Our notes from the entertaining and statistic-laden Charles Nicholl of SeeWhy at Magento Live on email remarketing to reduce basket abandonment.

No purchase journey is the same (Google conducted 000s of studies).

Here are some compelling statistics re. abandonment and returning visits:

-O.25% is the percentage of first time visitors to buy on first visit.
- Browsers are 9 times more likely to purchase upon return (2.25%)
- First time returner to an abandoned basket converts at 18% - that's 60x better.
- A serial returner (or abandonner of baskets) converts ate 49% - which is192x better

On the subject of mobiles and tablets: 67% of people have used multiple screens sequentially to shop online (source: Google). At different times of day, people do different things for different devices. The "comfort" device is the desktop. Consumers are still wary of mobiles for purchasing.

Research shows that most shoppers prefer the full (or optimised for mobile) website, as opposed to apps. Tablets outperform smartphones 2:1, in terms of sales. By the end of the year, more emails will be opened on mobiles than anywhere else - the primary marketing weapon often falls on a non-mobile device.

A case study from Guthy-Renker showed that one of the best follow-up email subject lines was "oops, was there a problem with your checkout?". Follow his with "9 reasons to buy......". Incidentally, "Oops! Was there a problem with your checkout" has a 56% open rate and the inclusion on Christian names in the subject line is not as effective.

72% of purchases happen in first 12 hours. On average 8% will return overall unprompted, but 26% will return after remarketing.

Best guesses are often wrong - so test all this!

Remind/reassure/promote = a good starting point for a campaign, if yours new to the concept of emil re-marketing. You should use predictive heatmap software (e.g. Attentionwizard, at relatively low cost) to assess how emails will be viewed.

The end game of course is "targeted" and "personalised" trigger emails' which i surveys, offers is the highest ROI, per top retailers in US.

But only 5% of retailers personalise their remarketing: without it, the recovery rate is 2.6 %, with personalised material (eg your products) that can be 32%.

In Magento terms, all this is easy: use Magento trigger emails for abandonment and integrate Predictive Intent for personalised content.