The Effectiveness of Triggered Email Marketing in Addressing Browse Abandonments

Abstract Triggered emails are personalized messages that are automatically sent as a response to specific actions or states of customers. Typical examples of this type of campaign include cross-selling recommendations, cart abandonment reminders, and re-engagement emails. Despite the widespread growth of these strategies, there has been no formal evaluation of their effectiveness. This paper investigates the impact of one type of triggered email campaign by using an experimental approach. We identify customers who had recently browsed the website of a multichannel retailer but had abandoned the process before making a purchase. Approximately half of the sample was randomly selected to receive automated emails with different configurations, while the other half receive no message at all. Comparison of the sales of these two groups indicates that browse abandonment emails have increase revenues in the online channel and in the triggered category. In terms of the design of the campaign, we found that the implementation of triggered emails plays an important role in their effectiveness. In this regard our result indicates that retargeting based on longer navigation histories is associated with larger conversions and that recommendations of wider assortments are associated with larger revenues.