Using Automated Direct Mail for Abandoned Baskets

Research Suggests

According to the latest research, the vast majority of eCommerce carts are abandoned:

“The average shopping cart abandonment rate across all industries is 79.8%. In 2021, fashion had the third-highest cart abandonment rate of 88.57%”

^{(*Source: Feb 2022, Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics. https://fashiondiscounts.uk › Blog)}

This presents brands with a huge retention opportunity, yet many marketers struggle to recover these sales that were so close. Many major retailers, like GAP, fail to even send cart abandonment emails, essentially leaving money on the table.

Most eCommerce brands these days have a digital strategy for following up with customers who abandon their shopping carts, and it’s primarily left to email to try and convert these customers. The downside of this is that often these emails do not get cut through with the customer, they may go into their spam folders or just missed in the 100’s of emails most people receive on a daily basis, representing a huge missed opportunity. In fact, a recent report from Klaviyo reveals that businesses using basket recovery emails only earn back 3%–14% of lost sales, with an average revenue per recipient dropping to a derisory £4.77. Not great reading so far for eCommerce brands & retailers.

There is another way...

Using DIRECT MAIL for Abandoned Baskets

In addition to brands’ Abandoned Basket email strategy, smart marketers are harnessing the power of Direct Mail to claw back much larger sums of Abandoned Basket revenue.

How Does It Work?

An Automated Direct mail platform like ZAP~POST offers the ability to have a connection to the Brands CRM or CDP. So, in a similar way to an email marketing system integrating to an eCommerce platform with some logic that drives the abandoned email send, a similar workflow can be created to trigger a piece of Direct Mail:

Obviously, the brand needs to have collected the customer's postal address and this is easy to do and quite standard for most online checkout processes these days. The majority of eCommerce platforms have a 2 or three 3 step checkout process. Typically the first step collects the customer’s email and then their postal and or shipping address information. Brands that incorporate the address data collection process as early on in their checkout and signup process as possible give themselves a real advantage to utilise Direct Mail for follow-up. To make it less frictionless, utilising Address autocomplete, like the service provided by Google Places, can be a real usability win, especially if when the customer is filling out an address on a small screen, or struggling to remember the correct spelling of a complicated street name.

^{(*For more tips for including Address data collection in your website, this is a great article from Shopify: https://ux.shopify.com/designing-address-forms-for-everyone-everywhere-f481f6baf513)}

Why is Direct Mail more effective?

Direct mail is a physical and tactical method of marketing. When a full-colour, personalised postcard mailer lands on the door mat with the customer's name on it from a brand they love, with a compelling marketing message or offer based on their recent activity online, they can’t help look at it.

Could You?

Ask yourself - does an email give you that same sense of feeling a little bit special and loved by the brand? Probably not. In this sense, you get a 100% ‘open rate’ from a Direct Mail piece. In addition, on average Direct Mail will stay around the home for a good few days (MarketReach research says that on average it can be up to 10 days!) so you’re also getting constant brand recognition from other members of the household. Although it’s a fast-growing medium, there are currently far fewer brands using this marketing method, since the majority of brands are blindly relying on email marketing alone. This means that direct mail marketing is perceived as a more special and exclusive piece of communication by the recipient and therefore helps with not only conversion but also brand loyalty and retention.

Is there proof this works?

Yes, lots. One such example is a recent test case which was instigated by an Automated Direct Mail company for a well-known large eCommerce brand. The results of the test were overwhelmingly positive.

• The conversion rate from the direct mail piece was 113.5% of the email retargeting conversion.

• Average order value for abandoned cart conversions from direct mail respondents in the test group was almost exactly the same as those in the control group, i.e. those who converted from the initial retargeting emails.

The respondents to the direct mail were known customers that weren’t responding to retargeting emails. The results of both the email and Direct Mail activities used in combination amounted to more than double the result of the email retargeting alone (measured as additional sales from converted abandoned baskets).

^{(*Source: SG360 - US Marketing Agency)}

The Bottom Line

Essentially an abandoned basket is lost revenue from an expressed interest, and for many companies, Direct Mail could be the answer to converting those so ‘near, yet so far’ purchases to convert. Furthermore, certain parameters can be set that make the ROI even more compelling such as only sending a Direct Mail piece if the value of the basket is at a certain threshold or only sending a printed mailer if there has been no response to an initial email within 24 or 48 hours - all possible through the brands CDP in conjunction with our ZAP~POST platform - then the numbers really do start to stack up.

Take out a trial today and test how ZAP~POST can help your Direct Mail Abandoned basket marketing.