Abandoned cart e-mail. Does it even work?

VAt InteliMail, we sometimes have clients (especially those who are new to InteliMail) inquiring about the abandoned cart e-mail. It goes without saying that our clients are keeping an eye on their competitors, and if they see something they deem usable, they want to incorporate it into their business as well. That's pretty normal...

Our answer to the abandoned cart e-mail is straightforward:

ŽWe have never planned offering the abandoned cart e-mail and we are not changing our mind.
And here is why :-)

What is the abandoned cart e-mail anyway?

An e-shop customer visits the website, clicks on a few products, adds something to their cart, and then closes the browser and leaves. If the e-shop or e-mail platform tracks the customer's behaviour and has some trigger or scenario set up, it can reach the customer by e-mail, which is fine.

But the problem is how most (I guess 99%) of e-shops and e-mail platforms do it.

Problem No.1:

The customer receives an e-mail in their inbox: “Hello, you forgot something in your cart”, or something along these lines.

Oh, but wait... let's be honest. How many times have you forgotten to complete an order in an e-shop/anything in your cart? No one in their sound mind would simply forget to complete the order during the purchasing process. It's like grocery shopping. Imagine filling your shopping cart, leaving it in front of the checkout and arriving home with empty bags :-) The abandoned cart e-mail kind of looks like the e-store is making fun of the customer. In reality, the customer most probably had another reason for not completing the order. For example, they were searching a competitor's site for a better price. If the abandoned cart e-mail "works", in the vast majority of cases it is only because that particular customer would have returned to the e-shop and completed the order anyway.

Problem No.2:

E-mail content. The customer sees exactly the products they added to their cart. In the best case, an alternative product (which very few people can pick straight away). Problem is that such e-mail is sent to the customer repeatedly, arrives with a delay of several days, or even after the purchase has been made (we all know such scenarios). If the customer did not buy the product, even after receiving the abandoned cart e-mail, there was obviously a reason for it and there is no point in bothering the customer with this product anymore.

How it’s done at InteliMail?

Besides add-to-carts, InteliMail automatically detects the customer's interest in a certain product or products. A customer with relevant interest is switched to remarketing mode by InteliMail. In this mode, InteliMail soon contacts the customer with e-mails offering the products of interest including suitable alternatives. The e-mails are sent in a series over a number of days, in a non-intrusive way and with carefully prepared content. This process is either terminated automatically or by the customer's choice. The remarketing process is adjusted each time according to the customer's interest, so that the customer never receives an e-mail with the product twice in a given series.

What are the results of InteliMail?

InteliMail remarketing on a sample of 1100 sent e-mails

Opens: 90% and Unique opens: 50%
Many clients open e-mails repeatedly (because they contain interesting products). The open rates are high because the customers have been in contact with the e-shop and the e-mail arrived at the time InteliMail determined to be most relevant.

Click-throughs: 17% and Unique click-throughs: 9%
Once a customer clicks through, they do so 2 times on the average (again, because of interesting products)

Click-throughs after opens: 19%
TAlmost one in five customers will click through to the e-shop.

Orders received: 27 amounting to: 1.927 €
Overall conversion to number of e-mails sent: 2,45%

Some interesting facts

• after opening an e-mail and clicking through to the e-shop the order was completed by: 26% of customers.
• 30% of customers purchased one or more products that were included in the e-mail series.
• one such remarketing e-mail sent earned the client 1,75 €.

PS: We leave it to the reader to draw conclusions and evaluate results :-)