Case study

May 20, 2026

Recovering 1 in 4 abandoned carts: results from five venue tests

Our soon-to-be-released automation helps you recover customers who've abandoned their carts. To give you a sense of how it might work for your organisation - the recovery rates the feature can deliver, how many emails to send, and how to read your reports afterwards - we tested it with five organisations across the UK and Ireland. Their programmes, audiences, and ticket prices varied widely, but the findings were consistent enough to be useful for all organisations using the feature. Read on for the full run down. (Image: Forum Theatre Billingham)

25-31%

carts recovered

135

orders generated

312

tickets sold

488

customers reached

How we tested the automation

Roughly 1 in 4 customers who abandoned a cart in our test venues came back and bought when prompted. That's the headline finding from automation tests we ran with five venues this spring. The rate held up across all five regardless of organisation type, ticket price or audience size.

Between March and April 2026, we worked with Town Hall Theatre, Komedia Brighton, Ipswich Theatres, Forum Theatre Billingham and a traditional folk festival to test the automation. Some sent a single email; others ran a three-email flow over a few days. We measured results two ways: through standard UTM link tracking, and through a fuller manual attribution that captured customers who came back to buy without clicking through.

The headline: about 1 in 4 abandoned carts come back

Across every test, the recovery rate was between 25 and 31%.

Recovery rates per venue were as follows:

KOMEDIA
BRIGHTON

31%

TOWN HALL
THEATRE

30%

FORUM
THEATRE

28%

FOLK
FESTIVAL

28%

IPSWICH
THEATRES

25%

‍

This consistency is the most striking takeaway from our test. We'd expected some variation by venue type, audience age, ticket price, and number of emails, but we didn't really see it. Whether the customer had abandoned a £30 single ticket or an £85 group booking, whether they were on a folk festival list or a multi-venue regional theatre list, whether they were sent one email or three: about a quarter of them came back to buy.

For venues planning to start using this automation, recovery rates of up to 25-31% are achievable based on what we've seen so far.

One email or three?

One email did roughly as much work as three. The single-email flows averaged 29% full-attribution conversion across our tests; the three-email flows averaged 27.5%. Given how small the sample is, and that we weren't actively testing one approach against the other, those figures are best read as 'more or less the same' rather than one beating the other.

The first email appears to do most of the recovery work. Two things happen as the flow continues:

The audience shrinks. Some recipients have already converted; others have unsubscribed or otherwise exited the flow. How much shrinkage varies between venues: at Ipswich Theatres, 77% of the original audience were still in the flow by email 3; at Town Hall, it was 48%.
The audience that's left is harder to convert. The people still receiving emails 2 and 3 are the ones who didn't act on email 1.

The longer flow does reach some customers the first email missed - but our numbers don't show it recovering meaningfully more carts overall.

For venues anxious about over-emailing, that's worth bearing in mind. The longer flow may still be a good choice for catching customers the first email missed; our numbers just don't show a clear uplift either way.

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What about basket size?

Average order value across the five tester venues ranged from £31.57 at Komedia Brighton, where most tickets sell as singles or pairs, to £85.25 at Forum Theatre Billingham, where customers were buying for groups. That's a wide spread - but conversion rates barely moved with it.

In a nutshell - this automation doesn't change depending on basket size. A £30 comedy cart and an £85 family theatre booking come back to be completed at roughly the same rate.

What this means for your venue

A few practical takeaways:

Expect to recover up to a quarter of abandoned cart customers. That number held across every venue type in our initial test.
UTM tracking captures only a fraction of the baskets recovered - bear this in mind when reporting on performance *
You probably don't need a long email sequence - a single, well-timed email did most of the work for our testers.
The automation works across all customers, shows and basket sizes - our test didn't surface a price band or audience profile where it stops working.

‍

A few things to keep in mind when reading these numbers.

Sample size. Five organisations and 488 customers over roughly two months. This is a strong directional signal, but not yet a definitive benchmark - and as user numbers grow we'd expect to see more variation than the 25-31% reported here, with some venues recovering at lower rates.
One email versus three. This is an observational comparison across different venues, not a controlled A/B within a single organisation. The longer flow may still capture revenue that makes it worth the send; we just can't see it clearly in this data.
* A note on reporting. The 25-31% conversion rates here come from full attribution - matching customers who received an email against those who later bought tickets for an event in their abandoned cart, whether or not they clicked through. Ticketsolve will report UTM clicks only, so expect your own reporting to show conversion rates closer to 6-15%. The automation is almost certainly recovering carts at the higher rate; the lower number is simply what direct-click tracking can see.

‍

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