Roughly 70 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout, an extremely frustrating fact of life for all eCommerce businesses. Let’s do some quick math on what this means for your store.

If your store gets 100 orders per month, that means you can expect just over 230 shopping carts never made it to checkout. That’s 230 times someone added an item to their cart, and then walked (well, clicked) away before finalizing their order. If your average order value is $50, that’s a whopping $11,500 in lost revenue every month!

There are a lot of reasons people abandoned shopping carts, from unexpected costs to website errors to simple distraction. Some of those are things you can address and mitigate to drive your abandonment rate lower than the average, while others are, unfortunately, unavoidable.

But in those unavoidable cases, all is not lost: you can recover some of those abandoned shopping carts and turn sales that are slipping away into money in the bank. Smart retailers have been using something called abandoned cart recovery emails for years. (Seriously, the first automated abandoned cart recovery emails started going out over 15 years ago!)

In the video below, we walk through why abandoned cart recovery is so important, and take you step-by-step on how to set up an automated three -email recovery campaign using best practices (all based on the millions of emails stores have sent over the years using Jilt).

While you’ll never be able to recover every abandoned cart, stores using cart recovery emails on Jilt routinely see recovery rates in the 15-20 percent range—or higher. Based on our sample store above, that would mean an additional $1,700-$2,300 in monthly revenue. And that’s revenue generated by an automated email that goes to work for you after some quick initial set up.

Not a bad return! Automated recovery emails can truly change the fortunes for your store, which is why they’re one of the most important email automations you can set up.