While analysts estimate that shopping cart abandonment costs e-commerce merchants $18 billion in lost revenues each year, a recent survey revealed that fewer than 15 percent of online retailers have a plan in place to combat the issue — and that less than half of them are even monitoring the problem.

E-mail marketing firm Listrak has helped many of its clients reverse the shopping cart abandonment trend through specialized programs. One such client is Movies Unlimited, a leading online video provider that suffered from a 75-percent abandonment rate resulting in nearly 28,000 lost orders each month. Movies Unlimited enlisted Listrak’s help to implement a retargeted e-mail marketing campaign that reached back out to those lost customers. Listrak was very specific with its client about the tone of the e-mails and the information that should be included, and the program has garnered a 500-percent ROI for the online movie retailer.

Listrak’s cart abandonment campaign generates 10 percent of Movies Unlimited’s e-mail marketing revenue while accounting for merely .2 percent of the company’s e-mail volume. The campaign also has an average 43.4-percent read rate, a 25.2-percent click-through rate and a 13-percent conversion rate — all much higher than the industry norms. While significantly increasing the number of transactions and revenue, the orders from Movies Unlimited’s shopping cart abandonment program have a 27.7-percent higher average order value than other promotional campaigns.