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We have all been guilty at one time or another of abandoning our shopping carts. Maybe we couldn’t find our credit card, or the shipping costs shocked us, or we simply lost interest in our purchase.

Whatever the reason for the abandonment, the simple fact is that the vendor has let untapped revenue slip between their fingers.

Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper, The remarketing report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting web behavior to email marketing explains the value in marketing to abandoners, reporting that sending reminder emails to abandoners who do not convert after the first abandoned cart email can boost campaign revenue by up to 33 percent.

But why do website visitors abandon their carts in the first place? A study by PayPal and comScore found that 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks. The average cost of abandoned goods in those shopping carts was $109. In the same study, 46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges was a “very important reason” for ditching their carts.

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It’s that time of the year again, so without further adieu, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite unofficial holiday, Cyber Monday!

Contrary to popular belief, the term “Cyber Monday” was not coined by an army of scotch drinking Japanese robots from the 1980’s, but rather by Shop.org, the prominent digital retail group who sought to create a sister holiday for Black Friday that focused solely on online commerce. Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving and has become more and more recognized over recent years.

While we at Email Responsibly have touched on the topic of Cyber Monday in the past, today it’s time to look forward to see what is in store for Cyber Monday this year.

• In general, we expect to see an overall increase in the number of Cyber Monday and Black Friday mentions (by name) in email campaigns this year. This development comes on the heels of last year’s holiday season in which we witnessed firsthand the increasing usage of the actual term “Cyber Monday” in email campaigns. Furthermore, we expect to see these terms being used earlier, more prevalently and together in the same email – certainly more-so than in prior years.

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Just in time for the holidays, our friends at Experian Marketing Services have produced a valuable new research report packed with useful tips and insight for maximizing holiday marketing strategies this year. So what do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

• Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
  “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
• Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
  “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”

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“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.”
~ David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair

Any reasonably responsible email marketer knows that he or she should, at the bare minimum, follow CAN-SPAM regulations when sending email marketing messages. But, as it turns out, following this and other best practices does pay off in the long run. MarketingSherpa recently published a report called “Email Performance Since 2001,” tracing the relationship between email marketing best practices and email success. In one form or another, MarketingSherpa has asked the basic question about how well email marketing has performed since their first survey in 2001.

This chart highlights performance trends when following Best Practices and when Deviating From Best Practices. The Y Axis shows the efficiency of the email marketing endeavor. The X Axis displays the year.

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The idea of behavioral data affecting email sender reputation first surfaced three years ago, when AOL announced that dormant addresses would factor into sender reputation. AOL explained at the time that spammers create significant numbers of fake email addresses for the sole purpose of driving down complaint percentage rates. Even so, they said that this metric should never affect legitimate emailers who have genuine (human) email recipients.

The next phase of this concept was presented by Microsoft at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Conference in 2008 (PDF). Microsoft’s Anti-Spam General Manager indicated that in the future they would prefer to use recipient behavioral metrics like open-rates in addition to their other spam-related metrics to determine sender reputation. While the idea was still hypothetical at the time, the mere fact that they made these statements to a room full of email senders was worth noting.

Now, we have confirmation from Yahoo! that some of these same metrics that AOL and Microsoft have considered are now implemented into Yahoo!’s anti-spam reputation processes. Of course, we’ll never know exactly what percentage of non-openers or other behavioral factors will impact deliverability, but we can say with certainty that dormant addresses and inactive users are now playing a role in determining your Yahoo! inbox success.

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We all know that email is a great way to drive traffic to your business’s Twitter page. But in my view, the biggest challenge for businesses using Twitter is convincing your customers that your corporate tweets are relevant, interesting, and worthwhile.

So, I was fairly intrigued to read about new restaurants in Boston using Twitter to create buzz around their grand openings. Of course, an event like an opening is inherently interesting to local consumers because of its newsworthy nature. But after the first customers are served, how does the restaurant continue to use Twitter effectively? What would I want them to tell me?

I guess I want to know what’s in it for me. Daily menu specials or entertainment listings might be beneficial to Twitter users. Even better, if we’re talking about a very busy restaurant where I can almost never get a reservation, Twitter would be a great place to share table availability due to last-minute cancellations. (Maybe then I would finally be able to eat one of the tasty daily specials I always read about!)

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In the June 30th eMarketer article entitled “The Sad Tale of Abandon Carts,” a strong case is made for the value of abandoned cart emails. These ReMarketing messages have proven for some time to increase email engagement rates and drive higher revenue per email by 50% or more (compared to standard promotional email).

The eMarketer study cites high shipping costs as the top reason why consumers abandon their shopping carts, as well as the desire to comparison shop, a lack of money, and wanting to search for a coupon.

These findings reinforce my rationale for frequently encouraging clients to create abandon cart campaigns. As I see it, ReMarketing should be a key part of almost any businesses’ email lifecycle program, helping maximize potential revenue during checkout.

When it comes to ReMarketing, there are a few critical rules to remember:

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