Website Conversion Blog
Following up visitor abandons is very profitable business yet it is remarkable how few people actually do this.
In my Measuring Abandonment blog I referred to a Forrester Research study which used ELOAN as a case study. Forrester reports that an immediate follow up to an abandonment (within 30 minutes) of an abandonment would generate a staggering 89% open rate, and conversion of 26%.
This demonstrates what every marketer already knows: response rate is directly related to the relevance to the visitor.
And relevance has several important components, of which these two are the most critical:
Context The communication needs to be relevant to the context that the visitor had in their mind at the point of the abandon. Where were they in the process when they abandoned? What were they looking at?
Timing Relevance is directly proportionate to the time between a follow up and the abandon. We are all bombarded with tens of thousands of messages per day and website visitors attention span is very short. In order to make follow-ups relevant, the timing of the email is critical.
In the ELOAN example, relevance was clearly very high. They got both the context and the timing right, with the net result that their visitors were highly engaged.
Of the two, timing is technically the hardest to get right. Most web analytics data is not readily accessible in real time, so the only option is follow up some time after the abandon. This is sub-optimal, of course.
Email response rates drop off rapidly the longer it takes for you to contact a customer after their abandonment. The numbers are compelling: contacting a customer the next day is three times (3x) less effective that contacting them immediately; if you wait 72 hours, it is seven times (7x) less effective.
It’s obvious why your response rates drop so much – your communication is no longer relevant to the customer.
