Quick Tips for Salvaging Abandoned Carts

Someone who made the effort to visit your Web site, drill down to a few product pages, and put merchandise into the online shopping cart, even if he ultimately didn’t complete the purchase, has got to be a better prospect than the masses out in cyberspace who’ve never even heard of your brand, right? Of course we’re right. Yet most online marketers fail to try to persuade these consumers who abandoned their carts to return and complete their purchase.

And that’s a costly oversight. According to Experian CheetahMail, follow-up e-mails sent to shoppers who had abandoned their cart generate an average of $3.20 in revenue per e-mail. In contrast, the average revenue per e-mail of your garden-variety bulk messages is $0.13. “Companies that do not trigger abandoned-cart messages are missing out on a high conversion opportunity,” the company concludes in its white paper “The Remarketing Report.”

In the paper, New York-based CheetahMail offers up some best practices for abandoned-cart e-mails. Among them:

* Be as specific in your messages as possible. E-mails that were personalized to include the actual products that were abandoned had higher transaction rates (2.9%) than those that merely included a link taking recipients to their abandoned carts (1.4%) and those that required the recipients to log in before they could see their carts (1.3%).

* Don’t assume you need to include an incentive in your message. CheetahMail’s research showed that abandoned-cart messages that included a discount or some other sort of special offer had a transaction rate of 2.6 percent, compared with 1.8 percent for those that didn’t. But the revenue per e-mail was almost the same: $3.29 for e-mails with offers versus $3.20 for those without incentives. You may prefer to trade off the lower transaction rate for a greater margin on each purchase. Your best bet, of course, is to test to see what is most effective for your particular target market.

* If at first you don’t succeed… If shoppers don’t respond to the initial triggered e-mail, try sending a follow-up. According to CheetahMail, such follow-ups can increase a campaign’s revenue by up to 33%.

* Create a sense of urgency. Try messaging along the lines of “last chance to revisit your cart.”

* Time it right. For etailers, CheetahMail says the optimal time to send a trigger message is two to three days after the cart was abandoned. But it adds that “if your business has a need for a faster purchase cycle, such as sending price quotes, last-minute gifting, or customer service requests, consider deploying the message within 24 hours of abandonment.”