If you’re in eCommerce, you won’t be a stranger to an abandoned cart. According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is just under 70% (69.99%). That’s a huge segment that should be retargeted to regain those sales. This is where abandoned-cart emails come in.
Why do people abandon their shopping carts?
From price to delivery length, there are many different reasons why a person abandons their shopping cart. The chart below might help you analyze your specific case to perhaps make some changes.
Source: Baymard Institute
How effective are abandoned-cart emails?
If you were looking for a benchmark report all about abandoned-cart emails, look no further. According to Klaviyo, abandoned-cart emails have some of the best stats among other email marketing efforts. Klaviyo even generated $60 million in 3 months with their abandoned-cart-email strategy!
Their stats:
Open rate: 41.18%
Click rate: 9.50%
Revenue per recipient: $5.81
Recommended approach
Get the timing right!
You might think it’s too obtrusive to send the email straight away but stats show otherwise. A study done by Elasticpath showed the optimum time to send an abandoned-cart email was a quick 20 minutes after, which increased conversions by 5.2%. Whereas leaving it a full 24 hours showed a decrease in conversions by 50%.
Give them the right information
In the email itself, it’s best to include all the positives (where applicable), such as free shipping, fast-track shipping costs, and your returns policy/warranty to ease their decision. This humorous example from Nomad does just that!
Image courtesy: Really Good Emails
Social proof is the cherry on top
According to Oberlo, 89% of people will read reviews before buying a product. Make their job easier and include some of these reviews.
Image courtesy: Really Good Emails
Make it impossible to say no
What about a discount? If it was the original price that made them think twice, a discount may just sway them.
Image courtesy: Really Good Emails
Quick! Before it’s sold out
Add a sense of urgency to your email. They played with fire once, will they do it again?
Image courtesy: Really Good Emails
The subject line is important
It’s all well and good to focus on the right content/message, but what if they don’t open the email? This great example by Target is humorous and is it’s bound to entice those opens. It’s also important to follow standard subject-line tips. See here for more information on this.
Is once enough?
Depending on your product/client base, you might need to play around with how often to send abandoned-cart emails. Looking back at Klaviyo’s benchmark report: “If you’re sending a single email, then you might be leaving money on the table”, but sending too many, you may become an annoyance. They found that sending 2-3 emails was the best approach to maximize revenue but, as always, it’s best to do a little testing yourself.
If you are looking for an SMTP provider to help send your abandoned-cart emails, get in touch with SMTP2GO today.
About the author
Teresa Smith
Teresa has been at SMTP2GO since 2017, currently as Customer Success Engineer. She started on the support desk, where she spent years on the deliverability frontline: SPF and DKIM misalignments, TLS handshake failures on legacy MFCs, IP throttling on Gmail, the standard list. She holds an MBA in International Business and writes regularly on the SMTP2GO blog about the issues that show up in support tickets so often they've stopped feeling like edge cases.
