If you are Costco, an abandoned shopping cart means melting ice cream forming a sticky pool on the floor of aisle six. If you are an association, an abandoned shopping cart means something else entirely. It means your marketing was on target, your value proposition was compelling, and a prospective member or conference attendee visited your website to join your association or register for your conference.

But when it came time to key in their credit card information and complete their purchase, they didn't. It's a transaction that almost happened, but ultimately fell by the wayside. And "almost a member" is still not a member.

Why didn't they complete their transaction? Did the phone ring and distract them? Did they suddenly decide that your value didn't justify price after all? Or (shame on you if this is true) was the price hidden, forcing the prospective customer to initiate the transaction to reveal the price?

Abandoned carts aren't just missed opportunities for a transaction; they are teachable moments.

You could try guessing why they abandoned their cart. But, instead of guessing, why not just ask them? That's what I'm doing. And here's how I'm doing it on a shoestring budget.

Biweekly Reports and a Simple Message

Some months ago, I was clicking around the Manufacturers' Agents National Association's customer relationship management (CRM) database when I noticed a name—let's call him John Doe—with no transactions on his record. He hadn't joined, purchased an ad, or registered for a conference.

"So, if we never did any business with John, how did he get into our database?" I asked our CRM consultant.

Our consultant explained that websites commonly process transactions in a certain way. A customer's first step is to key in contact information. The second step is to key in credit card information to pay for the transaction. John had completed step one but not step two.

Was this single abandoned cart the tip of an iceberg of lost opportunities, or was it an anomaly? Our CRM software couldn't answer that question, but implementing commercial abandoned-cart software on our website would be expensive and time consuming. And, if it turned out that this abandoned cart had been an anomaly, all of that time and expense would have been wasted.

So, I asked our consultant if he could create a report that listed prospective customers who had entered their contact information but hadn't completed a transaction. To create that report, he billed me for less than half an hour.

Now, every two weeks, I run a report of transactions that were started but never completed. Usually there is a handful of names on the list.

In some cases customers were interrupted or had second thoughts but then came back a day or two later, abandoning the incomplete transaction and creating a new transaction from scratch, leaving two records in our CRM. I wouldn't want the incomplete transaction to trigger a "Why didn't you join?" email to someone who had come back later and joined, so I check each email address in the incomplete transaction report to see if it corresponds to another transaction that ultimately was completed.

People who started a transaction, never completed it, and never came back are probably hot prospects, or at the very least they represent an opportunity to learn why they abandoned their cart before completing the transaction, so they each get the following email:

Winning Back Lost Prospects

For the cost of 30 minutes of my time every other week, I can reach out to prospects who abandoned their carts and try to help them complete their transactions. It also lets me keep tabs on how many carts are abandoned, so I'll know if the number of abandoned carts changes abruptly.

About half the people I email about their abandoned carts email me back to share the reason they didn't compete their transaction. In every case where a prospective member shared their concern, I've been able to address it, and they completed their transaction—a very respectable close rate.

So much is written about big data, crunching massive databases, and data mining. But there is also an opportunity to learn from little data, one data point at a time. Abandoned carts aren't just missed opportunities for a transaction; they are teachable moments that give us the opportunity to learn why one particular person embraced our value proposition almost but not quite long enough to become a member or register for our conference.

Why did they leave us standing at the altar? The only way to find out is to ask.