Channel-by-channel: recovery rate and cost
Standard benchmarks across the major e-commerce verticals in 2026:
- Email. 5–8% recovery, cost ~€0.001 per send, sub-cent per recovered cart
- SMS. 4–10% recovery, cost ~€0.03 per send (US), recovered cart cost €0.30–0.80
- Voice (AI). 18–32% recovery, cost ~€0.18 per call, recovered cart cost €0.60–1.00
Cost per recovered cart isn't the right metric
Email looks cheapest on a CPRC basis. But email caps at 8%. Meaning the other 92% of carts go uncollected. SMS adds incremental recovery to that 92%. Voice catches the remaining bucket.
The right metric is total recovered revenue, not unit cost per channel. A merchant recovering 8% via email at €0.001/send leaves more money on the table than one recovering 30% via voice at €0.18/call.
Response rate, not just recovery rate
A second hidden metric matters: response rate (the % of touched customers who engaged at all, even if they didn't recover).
- Email. 20–30% opens, 5–10% clicks
- SMS. 95%+ delivered, 30–40% clicks
- Voice. 60–80% answered, 100% engagement if answered
When each wins
Use email when: AOV is low, list is large, content-rich nurture pattern matters, you have nothing else.
Use SMS when: AOV is moderate, customer has opted in, you want a one-tap re-engagement vector.
Use voice when: AOV is above €40, abandonment intent is high (checkout abandonment specifically), you operate in non-English markets, you want to break through email saturation.
The 2026 stack that wins
Voice at T+5min → email-1 at T+1h → SMS at T+4h → email-2 at T+24h → email-3 at T+72h. Each channel does what it's best at; the cadence compounds.
Stores running this stack consistently report 25–40% total recovery vs 5–10% for email-only. The economics: a €60 AOV store recovering 25% instead of 8% recovers an additional €10 per abandoned cart, at marginal cost of ~€0.20 per touch.