What can an Abandoned Cart Email tell us about data-driven product strategy
Over a long enough horizon, most companies care about one single metric: profit. A strategy should be aimed at ensuring this long term goal over a sequence of decisions. These decisions need to be aimed at maximizing the profit over the short and may as well be hurting it in the short term.
Take the example of an e-commerce company trying to increase its’ revenue. It spends a considerable amount of time to set up an abandoned cart email journey. Through that process, they discover that only a small amount of emails end up being sent through their journeys. The reason is that only very few of the website visitors had a tied email address. The cause of that? Website visitors are not incentivized to log in before checking out. There are no nudges, no specific program to offer special discounts to login customers, the website allows for guest checkout, etc.…
They are deciding if pushing customers to login is a strategic move that needs to be considered. We need to weight the pro and the cons of such a move. Data cannot tell you if this move should be made, but it can inform the direction, by giving estimates on the importance and impact of each of the components of the decision.
