Personalized Abandoned Cart Emails Drive Significantly Higher Revenue, Engagement

Personalized abandoned cart emails drive significantly higher revenue than promotional mailings, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services.

Experian’s Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report highlights email remarketing best practices and encourages marketers to deliver emails in a three-part series to achieve 50% higher transaction rates.

The report shows that personalized abandoned cart emails reflect 25% higher transaction rates than abandoned cart emails that just linked back to the brand’s website. What’s more, personalized subject lines had 12% higher unique open rates than mailings without personalization.

Shelley Kessler, manager of reporting, analytics and cross-channel marketing for Experian Marketing Services, told Loyalty360 that she isn’t surprised by the fact that personalized abandoned cart emails drive significantly higher revenue than promotional mailings.

“We’re not surprised because folks who have abandoned the cart have already shown interest in the brand’s products,” she explained. “However, the 25% higher transaction rates seen with dynamic abandoned cart emails highlights the important part personalization plays in converting even ‘interested’ customers.”

Here are some other key takeaways from the report:

·      Abandoned cart emails should be delivered in a three-part series: Brands that send second abandoned cart reminders had a 50% increase in abandoned cart revenue compared to just their first abandoned cart mailing. Those sending three mailings saw a 56% increase in revenue, compared to just sending the initial abandoned cart email.

·      Test including an offer: Including an offer in the first abandoned cart mailing boosted transaction rates by 54%. The highest transaction rates for offers were for dollar-off offers (2.05%), followed by free shipping (1.87%) and percent off (1.15%) offers.

The report details overall email marketing trends for the first quarter of 2014 as well as the key performance indicators (KPIs) that shaped the success of email programs over the past two years across seven major verticals: business products and services, catalogers, consumer products and services, media and entertainment, multichannel retailers, publishers, and travel.

Total email volume increased 15.6% in Q1 2014 compared to Q1 2013, but volume declined in Q1 as compared to the previous holiday quarter (Q4 2013). Here are some more key takeaways from the report:

·      Catalogers had the highest gain in volume as 100% of brands increased mailings in Q1 2014.

·      More than half of the multichannel retail brands had statistically significant year-over-year increases in total and unique open rates in Q1 2014.

·      50% of total email opens are occurring on mobile devices. However, this varies by vertical. While 63% of emails from multichannel retailers are opened on a mobile device, mobile opens account for only 22% of email opens for business products and services.

Kessler believes that marketers can significantly impact their respective businesses and customers from data revealed regarding the personalized abandoned cart emails.

“We recommend that marketers use dynamic content (products the customer specifically looked at) in abandon cart emails to optimize the connection with their customers,” she advised. “This approach continues the discussion through a series of abandon cart emails, including an offer (test this) if they have not yet converted, and delivering personalized content (in subject lines, or as an upsell) to maximize the chances for a purchase.”  

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