A colleague asked me to have lunch with one of her clients last week to discuss marketing automation tactics, specifically email automation. This client is in the manufacturing space and runs a growing ecommerce store.

When it comes to digital strategy, I use data to inform my decisions (You can read my post about this here). This includes both hard and soft data. With a lot of marketing strategies the concepts are often the same, but the specifics need to be tweaked.

As lunch wrapped up, I agreed to follow up with suggested next steps for how I’d recommend implementing what we discussed. I thought I’d share some of my notes around abandoned cart automation here.

People are often surprised that the percentage of abandoned shopping carts is between 50% – 80%.  In theory, you’d expect this to be much lower. How often does someone leave their full cart at the register without buying anything in a physical store?

I believe the best way to combat this is to understand why abandoned carts happen. Abandoned cart automation allows brands to have a positive interaction with users after they provide some information.

I recommend a multiple email approach. With the client I mentioned above it recommended 3 emails.

The first email

The first email’s important because the target is consumers who had a technical problem or got distracted. This email is pretty straight forward. It’s a reminder that their order did not get placed and lets them know what was in their cart.

With one client who sends this email 5 minutes after the cart is abandoned, we’ve seen nearly a 6% conversion rate.

The second email

The second email in the flow has a different purpose. It’s targetting consumers who likely are shopping around. They may have gone through the process to get the full price. This email needs to include more information about why the consumer should buy from your experience. It should apply some pressure and start the clock on the customer’s cart expiring. This is important because it adds a level of immediacy to the purchase.

I’ve had success with this email when it comes within the same day as the abandoned cart, but enough time has passed that the consumer has had time to do their research. With some clients, I’ve seen a conversion rate with this over more than 2% when the email is sent 6 – 8 hours after the cart is abandoned.

The third email

This email targets consumers who are the most unsure. It will probably have the lowest conversion rate. This goal of this email is to give users one more chance to purchase before their cart expires. This email often signifies the end of this micro interaction with the user, so it’s important that it provides future value. Maybe that future will be to purchase the items they added to their cart this time or the next time they’re looking for a similar item.

I like sending this email 24 hours after the first abandoned cart email.

Email automation’s an important part of any successful ecommerce experience. Abandoned cart emails are just one part. It’s often a great place to start and measure impact as there can be a huge potential upside.