S&S Worldwide Saves 25% of Abandoned Carts via E-mail

For some online sellers, the number of shopping carts that are abandoned exceeds the number of completed purchases. Yet many Web merchants shy away from sending triggered follow-up e-mails to visitors who left a site with unpurchased items still in their cart.
 
S&S Worldwide’s success with its cart-abandonment e-mail campaign could change their minds. By sending automated triggered messages to customers who left without completing their purchase, the seller of crafts kits, phys-ed equipment, and other educational supplies manages to turn one out of every four abandoned carts into a sale. In fact, the abandoned-cart program accounts for nearly one-third of S&S’s annual e-mail sales, says marketing manager Carolyn Nye.
 
S&S launched its abandoned-cart program in late 2006/early 2007, recalls Nye. In the beginning the company simply sent a basic text e-mail to visitors who abandoned their carts. It then progressed to including the contents of the cart in the body of the e-mail, using Silverpop’s Engage Transact module in conjunction with Coremetrics Web analytics software. Adding this personalized reminder of the unpurchased items improved conversion rates significantly, Nye says. S&S consequently began testing different offers and subject lines.
 
The e-mail program is set up to automatically send visitors an initial follow-up message within an hour after they’ve abandoned their cart. The immediacy is key to the program’s success rate, Nye notes. The message has a banner declaring, “Courtesy Reminder. We thought this might be important to you,” along with the list of items in the cart, several links taking the shopper directly back to the cart, and the toll-free phone number should the shopper wish to call in his order instead. If the recipient doesn’t respond, S&S will periodically follow-up with additional messages and promotions, such as discounts or free shipping.
 
Because the abandoned-cart e-mails, like all of S&S’s other transactional messages, are completely automated, the marketing department can make changes to the creative and the cadence without having to call on IT.
 
When analyzing the effectiveness of S&S’s e-mail campaigns, “I like to calculate the amount of money each send brings,” Nye says. “That helps me look at the ROI of different campaigns.” She usually calculates the sum based on e-mails delivered and received, though sometimes she will review them by open rates as well. 
 
In terms of return on investment, triggered programs have an often-overlooked advantage over promotional ones, says Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Silverpop. Promotional campaigns are more time- and labor-intensive to create and implement than automated triggered messages. As a result, once you factor costs into the equation, the ROI per message sent for a triggered e-mail—not just abandoned-cart messages but also order-confirmation, thank-you, and birthday messages—tends to be higher.