Cart Abandonment & Email Marketing Results | eCommerceFuel

Andrew Youderian • July 22, 2013

A few months ago, I shared our plan to implement email marketing with promises to share how things went … and the results are in! I’m happy to report with the help of Klaviyo and Rejoiner we were able to generate 10.5% of our overall sales from email marketing in June.

Email Marketing with Klaviyo

In terms of ramp-up over the last three months, here’s how email marketing as a percent of sales broke down:

% of Revenue Generated via Email

Simply kickstarting our email marketing program instantly gave us an 8% boost to revenue.  Not bad!

As discussed in the previous post, we segmented our email marketing efforts into different trackable email campaigns. These included everything from “newsletter” emails, which are broad product sales sent to our entire list, to “enhancement” messages, which are up-sells for a specific item a customer had purchased.

Here’s which message types did best:

Far and away, our traditional sale/newsletter emails (the “newsletter” segment) brought in the most revenue.  Why?  Because we didn’t segment customers for these messages, they reached everyone on our mailing list.  They also went out the most frequently (once every week or two), and so ended up in front of customers more often.

The effectiveness of these emails backs up what Ed Hallen said in our discussion on email marketing: Just getting started is the most important thing.  Yes, segmentation is incredibly powerful, and Klaviyo (the service we’re using) has some amazing features along those lines.  But for the quickest bang for the buck, it’s hard to beat simply sending out regular marketing messages to your list.

Our “newsletter” style emails generally took a similar format.  We’d chat with our suppliers and see what products they’d be willing to offer for sale that week.  If we were able to get something at a great price, we’d feature that as a special.  Other times, we’d simply pick a popular product to offer as the weekly deal and take a smaller margin.  An example of our weekly email newsletter can be seen below:

We’re also using Klaviyo’s powerful segmentation function to create customized follow-up marketing messages.  For example, VIP customers who have placed numerous orders will automatically get sent a discount coupon.  And some customers are automatically sent up-sell emails with accessories related to the products they’ve purchased.

But we still have a lot of work ahead of us to move the needle from the 10% of revenue range up to the 15% or even 20%.  The first 10% was the easiest, as it largely consisted of just getting a basic program in place.

To earn that additional revenue, we’ll need to get smart and targeted with our customer segmentation and follow-up campaigns.  This will require building out lots of highly specialized campaigns that may not be triggered as often as our newsletters but will convert at a (hopefully) much higher rate.

Retargeting with Rejoiner

The majority of our email revenues were generated by emailing existing customers, but we also generated a portion of that 10.5% of revenue by emailing customers who had abandoned their shopping carts.  Using cart abandonment service Rejoiner, customers who abandoned their carts automatically received three messages:

1.  An email reminding them about the cart

2. A second email asking them to finish their purchase

3.  A final email offering a discount to complete their purchase

Retargeting Results

We implemented our cart abandonment follow-ups before we kickstarted our email campaign in April, but it’s so closely related that I decided to bundle the two together in this post.  So how did the abandonment campaign perform?

Overall, we were able to recover between 3% and 11% of the abandoned carts each month.  Not too bad, but not nearly as high as the 15% average that Rejoiner co-founder Mike Arsenault sees on average.

In an attempt to increase open rates, we changed the sender’s name from “Right Channel Radios” to the name of our sales manager, Pat.  The timing of this change can be seen with the “*” next to April in the chart.  You’ll notice that it made a big difference, at least in the short term; open rates increased more than 50% and recoveries doubled!  It appears the old saying, “People like getting emails from other people, not companies,” has merit.

But over the next few months, both open rates and recoveries fell, and I’m not sure why this is.  One idea is that as we scaled up our newsletter marketing in April to a large volume of people, inevitably more people hit the “delete” and “spam” buttons.  I think it’s possible that this may have hurt our deliverability with all our messages and brought down our cart abandonment levels as well.  I’m still looking into the issue, and it could be something else entirely.

Overall, our cart abandonment emails made up just under 2% of our total revenues generated from email marketing for the quarter.  Not bad at all for a set-it-and-forget-it system.

Next Steps & Questions

Email marketing is an important component of any eCommerce marketing plan. In the next three months, we’ll be working to really build out our segmented email marketing campaigns and optimize our abandonment recovery emails to get those close to the 10% to 15% average.  I’ll be excited to share our results with you come October!

Until then, I’m happy to answer any questions you may have – just leave them in the comments section below.

Photo by purplemattfish

Post by Andrew Youderian

Andrew is the founder of eCommerceFuel and has been building eCommerce businesses ever since gleefully leaving the corporate world in 2008.  Join him and 1,000+ vetted 7- and 8-figure store owners inside the eCommerceFuel Community.