• by Jess Nelson , December 5, 2017

Only one out of four online transactions resulted in a purchase Thanksgiving weekend according to a Barilliance study, but triggered email campaigns may have saved some of those lost sessions.

Barilliance, a retail personalization company based in Tel Aviv, tracked 18 million visits to retail websites between November 24 and November 27 to investigate cart abandonment rates by both geography and device.

The United States had the highest cart abandonment rate during the study’s time period with 74.5% of carts being abandoned, two percentage points above the 72.5% of global carts abandonment over Black Friday weekend. Spain had the lowest overall cart abandonment at 70%.

Transactions on mobile devices are more likely to result in an abandoned cart according to Barilliance, with mobile experiences increasing cart abandonment by 15.9%. Mobile transactions are also more likely to have fewer items in a shopping cart, with average order value increasing by 10.6% on desktop.

Abandoned cart emails, sent to shoppers after they’ve added items to their cart but failed to complete a purchase within a designated amount of time, can recuperate some of the losses from abandoned carts. Cart abandonment emails drive the most revenue per recipient for online retailers with average order sizes of more than $50, according to a Klaviyo study of 1.5 billion emails sent from 1,000 US-based companies in the fourth quarter of 2016.

In fact, the average revenue per abandoned cart email is $5.64 according to BigCommerce, a large leap ahead of the $.02 average made on traditional promotional emails. 

Timing is especially critical with abandoned cart campaigns according to SaleCylcle, with emails send exactly one hour after a cart is initially abandoned performing the best with an average conversion rate of 6.33%.