The latest best practice tips given by Constant Contact, Rejoiner, Omnisend, BigCommerce, Sellbrite, Twillio, and virtually everybody else is to send your first abandoned cart email within 30 mins to 1 hour of the cart abandonment event and send your last message at the three day mark, but is that really the best messaging timing for each individual user to optimize conversions?

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...of course not.

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Take the example of someone who wants to go home and discuss a purchase with their spouse — For them, a delay of 24-48 hours might be a better choice, and a message within 30 minutes would be incredibly annoying.

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Without further ado, here’s the data we generated from a large eCommerce app we’re currently working with (You can see the probability of purchase on the vertical axis and the hours between view and purchase on the horizontal axis).

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As expected, the graph goes down and to the right (The longer it’s been since someone viewed an item, the less likely they are to buy it), but what’s more interesting is what happens before that 0% probability point.

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  • The bold, black line towards the bottom is when no notifications are sent. There’s only a 0.35% probability that someone will come back and purchase the item on their own after one days’ time, which is pretty crappy.

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  • The lowest grey lines (solid and dashed) represent the standard and generic marketing and lifecycle “blast” notifications that this app is sending through Braze. Surprisingly, after two days, these messages perform WORSE than not sending any messages at all!

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  • The red lines (solid and dashed) are general messages with timing and content optimized by Aampe, but they don’t contain any specific item recommendations. These consistently outperform non-Aampe-optimized messages, but not by much (especially after four days).

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  • Sending a message pointing to a specific item (even if it’s not the exact item the user abandoned) was more effective (starting at a .52% probability and staying consistently more effective than the rest of the strategies all the way out to the seven-day mark.)

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  • …but what was most effective by far (almost 3x as effective as standard lifecycle messaging) was sending a message about the specific item that was viewed, with Aampe-optimized timing and tone —It was STILL converting at 0.35% a full 3.5 days after the product was viewed! 😱

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So, why is this important?

Well, while these percentages look small, they accounted for over $10M in sales (that’s real dollars).

Plus, as order frequency has been shown to have over 2x the impact on growth as compared to average order volume, each of these additional incremental orders adds to the probability of converting one of your average users into a power user.

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Abandoned cart timing is key

Clearly, the content of your messaging has a substantial impact on encouraging additional purchases, but the messaging timing is equally important — You can't just send messaging to each user at a fixed cadence.

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It just doesn't work.

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(...We have more data on that here.)

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Sending abandoned cart messages at 30 minutes will annoy some users, and not sending messaging after three days means you're missing out on MILLIONS in sales.

The trick is finding when someone is most likely to respond to a message and sending them the abandoned cart message at that time.

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...and that's exactly what Aampe does.

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‍Cover image by FreePik.com