A new report by the e-tailing group reported in Online Marketing Startegies and Tactics notes that twenty percent of their EG100 merchants sent abandonment emails during the fourth quarter of 2009, a 6 percent increase over last year. The average time taken to follow was an appalling 6.15 days.

This parallels research by SeeWhy which found that only sixteen percent currently follow up on abandoned shopping carts within one week. Only 1 percent follow up in real time, and six percent within an hour.

In the SeeWhy research we also asked those ecommerce executives why they don’t follow up – after all the business case is pretty clear cut. The number one reason was that it was too manual and there was no automated way of doing it. An average follow up time of 6.15 confirms this: it has to be manual to take this long.

And what a massive missed opportunity.

Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that 90% of ecommerce leads go cold within one hour. But in order to follow up in real time, you need to automate the process. Many studies have demonstrated this as best practice – in fact a real time response will generate somewhere between two and three times the sales of one only 24 hours later.

No surprise then that the e-tailing group noted on their checklist that ecommerce teams need to ‘Understand (their)current technology’s ability to trigger abandonment emails’

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