Dive Brief:

• Research from Listrak on shopping cart abandonment email found the percentage of the top 1,000 retailers using the tactic has risen each year from 2011 to 2015, growing from 14.6% to 35.2%.
• In terms of cart abandonment, research from Bizrate found 18% of North American shoppers browsing retailers’ websites with intent to buy end up abandoning their carts.
• Shopping carts offer marketers a number of opportunities, particularly through retargeting email and advertising campaigns based on items left in abandoned carts.

Dive Insight:

Last summer Market Track surveyed consumers who had previously abandoned items in shopping carts and found that 28% did so because they decided they didn’t need the item, 27% decided to conduct more research before making the purchase, and 19% found the item at a lower cost elsewhere.

Cart abandon emails are an effective tactic. Based on performance metrics uncovered by Q3 2015 data from SaleCycle, those emails achieved a 40.5% open rate, 10.3% clickthrough and an impressive 28.7% click-to-purchase rate.

Jet.com ran a campaign last year that illustrated how creative marketers can get with shopping cart campaigns. In the Jet effort it ran a one day marathon that took its users’ shopping carts and created real-time videos about the contents of the cart.