Getting Started with Email Remarketing

Last time we talked a bit about the reasons behind abandoned carts and realized that there aren’t many weapons available to combat most of its causes. Even potential solutions that look tantalizing (showing S&H and tax on product pages) will likely just push abandonment to an earlier pre-cart point in the process.

If Nothing Else, Read These Two Stats

All is not lost, however. It turns out that remarketing to shoppers who have left full carts behind really can make a difference. Check out these two stats, pulled from the Experian CheetahMail report:

Even the most basic [remarketing] emails (even those that simply link to a website home page) pull in over 31% higher transaction rates compared to bulk promotions — a number that senior management will find difficult to ignore.

Yowza. That fact alone should should make you want to drop everything and put a remarketing program together today. But maybe you’re still skeptical. After all, won’t a remarketing email with a discount offer simply train shoppers to abandon the cart in hopes of a better deal?

Not to worry (from the same report):

Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.

We don’t even have to include a discount offer in the remarketing email to reap its rewards. Not bad.

I’m Convinced. What Else Should I Know?

Before you get started, keep these tips in mind when sending your remarketing emails:

Create a sense of urgency. Subject lines mentioning that an item is about to be out of stock or that the basket is about to expire is likely to garner a better response rate than one simply reminding the user that items are left in his or her cart.

Time it to hit the sweet spot. When is the sweet spot? Conventional wisdom says one  to seven days after the user abandoned the cart. Start by sending it two days after abandonment and then test random groups using different timing to find optimal response rates.

Link directly to the cart. From the report:

The quicker a customer can access their own cart and view the actual products they were interested in, the higher the returns.

How Much Time Will It Take?

Implementing a remarketing program is one of those best practices that can yield great results without much investment. If you’re ready to dip your toes in check out our next post. We provide, in usable form, the world’s simplest php email remarketing script that will get you a functioning remarketing program in a few minutes.

Tags: abandonment, cart-abandonment, Email Marketing, Remarketing

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 8:10 am and is filed under Email Marketing, Remarketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.