Only 20% of Sites Follow Up Abandoned Carts with E-mails

Only 20 of the 100 websites visited by the E-tailing Group for its fourth-quarter mystery-shopping study sent follow-up e-mails in response to abandoned shopping carts. Even so, that’s up from 14% of the ecommerce sites visited the previous fourth quarter. The value of each abandoned cart was more than $99.

Just 40% of the abandoned-cart e-mails included a personalized salutation, the same percentage that included a photo of the abandoned items in the message. Fifteen percent included a discount, free shipping, or some other sort of incentive to help close the sale, down from 29% a year ago. The average amount of time from when a cart was abandoned to when a follow-up e-mail was received was 6.15 days, compared with seven days the previous year.

The E-tailing Group offered several suggestions to convert abandoned carts into sales:

• First off, be sure that your website has the functionality to save abandoned carts. Likewise, be sure your e-mail system can support triggered abandoned-cart e-mails. Obviously you can’t proceed until you have those capabilities in place.

• Include real-time inventory messaging on your product pages and in the shopping cart. To salvage carts that are abandoned because of back-ordered products, consider implementing triggered e-mails that alert shoppers as to when the items are back in stock. In addition, if a product is out of stock, suggest alternative products on the product pages, in the shopping cart, and/or in the follow-up e-mails.

• In your follow-up e-mails, let shoppers know when and if their abandoned cart will be cleared.  

• Use HTML so that you can include photos of the abandoned items in the e-mail messages.

• Test promotional offers in the follow-up e-mails to see if they help you convert sales profitably.