eBook - Silverpop

A Forrester study of a financial services provider
measuring loan-application abandonment
found the response rate hit a high of
89 percent on messages sent immediately
after abandonment but fell to below 20
percent three days later.
• Product Inclusion. Test whether to include
the actual products your customer left in
the cart or just use a generic reminder to
come back and purchase them. Always
link directly to the cart, however.
• Incentives. Incentives to return aren’t always
necessary if shoppers abandoned for
technical reasons or they got interrupted.
Incentives and discounts clearly will
increase conversion rates, but test different
types and levels of offers against no
incentives to find the optimum balance of
revenue and margins.
Also, many consumers are waking up to cart
abandonment offers and are seeking these
additional discounts. Consider holding back
discounts to those customers who show
signs of abandonment discount abuse.
• Message Design. Cart-abandonment
emails might seem creepy or an invasion
of privacy to some shoppers, even though
they’re already your email customers.
Reassure recipients you are contacting
them as a service, not just hounding them
to buy. Include applicable terms such as
duration (how long they have to complete
the purchase).
Drive customer service, too. Include
customer-support contact information (email
links, live support or phone numbers) to allow
shoppers to report technical problems with
the sites or issues they had with the product
or your checkout process.
As with any transactional email, make
sure your marketing team owns them and
designs them to reflect email best practices
(branding, rendering, usability, great content
and deliverability).
An effective remarketing program, implemented
using email and Web best practices, could help
you recover up to 25 percent to 50 percent of
your abandoned shopping carts.
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