- What is an abandoned basket email?
- Why is an abandoned basket email important?
- How can Travelgenix help with abandoned basket emails?
- When does the abandoned basket email get sent?
- What does the abandoned basket email look like?
- What about data privacy and marketing permissions?
- How to set up abandoned basket emails?
What is an abandoned basket email?
An abandoned basket email is an email sent to an individual end user, after they start the booking process online, but fail to complete the purchase.
Why is an abandoned basket email important?
When consumers purchase travel products, they generally research products and pricing until they feel confident they have found the right product, at the right price, from a company they trust.
If a consumer starts the booking process, but abandons the purchase process, then it's a very strong signal of buying intent, but there is something stopping them from completing the booking.
By sending an automated email to these individuals, you have an opportunity to "follow up" with them, to engage them and convince them to complete the booking with you.
This helps improve sales conversions and reduce your look-to-book ratio.
How can Travelgenix help with abandoned basket emails?
With Travelgenix, you can connect third party email services to our platform (e.g.
Mailerlite), which can be configured to send abandoned basket emails to individual consumers, at exactly the right moment. This way, Travelgenix automatically notifies your email service provider at the right time, and you have complete control over the abandoned basket email/s you send to the end consumer within the Email service provider configuration options.
When does the abandoned basket email get sent?
The Travelgenix booking flow is made up of four distinct stages:
- Search - Input search parameters (E.g. Destination, check in/out date, number of guests etc)
- Results - The long list of product results + prices (E.g. Hotels, Flights etc)
- Extras - The ability for consumers to add travel extra products AND submit guest/passenger details and email address (This is required to build the order to send to the suppliers to confirm)
- Basket - The payment stage and the completion of the booking
When end consumers research travel products online, they generally only ever get as far as the extras page, to see the total price and product overview, without inputting their personal details.
Once they input their personal details into the Extras page, to proceed to the basket page, it is an intent to make a purchase and is the start of the order process.
The Travelgenix platform identifies end consumers that input their personal details into the Extras page, and proceed to the basket page. At this point in the booking process, Travelgenix can send this information about the consumer and the product(s) that they have added to their basket to your email marketing platform to trigger your abandoned basket/cart workflow.
So put simply, end consumers will not get an abandoned basket email before they input their details into the Extras page, and are on the basket/payment page. You control the delay within your email service provider.
What does the abandoned basket email look like?
Whatever you like! As the email is sent from your email marketing provider, you can use their email configuration tools to design an email that matches your brand and includes whatever copy you think will compel the end user to book with you.
We are able to send various pieces of information to your email marketing provider to allow you to display what they added to basket and also a link/url for them to come back to the website to complete a booking for those items - currently, they will be taken back to the search stage, but with the product that they added to basket as the only (where supported), or top, option for them to book. This is due to supplier session timeouts, but there is further development coming where we will be able to recheck availability and pricing straight from the actual basket page.
What about data privacy and marketing permissions?
You should seek professional legal advice to ensure your business complies with any applicable data privacy regulations.
However, it is widely accepted that when an end consumer submits their personal information as part of an online purchase process, there is clear intent and an abandoned basket email constitutes part of the order process and not a marketing message.
However, if you do use a third party email service provider, you may need to include it in your privacy policy as a sub processor.
How to set up abandoned basket emails?
You will need an account with a third party email service provider that is integrated with your Travelgenix account. Currently we support the following email marketing platforms for abandoned basket/cart functionality:
