A case study published in MarketingSherpa recently illustrates how to convert a percentage of shoppers who abandon your shopping cart.

Diapers.com set up a system whereby an email was sent to any registered user who abandoned their cart. The email went out at least 24 hours AFTER abandonment and featured the items left in the cart.

Why the wait? Many of Diapers.com’s customers ordered online late at night. The company reasoned that it was better to give these customers some space before contacting them again.

The emails were:

personalized, using the customer’s first name;

included three text paragraphs in order to get the key message to readers who might have images turned off in their email program; and

included a “View Cart” hotlink to allow customers to click through and complete the purchase.

As a result of this approach…

Diapers.com’s conversion rate was 129 percent higher than that achieved by any previous marketing campaign; and

The emails sent after abandonment made up 10.4 percent of the total revenue from Diapers.com’s email marketing program despite constituting just 2.7 percent of the total volume sent.

We have long advised clients to specifically follow up on customers who abandon their shopping carts. We also do this for our own sites and have been exceptionally pleased with the business we’ve received from customers who, for a range of reasons, didn’t complete their original order. (Hint: it’s not necessarily because they’ve changed their mind about buying from you…)

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Focusing on Referrals, Abandons Helps Eretailer Grow List, Bolster Sales”, MarketingSherpa, September 10, 2008

One of the Internet marketing forums I occasionally frequent - Michel Fortin’s Copywriters Board - currently includes a thread in which John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2 salesletter is being discussed.

Unfortunately, some of the criticism being directed John’s way is, frankly, misguided.

In particular, one of the posters made the comment that a salesletter should stand on its own merits.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Sure, if you are teaching someone how to write good copy, a salesletter should stand on its own merits in the sense that it should reflect “best practice”. It should, perhaps, embody all the classic “rules” of strong, persuasive copy.

But in the real world, a salesletter is ONE component of a multi-faceted and interrelated marketing campaign. It should be constructed within the context of - not independently from - that marketing campaign.

So, rather than reflect “best practice” or have all the boxes ticked - e.g. “got pre-head (tick), got bold headline (tick), got sub-head (tick), got testimonials (tick), got product graphic (tick), got johnson box (tick),” etc - the salesletter should simply be built to SELL in the most effective manner. And what is most effective will depend enormously on who the target market is, what their wants and expectations are, what they already know, how they came to be reading the salesletter, and so on.

In short, if copy is king. Context is EMPER0R.

On this basis, a salesletter that works well with PPC traffic… may not work as well with traffic from endorsed mailings… and vice versa. A salesletter that works well for a “no name” marketer… may not work well for a high profile marketer such as John Reese… and vice versa.

So, no, a real-world salesletter should NEVER stand on its own merits. For maximum effectiveness, it should ALWAYS be a function of the overall marketing campaign.

Source: “Let’s talk about Traffic Secrets 2 copy”, The Copywriters Board, July 16, 2008