How far down is your link?

If your cart abandonment emails are long and the link back to the cart sits below the fold, move the link into the first sentence and cut the re-selling. These buyers already decided. For one client that took recovered revenue from about $74,000 a month to $172,000 in May.

I was looking at a client's cart abandonment emails last month. The sequence was working... kind of. Pulling in somewhere between $60K and $88K a month depending on the month. Not bad for automated emails.

But when I actually read through them, I noticed something.

The emails were long. They were trying to do a lot... justify the purchase, explain the benefits, build urgency. Good instincts, bad execution. Because the one thing the email existed to do... get the person back to their cart... was buried halfway down the page.

The link to the cart wasn't in the first sentence. It wasn't even near the top. You had to scroll past paragraphs of selling before you could actually click through and finish your order.

And the first sentence? “You left something in your cart.” But “your cart” in the email itself wasn't linked to anything. Just plain text.

These emails were talking to people who already decided to buy. They put something in the cart. They just didn't finish checking out. That's not a sales conversation... that's a nudge.

So I did something simple. I linked “your cart” in the very first sentence of every email so the path back was immediate. Then I trimmed the copy. Removed the sentences that were trying to re-sell and kept the ones that reminded and reassured. The emails got shorter. The link got higher. The job of the email got clearer.

Here's what happened.

January through April, the old version averaged about $74,000 a month in recovered revenue. May, with the optimized version, hit $172,000... and there were still a few days left in the month.

Same product. Same traffic. Same number of emails in the sequence. The only difference was that the email stopped trying to do too much and started doing the one thing it was supposed to do.

How far down do your customers have to scroll to do the thing your email is asking them to do?

Jason “Just Click the Link” Resnick

P.S. Sometimes the best optimization isn't adding something new. It's removing what's in the way.