Cart abandonment is a problem that every online retailer faces. A large number of businesses, however, seem to be content leaving these carts abandoned, even though they could turn many of them into sales with some simple automated email responses.
A recent study found that automated follow-up emails produced open rates of more than 40%. This, needless to say, is quite impressive. Those open rates also translated into significant sales, which brought in a lot of money. About 2.05% of people who got the email reminders ended up buying the products.
The emails to remind people of their carts are also very easy to produce since much of the content will simply be a reminder of the items that they were thinking about buying.
Fayez Mohamood, the CEO of Bluecore, commented on the report saying, “This year a primary takeaway was how consistently marketers prioritize what their customers are searching for and abandoning on their commerce sites, and how little priority they give to the products they’re engaging with and buying.”
The one potential risk to this type of email is that it does have a higher than normal unsubscribe rate. The cart abandonment emails generated a .12% unsubscribe rate, which is quite a bit higher than the .040% unsubscribe rate for emails sent after a purchase. Balancing when, and how many, of any type of email is going to be very important.