Online retailers are becoming more aggressive about reminding shoppers of their abandoned shopping carts, suggests a report today from the The E-tailing Group Inc., a consulting firm.
A study of 100 e-commerce sites found that online retailers, on average, sent reminder e-mails to consumers about their abandoned carts 4.96 days after those consumers left the sites. That is down from 6.15 days in last year’s study. A second reminder e-mail arrived an average of 8.40 days later. The report says that 5% of the merchants sent a second e-mail, up from 1% from the last study.
To track the response of web merchants, The E-tailing Group signed into 100 e-commerce sites and stopped the checkout process just before purchase, leaving abandoned carts. 23% of the merchants sent reminder e-mails, up from 20% last year, the report says. 18% of merchants this year knew their cart abandonment rates, an improvement from last year’s figure of 23%.
The E-tailing Group found at least one surprise in its study: fewer discount offers than expected in the e-mails. “Given the state of the economy we anticipated that incentives would once again be important, but promotion reminders increased slightly to 17%, versus 15% last year,” the report says. “Tactics ranged from a percent off the entire purchase to free shipping with a pre-defined purchasing threshold.”
Comments | 2 Responses
I'm surprised the figures are so low, because transactional (triggered) emails like this get opened more - because customers are half expecting to be contacted - and abandoned cart emails is shown in experiments to increase sales. For any retailers reading, here's a simple "how to" guide to one strategy which has been shown to work. It's much easier than social marketing! http://blog.marketingxd.com/post/5214024783/using-tri gered-emails-to-recover-abandoned-carts
Hmm. It mangled my URL Dx. Try this one instead: http://bit.ly/llh9o2
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