Cart abandonment campaign pulls in an extra $38,605

Did you know on average 67.91% of people that initiate a transaction on your website will abandon their cart in the process?

Think about that: you have a customer eagerly ready to purchase, they're going through the checkout and then for some reason they get distracted, lose focus, or procrastinate on their purchase and just abandon their cart.

Think of all that lost revenue.

What would that mean for your business if you could recover just a fraction of those cart abandonments? For most mid to large-size businesses this is a tremendous opportunity to generate a significant amount of revenue, and today I am going to show you a case study on how we generated an extra $38,605 in one month for our client The Vault Pro Scooters.

Step 1: Pick a platform that tracks your data

The first step to creating an effective cart abandonment campaign is making sure you can track your data.

As marketers, we need to measure all the variables to optimize and create an effective marketing campaign. Sometimes marketing campaigns can start off rough and get better as time goes on because we have the data to conclude what is working and what isn't. Data will always give us the opportunity to optimize our campaigns.

With The Vault Pro Scooters, we used CartStack. With this platform, we can easily track conversions, open rates, click-through rates and create split tests to continually improve the campaign.

Step 2: Set up your email campaigns

This can be broken down into three different sub-sections.

Email timing

To keep things simple, we sent a total of three emails. One 20 minutes after abandonment, 24 hours after abandonment and three days after abandonment (we are still testing this).

We noticed that most of the conversions were coming from the first email. The first email is almost like a quick reminder to keep them on track to finish their purchase. You will want an email sent within the first 2 hours of abandonment. There have been multiple studies proving the longer you wait to send the first email conversions will decrease.

The second email was still very effective, but by the time we sent the third email, we noticed the conversions were very minimal.

Email frequency

As mentioned above, we sent a total of three emails. Anything more than that is overkill.

Email template/content

For this, we kept things pretty simple. We included a nice banner image with some lead-in text and then displayed the products/items the customer had left in their cart.

One note: always have a clear call to action in your emails. This is how you lead the customer to the next step. If you don’t make it clear people will not take that next action. In this case, we made sure our CTA stood out so that customers knew what actions to take next. View the template below.

Step 3: Optimize and run split tests

Once we started the campaign the first thing we did was start split testing subject lines. This is the first thing customers are going to see in their inbox, and it’s a quick and easy thing to A/B test.

We noticed by asking questions rather than stating something in the subject line that open rates had increased.

Question-based subject line: Did something go wrong with your order?

Statement subject line: You left items in your cart...

We also started split testing the email content by having the CTAs bigger and bolder. This has helped with click-through rates and conversions on the campaign. As time goes on, we will continually run new split tests with subject lines, content, CTAs, etc. This is how you maximize the revenue from each campaign.

Here is one example of a split test we ran. 

Version A

Version B

The final A/B test results  

Revenue recovered after 30 days 

After one month of running the cart abandonment campaign, we have recovered a total of $38,605 in revenue for The Vault Pro Scooters. This would equate to about a 13% monthly increase in revenue & a 987% ROI over just the first 30 days with the money invested in setting this campaign up. 

If we can repeat this result month over month or even improve on this, we can recover over $450,000 of potential lost revenue. 

Whoever said email marketing isn't effective doesn't know what they are talking about. You just have to use the right strategies!

What you need to do next

If you run an ecommerce business, it is a no-brainer to set up a cart abandonment campaign. Just think of the lost revenue.

If you're not sure how to go about this or don't have the time to set things up on your own, contact us today, and we will be more than happy to set up and maximize a cart abandonment campaign for your business.