen?
False declines occur when customers cannot complete a payment due to failures in the authorization process, which can involve the vendor, payment-processing platform, or credit card issuer. The issuer is responsible for approving or declining transactions and provides an error code when a charge fails. Common causes include insufficient funds, incorrect card information, expired cards, suspicious activity, technical glitches, outdated customer information, and overly stringent fraud prevention measures. These issues not only impact revenue by causing potential sales losses but also affect other marketing efforts and KPIs - Cost of Acquisition (CAC), LifeTime Value (LTV), conversion rates and retargeting efforts as well as customer experience, and operational efficiency. High decline rates frustrate customers, leading to abandoned purchases and eroded trust, while straining resources and increasing support inquiries. Additionally, monitoring decline rates helps optimize revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, detect fraud early, streamline operations, and contribute to informed strategic decisions.
How Bounce helps reduce retargeting costsÂ
Bounce offers a cutting-edge AI-based payment recovery solution designed to address the issue of false declines. By analyzing millions of data points in real-time, Bounce can distinguish between valid and invalid declines, recovering over 30% of transactions that would otherwise be lost. This not only helps retain revenue but also reduces the need for extensive retargeting campaigns, thereby cutting down on retargeting costs.
Your Gain
• Reduction in Retargeting Costs: By recovering falsely declined transactions, Bounce significantly minimizes the need for additional retargeting efforts. This leads to substantial savings in your marketing budgets, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently.
• Improved Customer Retention: Ensuring a smoother checkout experience reduces customer frustration and improves loyalty. This enhances the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers, as satisfied customers are more likely to return and make repeat purchases. Our clients have seen a 15% decrease in churn due to the improved payment process.
• Higher Conversion Rates: Successfully recovered transactions boost overall conversion rates. This maximizes the return on investment (ROI) for your initial marketing efforts, turning more potential leads into actual sales and driving revenue growth. Our solution has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 10%, significantly enhancing your marketing ROI.
• Enhanced Renewal Rates: Subscription renewals often face payment issues, with decline rates reaching up to 50%. Bounce identifies and resolves these issues, recovering up to 20% of almost lost renewal deals, directly boosting your subscription renewals and overall revenue. This results in a 5% increase in your top-line revenue and improves key metrics like CAC, LTV, and retention.
You can save millions annually
Retargeting is essential for e-commerce success, but it comes with significant costs, particularly when dealing with false credit card declines. Bounce’s AI-based payment solution offers a powerful way to reduce these costs by ensuring more transactions are successfully processed, improving customer satisfaction, and enhancing the overall efficiency of marketing campaigns. By addressing false declines, businesses can save millions annually, gain a higher return on their marketing efforts, and lift their top line by up to 5%.
Schedule a meeting with our experts and let’s see together how much you can save.
As Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve never lost a game; I just ran out of time.” This mindset of quickly bouncing back after a setback is crucial in e-commerce, where retargeting serves as a strategy to recover from lost sales, especially following a failed transaction.
Reminding them of what they left behind
Retargeting is a powerful strategy to remind customers of what they left behind and bring them back to complete their purchase. Companies like AdRoll and Criteo excel in this, using cookies and tracking pixels to craft personalized ads based on users’ previous interactions, significantly boosting conversion rates and enhancing brand recall. Retargeting is a key strategy for converting “window shoppers” into buyers by leveraging their initial interest and keeping the brand top-of-mind.
However, are you considering whether retargeting is always the most cost-effective solution after a failed transaction? This practice is particularly common, where businesses instinctively turn to retargeting to recover lost sales. While retargeting can be effective, it doesn’t address one of the root causes of lost sales: false credit card declines.
While retargeting can be effective, it doesn’t address one of the root causes of lost sales: false credit card declines.
False credit card declines continue to be a significant issue for merchants, costing billions in lost revenue. But is it really so significant? In 2019, merchants in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany collectively lost $20.3 billion due to false credit and debit card declines, according to a study by Checkout.com and Oxford Economics. This figure represents a substantial increase compared to earlier estimates, underscoring the growing impact of this problem. For every dollar lost to actual fraud, around $25 in genuine transactions are falsely declined, which is a substantial burden on businesses. These false declines cause immediate revenue loss and necessitate increased spending on retargeting efforts to recover these lost sales. Instead of constantly solving the problem after it occurs with expensive retargeting, businesses can prevent it in the first place by addressing the root cause -false credit card declines.
What are false declines and why do they happen?
False declines occur when customers cannot complete a payment due to failures in the authorization process, which can involve the vendor, payment-processing platform, or credit card issuer. The issuer is responsible for approving or declining transactions and provides an error code when a charge fails. Common causes include insufficient funds, incorrect card information, expired cards, suspicious activity, technical glitches, outdated customer information, and overly stringent fraud prevention measures. These issues not only impact revenue by causing potential sales losses but also affect other marketing efforts and KPIs - Cost of Acquisition (CAC), LifeTime Value (LTV), conversion rates and retargeting efforts as well as customer experience, and operational efficiency. High decline rates frustrate customers, leading to abandoned purchases and eroded trust, while straining resources and increasing support inquiries. Additionally, monitoring decline rates helps optimize revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, detect fraud early, streamline operations, and contribute to informed strategic decisions.
How Bounce helps reduce retargeting costsÂ
Bounce offers a cutting-edge AI-based payment recovery solution designed to address the issue of false declines. By analyzing millions of data points in real-time, Bounce can distinguish between valid and invalid declines, recovering over 30% of transactions that would otherwise be lost. This not only helps retain revenue but also reduces the need for extensive retargeting campaigns, thereby cutting down on retargeting costs.
Your Gain
• Reduction in Retargeting Costs: By recovering falsely declined transactions, Bounce significantly minimizes the need for additional retargeting efforts. This leads to substantial savings in your marketing budgets, allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently.
• Improved Customer Retention: Ensuring a smoother checkout experience reduces customer frustration and improves loyalty. This enhances the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers, as satisfied customers are more likely to return and make repeat purchases. Our clients have seen a 15% decrease in churn due to the improved payment process.
• Higher Conversion Rates: Successfully recovered transactions boost overall conversion rates. This maximizes the return on investment (ROI) for your initial marketing efforts, turning more potential leads into actual sales and driving revenue growth. Our solution has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 10%, significantly enhancing your marketing ROI.
• Enhanced Renewal Rates: Subscription renewals often face payment issues, with decline rates reaching up to 50%. Bounce identifies and resolves these issues, recovering up to 20% of almost lost renewal deals, directly boosting your subscription renewals and overall revenue. This results in a 5% increase in your top-line revenue and improves key metrics like CAC, LTV, and retention.
You can save millions annually
Retargeting is essential for e-commerce success, but it comes with significant costs, particularly when dealing with false credit card declines. Bounce’s AI-based payment solution offers a powerful way to reduce these costs by ensuring more transactions are successfully processed, improving customer satisfaction, and enhancing the overall efficiency of marketing campaigns. By addressing false declines, businesses can save millions annually, gain a higher return on their marketing efforts, and lift their top line by up to 5%.
Schedule a meeting with our experts and let’s see together how much you can save.
Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 5
Heading 6
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
Block quote
Ordered list
- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 3
Unordered list
- Item A
- Item B
- Item C
Bold text
Emphasis
Superscript
Subscript
Further reading
Ever wondered why your online shoppers are ditching their carts at checkout? If you answered yes, you might be in the middle of a checkout conversion problem.
In other words, visitors come to your website to make a purchase, but leave before completing their purchase. This phenomenon is all too common in e-commerce, with abandoned cart rates having skyrocketed to 70% in 2023.
Fortunately, there are several effective tactics businesses can employ to tackle this problem head-on and reclaim your potential customers. In this blog, we'll delve into the top ways you can boost checkout conversion rates and up your revenue.
But first, why are people dropping out? Â
There are many reasons why people visit your online store, make their way through a purchase process and then at the last minute totally change their minds. Here's a list of the typical reasons why you’re not getting those wins.Â
- Complicated checkout process: A lengthy or convoluted checkout process with too many steps or form fields can discourage customers from completing their purchase.
- Account creation walls: Requiring users to register or create an account before checkout can be a barrier, especially for first-time visitors.
- Lack of preferred payment option: If your store doesn't offer the payment method preferred by a customer, they may abandon their cart rather than compromise on payment security or convenience.
- Lack of trust in website security: Concerns about the security of personal and financial information can cause customers to abandon their carts if they don't trust the website's security measures.
- Unable to save the items for later: Some customers might wish to save items for future purchase or comparison, leading them to abandon their carts temporarily.
- Website errors: Technical glitches or slow loading times can frustrate visitors and lead them to abandon their carts.
Top ways to improve your checkout conversions rateÂ
1. Simplify the checkout process
People appreciate a clear and intuitive buying process. However, many businesses fail to deliver on this. To increase conversion rates, aim to make the journey to checkout as simple as possible without unnecessary steps, forms, or pop-ups. To create a simplest checkout process: be mindful of general design and layout, and keep the journey as quick (and painless) as possible.Â
2. Offer guest checkout
As mentioned above, there should be minimal steps before checkout. A great technique to achieve this is by offering Guest Checkout options. This allows potential shoppers to bypass account creation and purchase items directly, thereby potentially preventing a 35% drop in transactions. Shoppers provide their information for their order, such as their name, shipping address, and payment details, without wasting their precious time creating an account on your website.
3. Optimize for mobile
Most folks these days shop on their mobile phones - 76% of adults (US), to be exact. If you're running an ecommerce store, you'd best make sure that you adjust mobile navigation so that your online store is fully optimized for the mobile experience. Key actions you can take include ensuring a highly responsive design, providing an optimal mobile view, and integrating payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, allowing users to complete their purchases with a single touch or click.
4. Display clear shipping fees
If you have global customers shopping from your online store, they probably want to see shipping costs before they click the pay button. Shipping costs can significantly affect prices, and purchasing an item without shipping costs can appear quite different at checkout. To avoid misleading customers, it's best to display clear shipping costs and available payment methods clearly on the checkout page. Doing this helps shoppers make better-informed decisions, ensures transparent pricing, and even boosts trust.
5. Communicate trust
Customers want to feel safe and secure when making purchases online. This includes having a reputable-looking website and displaying various badges for payment security, data protection, and purchase policies. Creating a trustworthy relationship with your customers boosts conversion rates. In fact, statistics show that 35% of potential buyers abandon a site without a security badge. These trust signals reassure customers that their information is safe and their purchase is protected.
6. Offer multiple payment options
Different customers have various preferences when it comes to payment methods. The Baymard Institute found that 6% of cart abandonments occur due to a lack of preferred payment methods. With more options, paying becomes more convenient, increasing the likelihood of completing a purchase. By offering multiple payment options, you make it easier for customers to pay in a way that suits their preferences and needs.
7. Use abandoned cart emails
Implementing an abandoned cart marketing strategy is crucial. A great way to do this is by re-engaging customers through "abandoned cart emails." Setting up emails gently reminds customers about their abandoned carts, highlights the items left behind, and utilizes personalized tactics tailored to reflect their buyer interests. Additionally, offering exclusive discounts or special offers can entice customers to return and seal the deal.
8. Reduce card decline rates
Having your customer click on the "pay" button can still turn out to be a lost conversion. Countless good deals are lost due to card declines - in fact, an average of 10% of checkout purchases get thrown out right at this very last conversion stage. This problem often goes unnoticed by merchants, but it can lead to millions of dollars lost for your business, not to mention the wasted marketing costs. With Bounce, your ecommerce business can identify false card declines and recover over 30% of them in real time, ensuring you capture valuable revenue opportunities and minimize losses effectively.
Optimize checkout for success
Whether it’s confusing web design, or false card declines, improving your checkout process is vital for ecommerce success. With many factors leading to cart abandonment, streamlining the online checkout is crucial for retaining customers, building loyalty, and boosting revenue. By prioritizing checkout optimization, businesses can seamlessly guide customers through the buying journey and resolve common pain points that maximize value from your shoppers.
Checkout fail. It's a familiar pain for marketers.
After investing thousands of dollars in targeting and re-targeting, the excitement of a potential customer placing an order turns into frustration when they fail to convert into a paying customer.
And in many of those cases, it’s due to payment decline.
The hidden cost of checkout churn
Did you know? More than 10% of checkout purchases get thrown out of the funnel right at the conversion stage due to credit card declines. The user enters his credit card number, hits “purchase”, and receives a failed transaction notice.
Those failed transactions can translate into millions of $ lost for your business, not including the lost marketing costs.
Here's another nugget: 30% of failed checkouts can actually be recovered into a closed deal.
With Bounce’s AI-based payment solution, companies can save up to millions of dollars annually, gaining a higher return on their marketing efforts and lifting their top line by 5%!
The cumulative year-over-year impact of recovering lost checkouts is enormous.
It also goes way beyond immediate top-line revenue.
The fuller picture: understanding company growth impact
Let's explore how failed checkouts influence your business's growth and performance:
- Top-line Impact: Lost deals directly dent total revenue, affecting company growth.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Each lost deal not only hampers revenue but also resets the clock on acquiring new customers and increasing your average CAC.
- Retargeting Costs: A failed checkout experience is likely to prompt increased spending on retargeting campaigns to re-engage users and target new potential ones.
- LTV and Repeat Customers: A declined transaction at checkout leads to a bad user experience, and by that, you risk losing your customer permanently, impacting both the lifetime value (LTV) and the rate of repeat business.
- Conversion Rates: Checkout failures directly affect checkout conversion rates and the success of the overall marketing funnel, with fewer leads and visitors that turn into customers and repeat customers.‍
- Purchase Size: Customers facing declined transactions tend to abandon their purchase initiative entirely. Of the few that do retry, they will often revisit their cart and remove purchases, resulting in a lower overall purchase value.
Unlocking lost checkout revenue with Bounce
Bounce helps companies prevent revenue loss and all other negative impacts of declined payments.
Our payment recovery platform uses ML to analyze millions of data points, identifying which checkout declines are valid and which ones should not have been declined. Our solution recovers over 30% of payment declines, in real time.Â
Bounce seamlessly integrates into your existing checkout process, providing the user with a positive and smooth experience when identified as valid. We’re so sure of our data that the service is risk-free. Your customers enjoy a better checkout experience, and you enjoy a higher return on your marketing efforts.
Here’s how our checkout recovery helps our customers recover tens of thousands of dollars in lost checkout revenue.
How Bounce improved authentication rates for Lingopie and lifted their entire business KPIs
Lingopie is the world's only language-learning application that uses real TV shows and movies to help its users learn a new language. They make language learning fun and as simple as watching your favorite TV show.
‍One of Lingopie’s amazing achievements is their long-lasting relationship with their users.Â
‍While joining their subscription service, Lingopie users go through an authentication process before starting their free trial. The purpose of the authentication process is to prevent fraud and attain a valid form of payment from the user.
Having a reliable, smart and efficient authentication process that validates the users is key to achieving long lasting relationships.Â
Before Lingopie started working with us many of their potential users did not comply with the authentication process.
We got to partner with Samuel Medalie, CFO of Lingopie and found that many users were failing the authentication stage due to faulty declines. These users could have been approved but were not making it past the initial authentication.
We integrated with Lingopie’s current authentication process, keeping the existing user journey. Putting our solution to work, our ML algorithm identifies good users who were about to be blocked by card declines. These good users were able to smoothly pass the authentication process and move on to the free trial phase, ensuring a positive experience.
After joining Bounce the number of new users completing the authentication process increased, allowing more users to initiate their journey with Lingopie and transition into paying customers.
"Bounce increased our authentication rates by 8%. Customers are automatically approved, so the user experience is seamless."
This has a huge impact on Lingopie’s subscribers, which increased by 5% as well as other KPIs such as top line, LTV, conversion rates and retention.
"Bounce helped us provide our new users with a smooth authentication experience. More users start their journey with us and stay for a longer time”
While improving Lingopie’s authentication process, we were also happy to advise them with other payment-related decisions they faced, such as optimizing their subscription process. We simply see our customers as partners and their success is also our success.