Why you should be using abandoned cart recovery emails

Sales

Why you should be using abandoned cart recovery emails

You’ve managed to entice a customer onto your website, they’re browsing your products and considering whether or not they want to spend their hard-earned cash with you. Getting customers to spend money in your online shop can be an uphill battle, with a variety of obstacles on the way.

Abandoned carts may be more common that you think…

According to a report by Baymard published in 2016, 69% of all e-commerce visitors abandon their shopping cart. The phenomenon of cart abandonment is seen much more in online shops than in ‘real-life’ situations. Not many of us would go to our local supermarket, pack our trolley full of goodies, then simply decide to leave the shop and not bother buying anything after all.

Online, however, many of us are willing to do just that. There are many reasons why people choose to not make a purchase after adding goods to their baskets, including inconvenient shipping or payment options, a website crashing or they’ve simply been distracted by something else such as the doorbell ringing forcing them to put there shopping on hold.

abandoned shopping cart

While addressing the reasons for cart abandonment is vital for any online retailer, abandoned cart recovery emails, sent to a customer who has added products to their cart but then not checked out, can play a key role in enticing those customers back to your shop to complete their purchases.

How effective are abandoned cart recovery emails?

Research by Salecycle (2015), found more than a tenth (11.61%) of all cart abandonment emails are clicked and we have similar statistics with many of our own clients, with some achieving 15% recovery rates of carts through such emails.

Essentially, this means that online retailers who do not send out these emails, could potentially be missing out in turning those lost customers into sales, after all.

Additionally, abandoned cart recovery emails may result in higher average order values (AOV). The same research from Salecycle shows that the AOV of recovered purchases is 14.2% higher than typical purchases.

Even more interestingly, Salecycle discovered that just less than a third (29.9%) of clicks led to a recovered purchase back on site.

Here is an example of an abandoned cart email sent by Urban Outfitters to entice us back to their store to buy the products we added to cart:

sample abandoned cart email

When to send abandoned cart recovery emails

When it comes to these types of emails, timing is everything.

There are many different expert opinions out there, offering views about the most effective approach of when to send abandoned cart recovery emails and how many to send.

However, it’s generally accepted that sending one immediately after a customer has left your shop, may leave you looking too desperate and could actually end up putting some customers off. Shopify’s research has found that sending an email either one hour after the cart has been abandoned, or ten hours after, tends to provide the best results and it is what we recommend to many of our clients. However, this does very much depend on the business and can vary greatly from industry to industry and there are cases when sending immediately after may be suitable.

when to send abandoned cart recovery emails

You could increase your profit with abandoned cart recovery emails

The main aim for any ecommerce business it to convert clicks into sales. Customers abandoning baskets is one of the biggest stumbling blocks many online retailers face, yet many have not proactively tacked this problem.

By sending out abandoned cart recovery emails to these shoppers, you are creating another opportunity for people to spend their money with you and to increase your conversion rates.

As the stats show, these types of emails are far from a waste of time. Neglect to send them and you could be missing out on potential sales.



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