In the two weeks since Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online sales volumes have remained healthy, and the shopping cart abandonment rate steadied down to more usual levels, hovering around 65 percent. But these headlines mask an underlying trend to extensive discounting in order to get the volumes.

Particularly in the ecommerce sector, there’s lots of focus right now on optimizing the website conversion in anticipation of the impending holiday season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Following up visitor abandons is very profitable business yet it is remarkable how few people actually do this.
 
In my Measuring Abandonment blog I referred to a Forrester Research study which used ELOAN as a case study. Forrester reports that an immediate follow up to an abandonment (within 30 minutes) of an abandonment would generate a staggering 89% open rate, and conversion of 26%.
 
This demonstrates what every marketer already knows: response rate is directly related to the relevance to the visitor.

When you think about an email service provider (ESP), you tend to think about large batch based email blasts, customer promotions and newsletters that will drive visitors to websites as targeted traffic. We find ESPs could play a critical role is tackling website, checkout and/or shopping cart abandonment as well.

Research by the eTailing group shows that the top tactic in driving website conversion for 2009 is targeted email.