On the Web: Rapid-Fire E-Marketing

Almost 60 percent of online retailers don't send emails or do any type of follow-up marketing to shoppers who abandon carts, according to a recent survey. Abandoned cart emails are the most basic and lucrative of a class of emails called "triggered email." Merchants who ignore triggered email are missing out on some easy money — perhaps they had too much money to begin with?

The Good Autopilot
Triggered emails get their name from being "triggered" by something a shopper did. This could be placing an order or, as noted above, leaving a site with products still in the shopping cart. The email should be sent immediately after the trigger from the retailer itself or its email service provider (usually a day or more later). Triggered emails use a standard creative template. Once set up, they're sent automatically, requiring no further marketing intervention.

Triggered emails produce more than 15 times greater sales per email delivered. So why do so many merchants ignore them? It's probably because, on a daily basis, they produce relatively small amounts of revenue.

Using data from the chart below, delivering 100,000 emails in a campaign will produce $15,000 of revenue over a couple days. By comparison, even the lucrative abandoned cart email (ACE) might produce only a few hundred dollars a day. But, that ACE will deliver sales today, tomorrow, the next day, when you're on vacation, out sick or stumped for ideas for your regular email. Furthermore, you can magnify the impact by setting up many different types of triggered emails and sending out series of them, rather than just one. Here's how to get started building your program into a wheelbarrow full of cash.

Getting Started
Build triggered emails to deploy after a shopper has:

• made a purchase;
• signed up for your email program;
• requested a paper catalog (if you have one); and
• abandoned a shopping cart.

In the first three cases, thank the shopper. Then, in all cases, offer a small promotion — a discount or some other type of offer — with a very quick expiration, like three days. Include links to a selection of top performing categories on your site. Edmund Scientific does a great job with these emails.