An effective way to recapture the potential customer who has abandoned their shopping cart is to send them a reminder email. Don’t do it right away. JupiterResearch recommends waiting at least 24 hours. I’d wait a few days. In the email show a photo of each item along with the product name, price, etc. just like you (hopefully) do on your View Cart page. Sweeten the deal, particularly if the person appears to be new-to-file, by offering a discount or incentive to complete their purchase. If you’re too predictable about it, customers may figure out what you’re doing and purposefully abandon their cart in anticipation of a discount. The last thing you want is this listed as a discount on coupon codes sites like dealnews.com. You may wish to send several more reminder emails spaced out over time after the initial one, continuing to up the ante with more irresistable offers with each successive email until you finally give up on them. PETCO’s reminder emails, sent 3 days after the cart is abandoned, included the abandoned product as the main feature along with cross-sells to three other high-margin items; these program-centric emails achieved a 852% increase in clickthrough rate and 171% increase in conversion rate over the company’s previous campaign-centric emails (as reported by MediaPost).

Of course it’s hard to send a reminder email if you don’t have the shopper’s email address. If the shopper is not a previous customer or is unidentified, have them identify himself/herself as early on in the ordering process as possible. In other words, have them provide their contact details / create an account / login (as an existing account holder) as one of the first steps of the checkout. Note that user accounts are an important feature for ease of repeat ordering and checking on order status. Through the use of cookies you should be able to also identify many of your returning shoppers without them logging in first.

This kinda goes without saying… If you’re going to provide a means for a shopper to be reminded of their cart contents, you’ll need to allow shoppers to add items to their “shopping cart” then leave that cart for extended periods of time and still have it remain intact. I’d keep their cart alive for 90 days or more. Sometimes shoppers will purposefully want to save their cart and return later to it. Consider having a “save my cart for later” option and/or “move items to wishlist” type feature to better cater to these people’s needs.

Received any shopping cart reminder emails recently? If so, were they any good? Is there a merchant you’d like to highlight who does this “recapturing” exceptionally well? Post a comment and let me know.