Remarketing emails may impact etailing revenue

With shopping carts being abandoned at an alarming rate, many etailers are wondering how to stem the tide. A new case study from ExactTarget indicates that remarketing the items via email could be the answer for which etailers have been looking.

by Kristina Knight

ExactTarget worked with TicketsNow on the study. Researchers found that transactional emails sent after a shopper had abandoned items in a shopping cart actually worked to improve overall company revenueby 30%.

Researchers set up a program that would email the user who abandoned the item within minutes of cart abandonment, reasoning that the user would go ahead and buy the item from a competing resource within a few hours if they weren't contacted. The email messages latched on to that sense of urgency, compelling shoppers to buy the item.

The team came up with four different email messages, each with a different offering with each giving increasing discounts if the user would return to purchase the product.

With the increase in revenue because of the remarketing campaign, TicketsNow is looking at other options of even better customer conversion.

"Our first focus was remarketing through abandonment; now we're looking to pursue new opportunities focused around last-minute event promotions based on website activity," said Mark Hoden, senior vice-president of customer marketing for TicketsNow. "We're going to move further up the transactional funnel to identify characteristics of those shoppers."