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Tell the truth. Have you abandoned a shopping cart this week? I’m not talking about the people who leave actual carts in the middle of the parking lot when there’s a corral two feet away. (Though they annoy me, too.) I’m talking about the 70% of shoppers who load items into a virtual cart on a website only to walk away without buying anything.
We all do it. Ironically, I was going to do it today simply to see if the online store I was buying from would offer me an incentive to come back and finish. I decided not to count on it and it’s a good thing. According to an article on eMarketer, only 35% of marketers send out a remarketing email to people who showed an interest but didn’t follow through. Odds are the small site I was buying from wasn’t part of that 35% but they might be in the future.
A survey by SeeWhy says the use of remarketing emails will more than double in the next year. They also show a slight increase in the use of remarketing advertising but the numbers there and for phone marketing are still pretty low.
The remarketing email, though, is a no-brainer. All it needs to be is a canned response — hi, we see you left some items in the shopping cart — with an incentive to return. Free shipping or a 15% coupon code would be enough to entice me back and I believe I’m a typical online shopper.
I don’t have a study at my fingertips, but I would bet that the reason most people don’t follow through on a purchase is because of the bottom line. Take the order I placed today. As I added items to the cart, my shipping cost remained at $4.50 which meant it was advantageous to add more items until I hit the next level, which I assumed to be a $50 sale. But then, when I went to check-out, the site pulled a switcheroo and said the $4.50 shipping was only for media mail and since I had t-shirts in addition to a cd (and mind you the t-shirts were in the cart first) I had to pay $10.00 shipping. Suddenly my bottom line went from 44.95 to 50.00 and even though that’s not a big jump, visually 50.00 felt like a lot more and I almost walked away.
Imagine that I had abandoned the cart, then, a half hour later, received an email saying they’d take 10% off my order if I returned. I’d click that link in a second. Without the email, that would have been a sale lost.
Do you use remarketing emails for your business? If not, what’s stopping you, because that’s money left on the table.
