Why Is A Cart Abandonment Email Series More Effective Than A Single Email?

Nothing is more disheartening than spending a huge sum of money on driving traffic to your website and seeing three fourth of visitors abandoning their carts. Adding an item to the cart is a signal of being interested in that product, but a major portion of the buyers don’t complete their purchase going for a number of reasons. Sometimes people find the shipping rates too high, while some checkout without making a purchase just because the process took too long. Cart abandonment emails help you fix this problem as they bring back up to one-third of the revenue. But should you send a single email for cart abandonment or a series of emails? I will answer this question and discuss the abandoned cart email series in this article. Dive in deeper to know more on the topic and learn how you can fix your leaking bucket.

Understanding The Psychology Of Abandoning Carts

A large chunk of the shoppers is serious about making the purchase but leave midway due to a variety of reasons. Some of them may not be comfortable with the total price after adding shipping costs, while others may consider surfing other sites to see if they can get better deals. In the below graph, you can see a variety of reasons that lead to cart abandonment during checkout:

You can win back a significant portion of the leaked revenue as your visitors are most likely to complete the purchase, if given the opportunity of getting the best deal that suits their preferences. For this, your experienced email developers and marketers need to address their concerns individually using personalization and reach out to them at a time when they are most likely to have conducted enough research and made their mind to make a purchase. The below graph shows conversion rates of abandoned cart emails:

The study on cart abandonment from Rejoiner shows that half of the revenue comes from the first message sent while the other half comes through subsequent communication. Nonetheless, sending a one-off message will still leave your bucket leaking despite the fact that you could have converted those visitors.

Why Abandoned Cart Series Is Preferred Over Single Messages

As opposed to normal marketing and promotional emails, cart abandonment emails show a significantly higher open rate of 45%. The click-through rate also sits at 21%, making them highly recommended to fix your leaking bucket. On the other hand, 306.4 billion emails are received on a daily basis, which translates to 121 messages a day for every person. If you are looking forward to sending only one message, it may get buried down under all other messages.

The chances are that your competitors might end up closing the sale due to this reason. On the other hand, sending out a series of targeted messages has a better chance of getting noticed. By sending three cart abandonment emails, you can fetch 69% more orders as compared to one-off emails. Therefore it is indeed necessary to launch an automated cart abandonment email series to make the most out of the situation.

In the next section, I will discuss how you can sequence your messages to get maximum benefits.

How To Schedule Cart Abandonment Email Series

For the scheduling part, I recommend the following tips:

• Send the first message in 10 minutes to 1 hour timeframe.

Usually, the first message is a reminder that shows the product clearly and asks the reader to complete their purchase in case they forgot or left due to any other reason.

• Send the second message after one or two days.

In your second message, you can be more specific about the benefits and features of your product to clear any fog. You can also start giving some value editions at this stage.

• Send the third message after five to seven days.

The third mail is generally your final attempt to close the deal, and it involves further use of value additions to attract buyers.

Beyond the third email, your messages will start looking spammy, and you may avoid including the fourth message in your email automation workflow.

If your item is not costly, you can take early follow-ups as your customers wouldn’t need much time to make their minds. On the other hand, pricey items require a lot of thought process before a buyer puts his hands in his pocket. You can schedule your emails based on these general facts to get the best results.

Wrap Up

I have covered a lot of statistics in this article to help you understand how cart abandonment series work and why you need to send a series of messages instead of a single email. Leveraging a cart abandonment email series is more effective in terms of generating revenue, and it also ensures that you don’t leave money on the table simply because you didn’t contact customers who were likely to buy from you. I hope you find this article insightful for your ecommerce store.

Author Bio

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing full service email marketing agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.