Marketing Experiments discusses ways that email can help you generate sales from abandoned shopping carts.

Whatever the reasons, many prospective customers who start the shopping cart process abandon it before they are finished. One way to try to recover these "lost" sales is to collect people's email addresses just before the shopping cart process begins, and then email them when and if they don't complete the purchase.

With one of our research partners we tested a series of email messages in an attempt to recover abandoned orders for a large online service provider, which we will refer to as Company A.

The details of the test were as follows:

• Company A used a recurring monthly subscription model. 
• They offered a free 30-day trial to encourage sign-ups. They were confident that once someone had tried their service, he or she would continue to subscribe after the trial period. 
• Step 1 of the company's order form included an email sign-up. This approach was used because many potential customers would "back out" when they realized a credit card number was required to initiate the free trial. 
• We decided upon a three-part email campaign to re-capture lost sales. 
• For six months, we tested this sequence of three automated emails, sent to these prospects over a period of four to seven days.
  

Here were the results of the test campaign:
 

What You Need to Understand: Over a six-month period, Company A was able to recover more than 4,000 lost sales.
Beyond the nominal cost of sending the email, these 4,000 orders were obtained without any additional marketing costs, which dramatically increases yield-per-visit and return-on-investment. It also lowers cost-per-acquisition.

In addition, we not only saved the sale, but we also turned a prospect into a customer... thereby opening the door for future sales.

You'll find the full set of research results, plus the text of the emails we used, in our Shopping Cart Recovery Test Brief. The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.