The highest-ROI automation in ecommerce

Today’s Retention Edge is about the #1 way mobile apps drive net-new revenue.

It’s a clear answer to the age-old question when you add a new channel - how much of this is really incremental?

It’s also one of the top reasons to launch a mobile app, and a solution to one of the biggest revenue leaks for ecommerce brands.

In this issue we’re going to break down push notifications for abandoned carts - the highest-impact automation you can set up, and the one campaign that could add six figures in new revenue to your bottom line.

The biggest revenue leak in ecom

Around 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Those are overall numbers - on mobile it’s over 85%.

This is a big deal. It means, on mobile, out of every 10 customers who add a product to their cart, fewer than 2 go through with their checkout.

That represents a massive opportunity. These are customers who have explicitly shared what they’re interested in and shown a sign of intent. There’s just something blocking them from following through and paying you.

It’s much easier to push these people over the line, compared to going out and selling to fresh customers.

Especially when you have a secret weapon at your disposal.

Why push is different for cart recovery

The idea of following up with abandoned carts is not new.

What is different, however, is the impact of push.

Email and SMS are solid ways to recover carts. They have broad reach, and deliver a decent ROI.

They do depend on the customer being subscribed to that channel, and having the customer logged in and their activity attributed to their profile, though.

It’s not always the most reliable.

On top of that, emails may not be seen, or at least, not right away. Your abandoned cart email might end up in the promotions folder, which the customer might check only once a day, or every two or three days.

SMS costs per send, which isn’t a huge deal, but is worth noting.

Push offers some real juice compared to these channels.

• A push notification arrives instantly, while intent is still high

• It shows up on the lock screen (essentially already “open”)

• The abandoned cart triggers for every app shopper (no login issues or attribution problems; if they have push turned on, they’ll receive the notification)

• There’s zero cost per send

• The notification sends them back to their cart in one tap

It’s direct, it’s instant, it’s low-friction. It’s the perfect way to recover abandoned carts.

The impact of an abandoned cart push notification

Abandoned carts happen for a lot of reasons. But one of the most common (and the one that represents money left on the table) is that the customer got distracted.

They forgot to finish their purchase, they got dragged away, something came up. For whatever reason, they didn’t follow through. But it wasn’t because of a major issue with the product.

These are the easiest sales to recover. Because all you need to do is send a quick reminder.

But the important part: getting through to the customer while intent’s still high.

You’ve got to hit them when they’re still excited. When the FOMO’s still running.

An “Are you still interested” or “Get it quick before it’s gone” doesn’t hit the same when it’s a three-day old email.

Push lands right away. The notification gets seen. And it makes it easy for the customer to come back.

That’s really all you need to bring back a ton of customers who might otherwise have drifted away.

The proof

I’ve seen a real impact here from brands we’ve worked with on setting up abandoned cart push.

We broke down some of them in our Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report.

Multiple brands in our report were driving tens of thousands in revenue per month from abandoned carts.

One brand (Pharmazone) gets 22% conversion rates from their abandoned cart notifications (that’s nearly 1 in 4 notifications leading to a sale).

But the best, and this was crazy, we had one brand that was getting over $200,000 in revenue in a 30-day period, just from abandoned carts.

Time and time again, this channel just works. The impact is often enough, on its own, to more than justify the cost of building and running an app in the first place.

The blueprint for recovering lost revenue on autopilot

Like we explored last week, one of the top benefits of push notifications (and apps in general), is that the best sequences are automated.

They take little work to set up, and very little to manage. They just run in the background, adding to your bottom line.

Abandoned cart notifications are the best example of this.

You set up your notifications. You could do a simple three-message sequence:

• Message 1 (5-15 minutes): gentle reminder (”Your cart is waiting for you. Tap to finish your checkout”)

• Message 2 (3-6 hours): FOMO nudge (”Time’s running out! Check out before your items are gone!”)

• Message 3 (24 hours): The sweetener - offer a small incentive to finish the purchase (”Still interested? Take 10% off, on us”)

It’s so simple, yet it’s one of the highest-impact automations there is.

The notification deep links to the cart page in your app, so all it takes is a couple of taps and the customer can come back to finish their purchase.

It’s that easy. And it works because it’s easy.

Your net-new revenue driver

One more important thing to realize about abandoned cart notifications is that these are net-new sales.

If the channel didn’t exist, the customer would have drifted away.

It’s an answer to the incrementality debate for mobile apps. This channel doesn’t exist without a mobile app. So the revenue you get from abandoned cart push notifications is clear, net-new revenue.

For some brands, that means $200,000+ per month in revenue that didn’t exist before.

It’s not cannibalizing other channels, or coming with $$$ in ad spend attached, or taking a new team to run.

It just works on autopilot.

And it makes for the most compelling reason to launch a mobile app.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

You don’t need six figures too build an app anymore. MobiLoud turns your existing site into a mobile app, in 30 days - minimal lift with a lower cost than custom apps built from scratch. It’s a much simpler way to get a unique, custom app that looks and feels just like your brand.

You get push as a new revenue channel, and an app that sits on your customer’s home screen, fully synced with your site, with everything done for you, by the MobiLoud team.

This could be the best thing you do this year to scale your brand.

Go to our site to get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn to learn more about how it works.

Quick Hits

Klaviyo's Co-CEOs Say Agentic Commerce Could Make Most Shopping Redundant

Klaviyo's co-CEOs told Diginomica this week that as agents take over the job of finding and evaluating products, the performance-marketing game as we know it changes. Their pitch: the brands that survive will be the ones with direct relationships to their customers, not the ones best at bidding against AI.

David's Bridal Plugs Directly into ChatGPT and Copilot

David's Bridal rolled out AI shopping integrations on Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT on April 17, letting users browse and buy without visiting the website. It's a decisive "we'd rather be on the AI shelf than off it" move.

Beauty Giants Race to Own the AI Shopping Moment

PYMNTS reports that L'Oreal, Estée Lauder, and Sephora are all investing hard in being the default answer when a customer asks an AI which foundation to buy. Beauty is a category where discovery matters and algorithms can make or break you. It's a preview of what's coming for the rest of DTC, category by category. If you're not actively shaping how AI describes your brand, someone else is.

Mondelez Hires a Global Lead for "Emerging Commerce Platforms"

Mondelez (Oreo, Cadbury, Ritz) opened a role this week specifically to own agentic commerce strategy. When a CPG giant creates a new leadership seat to tackle something, the trend is no longer theoretical. Most DTC brands won't hire for this, but they should at least be thinking about who on the team owns the answer to "how do we show up inside AI shopping agents."

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else (in general) you’d like me to cover related to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.