Mizzen Media - Best Shopping Cart Abandonment Solutions by Mizzen Media

Online, April 24, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Lately Mizzen Media has been speaking extensively about shopping cart abandonment, a significant and often underappreciated source of lost revenue for most online stores. Today we will review the prudence of sending out the 'follow up email' when a user has not completed a sale, and this article will hopefully illustrate how this technique has the capacity to reliably recover previously lost conversions.

Some ecommerce platforms have the follow up email functionality built in, however many do not and the importance of the follow up email as a sales saving strategy cannot be overstated; according to Mizzen Media it should really be used as standard by any e-commerce site that wants to see an increase in their conversions. To be sure, given that on average 67% of online customers will abandon their cart at some point in the shopping process it only makes good business sense to address this phenomenon in some manner, and the follow-up email provides a simple, inexpensive and highly effective means of successfully targeting this problem.

And Mizzen Media has found that 'timing' is of the essence. We've reviewed a number of studies and found that that follow up emails sent at strategic intervals, namely immediately following abandonment and again 24 hours later, can lead to significant recovery in sales. If you wait too long to follow up by email, the window of opportunity will likely be lost, so the trick is to respond immediately and in quick succession with several versions over several days.

If you are currently overlooking this technique what should be your first steps? Initially, Mizzen Media would suggest you contact your ecommerce provider to see if this functionality is able to be built in. Many do have an initial email after the abandonment, and while just this one is not ideal, it is a good start. The next step would be to either hire a web developer to create this functionality within your site or hire a firm which will take care of this for you as they will have the experience and technology available to provide the highest yield for this lost customers group.

If you want to give this a try in-house, remember that there are a number of ways to approach your follow up email system. For example, you can send follow up emails taking the blame and asking what your company failed to provide to make the sale go through. You can also claim nativity and simply send a follow up email letting them know that their shopping cart is due to expire in the next 24 hours and urge them to move quickly to resume shopping, or you can offer an incentive if they return to your site and shop. There are many strategies you can use, but the moral of the story is to make sure you at least use one of them!