The Hypothesis
Without intent data, retailers often treat all basket abandonments the same. This leads to ineffective email strategies.
If a retailer decides to send basket abandonment emails, they tend to be triggered by any abandoned basket and push for the sale. But when a visitor abandons their basket, it doesn’t always mean a lost sale. People leave their baskets for various reasons, and understanding their intent can help tailor follow-up messages.
Some might still be browsing, while others may have a high intent to buy and a high likelihood of returning. In both these instances (and countless others) a generic follow-up email focused on immediate conversion fails to help. These are all missed opportunities, even if intent to purchase is lower than hoped.
With intent data, businesses can send more targeted and effective emails to those who abandon their baskets. This ensures messages are relevant to the customer’s current buying stage and mindset. It makes it possible to only send discounts, or abandonment emails themselves, to a customer when they may make a difference.
This subtle tweak can turn basket abandonment emails into more than a conversion tool for the minority of high intent customers. It can turn them into a nurturing or persuasive tactic for those who aren’t quite ready to buy.
The Tech You’ll Need
- A CRM or ESP that can use basket abandons as an email trigger and allows custom data (on intent) to be passed to customer profiles
- Made With Intent or an alternative way of capturing predictive data and passing it to your CRM/ESP
Using this tech together allows for precise (but simple) segmentation of emails using customer intent. Sending an email based on the proximity to purchase then becomes as simple as using any other list or attribute.
Setting This Up
With the Made With Intent platform, you can add intent data to all your emails, including basket abandonment messages. This walkthrough shows how.
The Target Segments
This play is relevant to customers who abandon their baskets for various reasons. Referring to our segmentation framework based on intent, the below segments are the most likely matches.
Basket Abandoners
This segment is made up of customers who, prior to abandoning their basket, had items within it. They would have had a high intent to exit with a low likelihood of returning to site.
As we’re talking abandonment emails here, they will have likely left the site. They aren’t expected to return as it stands, so how can you draw them back to their planned purchase? Appropriate tactics for your follow up emails here would be to send more typical reminder emails with a discount code to incentivise purchase.
Basket Pausers
Basket Pausers are people who build a basket and show medium to high purchase intent but decreasing momentum.
The key difference to the Basket Abandoner segment is not just the above differences in intent to purchase and exit (which has likely happened to both in the case of basket abandonment emails). It is also in their steady or high intent to return, suggesting they will come back to the site. With this in mind, it may be more appropriate to send emails focused on the benefits of the items in their basket without offering a discount.
The Impact
“In physical retail you've got teams who pick up the subtle subconscious cues from a visitor - Intent is the closest we can get to that for ecommerce.”
Nik Fletcher, Head of Digital Experience, Rapha
How Rapha drove over £110k incremental revenue by focusing their abandonment emails
Rapha decided they wanted to use intent signals to only re-engage shoppers who left the site at a medium and high intent.
Without intent, Rapha would send an email to any customer who abandoned their journey. The only dependency was if Rapha had their details as well as permission to email them. If they do, then the customer would get an email designed to persuade them to purchase.
Using Made With Intent, Rapha could focus solely on people who demonstrated a medium to high level of intent to purchase, and still abandoned. By emailing these customers with a more compelling message and reminder of the product, it was 15% more impactful than just sending this email to everyone. It also protected their all important opt out rate, simply by being more appropriate.
Rapha saw £110k incremental revenue from customers who abandoned their purchase, but demonstrated a level of intent. In addition, this drove just a 0.04% unsubscription rate vs typical benchmark of 0.5%. With a really strong click through rate of 8.3%, the low unsubscribes weren’t simply a result of weak interaction.
By adjusting basket abandonment emails - what you send and whether you send them - based on customer intent, retailers can be more effective. More appropriateness not only drives revenue, but protects margin and email opt outs.
Interested in other ways you can use intent data in ecommerce? Check out more of the plays in our playbook, or take a closer look at how Made With Intent can help you add post-visit intent to your targeting.
