Record Results: Movies Unlimited Garners 500% ROI with Shopping Cart Abandonment Campaign
Online movie retailer uses automated email series to recoup lost revenue
Movies Unlimited is regarded as the world’s most comprehensive video provider,
specializing in hard-to-find titles and carrying nearly every title currently available.
With tens of thousands of movie titles and customers worldwide, Movies Unlimited
has a tremendous volume of site traffic, but also has a 75% shopping cart
abandonment rate resulting in nearly 28,000 lost orders each month.
To recoup lost revenue, Movies Unlimited worked with Listrak to implement an automated shopping
cart abandonment solution that reaches back to site visitors who start a shopping cart but do not
complete the transaction. The email campaign includes a series of personalized messages that
display images of the movies left in the cart and provided clear calls-to-action including purchase now
and save my movies. The first email is sent 24 hours after a cart is abandoned with a message that
communicates they left the site without completing the transaction and detailing, with images, the
items left in the cart. If the customer completes the transaction then the conversation ends. If,
however, no action is taken, five days later a second email is sent with a different subject line
reminding the customer of the items left in the cart. If there is still no action, a final email reminder of
the cart items is sent. Each email has a primary call to “purchase now”; with secondary calls to save
or clear the cart.
The campaign also incorporates A/B split testing, where version A includes a discount offer and
version B does not. Both versions of the email have the same messaging and calls-to-action.
The Movies Unlimited shopping cart abandonment program is proving amazingly successful,
garnering 500% ROI. The campaign generates 10% of its email marketing revenue, while accounting
for merely .2% of the email volume. The campaign has an average 43.4% read rate, a 25.2%
click-through rate and a 26% conversion rate. While significantly increasing the number of
transactions and revenue, the orders from the shopping cart abandonment program have a 27.7%
higher average order value than other promotional campaigns.
The A/B split test also had interesting results: while the non-offer version had higher initial read and
click-through rates, the offer version drove 26% more transactions and resulted in 36% more movies
ordered than the non-offer emails.
We are continually optimizing the campaign with varied split test, as well as adjusting the timing of
messages to increase campaign effectiveness, customer engagement and revenue.
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