How email can salvage abandoned shopping carts

According to online marketing provider Experian CheetahMail, 41 percent of web shoppers in the UK regularly abandon their online shopping carts. What’s more, 30 percent of shoppers said they’d go back and complete their purchase if offered some sort of incentive along the lines of a small discount or free postage and packing. It stands to reason, then, that you can salvage a sizeable amount of those abandoned purchases by getting back in touch with the shoppers, a tactic that CheetahMail has dubbed ReMarketing.

The process is a type of trigger email marketing. Your website analytics can tell you where and when a visitor abandoned your site. You can then use that information to send him a targeted email “triggered” by the type of abandonment.

For instance, if a registered customer has quit the site before even beginning the checkout process, you could email him a quick survey asking why he didn’t make a purchase or send him a special offer based on the types of products he’d been looking at. If a customer abandoned his cart partway through the checkout process, it could be that he was interrupted; a reminder email might be enough to close the sale. And if the shopper received a system error during checkout, “ask the customer to revisit to try again or offer an alternative process—download a form, call a freephone number,” advises CheetahMail in its white paper “The Case for ReMarketing”. “The person wants to buy… they just need another solution.”

CheetahMail suggests six steps for an effective recovery campaign:

1) Know your starting point. In other words, establish your baseline metrics regarding the number of abandoned carts, your browser-to-buy conversion rate and the website pages with the highest abandonment rates. You also need to know your average order value, so that you can make sure you don’t spend more on salvaging sales than is profitable. CheetahMail assumes a 1-2 percent conversion rate for remails. If your site has 5,000 abandoned carts each month, and your average order value is £100, you can expect to take in an additional £5,000-£10,000 in sales a month by sending every customer who abandoned a cart a trigger email.

2) Consult with your web analytics provider. You want to be sure that you can access page visits to the user level and that data can securely be exported to you on a regular basis.

3) Consult with your email provider. Make certain that it can autoload data and autodeploy emails.

4) Start small and simple. Before you begin with triggered promotions, start with a simple reminder email to shoppers who abandoned full carts during checkout or by emailing shoppers a brief survey to find out why they’d exited your site.

5) Measure responses continuously.

6) Reevaluate and tweak your campaign periodically. For instance, you might want to set a limit as to how often you email an individual and prioritise your remailing efforts in the context of your overall contact strategy.