Technology

Thanx deploys automated cart abandonment marketing campaigns for restaurants

provided by Thanx

September 19, 2023

Thanx, a loyalty and digital guest engagement platform for restaurants, has created abandonment marketing automation that recaptures lost revenue from incomplete first-party digital orders. The new tools — most commonly seen in e-commerce but also regularly utilized by Doordash and Uber Eats — take advantage of Thanx's position as the provider of both ordering user experiences (mobile applications and websites) and loyalty/CRM software, said Thanx CEO and founder Zach Goldstein.

"Restaurants are habitual businesses. If a consumer got far enough in their purchase journey to add items to their cart for lunch or dinner but didn't end up converting, there's a high likelihood that the restaurant is still in the consideration set the next day," he said in a company press release. "The customer just needs the right prompt at the right time. Historically, this has been too hard for marketers to execute because it requires deep integration between two disparate systems — ordering and CRM. But Thanx does both, so we've turned this complex journey into one click to activate."

How it works
Once activated by a restaurant, Thanx cart abandonment campaigns automatically trigger whenever a consumer adds items to their cart on the restaurant's website or app but fails to complete the purchase. That consumer's cart is preserved and a personalized message is automatically triggered — with or without an incentive — encouraging the consumer to complete the purchase at a later time, for instance at lunch the following day. In e-commerce, cart abandonment emails recover more than 10% of incomplete purchases, according to the release.

Thanx ordering user experiences are built atop order management technology such as Olo, which is a loyalty partner. Thanx provides detailed reporting on cart conversion in restaurant dashboards, with industry-leading conversion rates averaging nearly 80% across app and web. In addition to cart abandonment marketing campaigns, Thanx also reports on location-specific ordering errors — even those originating at the point of sale — to allow brands to make operational changes that further optimize cart conversion.

Los Angeles-based Sweetfin's president, Seth Cohen, is using the platform and said driving customers to direct ordering channels is critical for growth.

"We always want to make ordering as frictionless as possible to maximize repeat purchasing," he said in the release. "Thanx's new cart abandonment automations allow us to grow revenue without adding any overhead to our team."