As a data driven guy, I’m constantly amazed at the number of web teams that don’t know their abandonment numbers. There are lots of reasons for this of course, some emotional and some rational.

If you’re tracking conversion accurately, then it’s easy to identify what you’re abandonment rate is, but mostly it’s a big negative number that people don’t want to be reminded of. It is often helpful to think about your conversion process as a funnel, where each step of the process towards your goal is represented by a level in the funnel.

The funnel helps us to focus on key steps in the process to conversion, monitoring effectiveness of each step, and of course graphically showing abandonment between each step. It also allows you to track changes in the conversion rate for each step – this is important since the changes are more important than the absolute numbers themselves.

If your conversion from visit-to-success (however you define success – a registration, sale, application etc) is say 1.2%, then your overall abandonment is 98%. So for every 1000 visitors 988 abandon, which is in itself a pretty depressing thought.

Perhaps a more positive way of looking at abandonment is to view the 988 as low hanging fruit for remarketing. Abandonment follow-up programs are often the single most effective campaigns that you can run.

Forester Research recently published a study into following up abandonment. They found that a timely follow up email (within 20 minutes of the abandon) would generate an 89% open rate (compared with a typical 19% for regular email), and conversion of 26%. These numbers are totally compelling, particularly where you have high lifetime customer value or individually high basket values.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 3:28 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.