The practical translation of Gartner's "triple squeeze" is abandoned carts

Consultancy Gartner has great skill distilling complex topics to memorable phrases and lists. Gartner identifies a “triple squeeze” for brands: stubbornly high inflation, scarce and expensive talent, and disruptions that alienate customers. I’ll translate Gartner’s thoughtful 1,000-plus words to a three-word problem for 2023: more abandoned carts.

Spoiler alert:?spending even more money on Facebook and Google isn’t going to solve the problem of abandoned carts.

Also, it’s already January, so an unavoidably complex martech adtech lift isn’t going to improve the 12-month performance either. Longer term, a martech upgrade may be brilliant—it’s probably overdue, right?--but it’s not going to help this fiscal year. When the CEO or Board asks you, “So, [insert your name here], what’s our plan for revenue growth this year?”, the prudent answer isn’t: “We’re going to do a ton of user acceptance testing.” (Remember, when it works, it’s “our plan,” but if it craters, it’s “your plan.”)

The answer to the missed-wealth problem of abandoned carts isn’t more content. When Mac computers first enabled ‘everyone’ to design their own marketing and corporate communications materials, a pundit was asked the main advantage of the then-new PC-based design capability. She replied: “It’ll enable more people to do a bad job, only faster.” That’s kind of the case today with generative AI for content. It’s fascinating. It’s faster. But does it work? Is the output effective?

So, back to a massive number of abandoned shopping carts.

As a growth marketer or performance marketer, you aren’t after more content or content created by AI. While AI generated content is amazing, the business value is very low because it is just machine-generated noise. Well-written noise, yes, but noise, nonetheless.

Rather as a growth marketer or performance marketer, you are after conversions as proven by completed digital transactions or subscriptions, for example. Conversions—emptied carts or completed apps or renewed subscriptions--prove a brand’s content accomplished the goal for which it was created, that the shopper perceived value and acted, and that the sponsoring brand received value too with the value measured as revenue.

Motivation AI is a class of generative AI platforms that focuses on driving better customer engagement. Boston Consulting Group finds?brands that deploy Motivation AI that prompts their shoppers to act can recuperate about $40 million of lost revenue or lost conversions for every $100 million of marketing-attributed revenue. The key is language that is optimized so individuals act when they are on the brand’s site or app or email or chat.

As a practical example, Persado worked with a Fortune 500 retailer to optimize the language of their?cart abandonment email. The retailer used Persado’s Motivation AI to optimize the full email--subject line, headline, sub header, CTA text and formatting, even emojis. Persado’s winning content drove 15 percent more engagement and 26 percent more orders. Google and Facebook and unoptimized AI-generated meandering content won't deliver those accretive results.

Words optimized for commercial action will positively impact the looming abandoned cart challenge.