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The Abandoned Cart Experience
Imagine you’re shopping online at a store you found on Instagram.
You add some items to your shopping cart and then proceed to enter your information at checkout.
But then you notice that the shipping cost and taxes are too expensive, so you decide not to buy anything and leave the website.
Later, you receive an email from that store reminding you of the items that you left in your shopping cart, and the store even adds an extra 10% discount coupon!
Excited, you return to the store to use your discount coupon and reclaim your cart.
This is just one common example of an effective cart reminder, or abandoned cart email.
What Is An Abandoned Cart Email?
An abandoned cart email is just as it sounds: an email sent to customers who abandoned their shopping cart.
Usually these emails are meant to remind them to finish shopping, and includes a limited-time offer.
There are multiple reasons why a customer might abandon their cart:
- they lost connection to your store website
- they’re saving their items to shop later
- shipping + taxes are too expensive
- they’re waiting on an offer or sale
Regardless of why a customer left their cart behind, an effective abandoned cart reminder will help recover potential customers.
Cart Reminder Workflow: How It Works
Abandoned cart emails are widely used in online shopping, and they’re so effective that e-commerce platforms like Shopify have a built-in cart reminder automation.
Abandoned cart workflows can be broken down into 3 general steps:
- Abandoned cart trigger
- Time delay
- Cart reminder email
1. Abandoned Cart Trigger
Cart reminder emails can only be triggered if the customer is already an email subscriber, or if they filled in their email address at checkout before leaving their cart.
To use an abandoned cart event as a workflow trigger, your email marketing platform first needs to be integrated with your e-commerce store.
It’s good practice to limit the number of times your workflow can be triggered per month, otherwise you’ll spam your customers with cart reminders.
A rule of thumb is to limit this workflow to trigger once a month.
2. Time Delay
Most businesses use a short time delay (less than 24 hours) before they send a cart reminder email.
You’ll want to remind your customers about their cart while it’s fresh on their mind; any longer than 24 hours and they’ve likely lost interest.
You should test what time delay works best for your store as part of your optimization strategy.
3. Cart Reminder
Your cart reminder email should contain a short message to remind the customer about their shopping cart, and a list of the items they left in their cart.
It’s especially important to include images of the customer’s cart items, as it’ll provide a visual reminder of what they were shopping.
You can also include an limited-time offer, like a discount coupon, to urge the customer to finish shopping. This is a very common, yet effective, technique to drive sales.
Abandoned Cart Best Practices
Here are some best practices to help you build an effective abandoned cart experience for your customers:
1. Keep It Simple
Your abandoned cart email should be short and sweet; abandoned cart customers are at the bottom of the marketing funnel, so they only need a small push.
You don’t need any special salesmanship or tactics to close the sale here, a simple cart reminder with an urgent offer and CTA is all that is necessary.
Do not include any distractions in the initial offer email. If you want to give them extra information, like return policies or recommended products, then you should put this in a separate email, after the offer email.
If they still won’t make the purchase, then they weren’t really interested in your product anyway.
2. No Hero Image?
Surprisingly, I’ve noticed that many abandoned cart emails without a hero image perform better than emails with a hero image.
This ties into keeping it simple; many brands use a beautiful hero image in their emails, which can be distracting from the main offer.
Instead of a hero image, your email should have images of the customer’s shopping cart items (refer to the previous examples in this post).
Overall, this may vary between brands, so you should test hero images vs. no hero images in your optimization strategy.
3. Multiple Abandoned Cart Workflows
For medium to large-sized audiences (>20000 subscribers), it may be worth building multiple abandoned cart flows for different audience segments.
Non-Customer Abandoned Cart Flow
One abandoned cart flow should be built for non-customers — people who have never made a purchase.
For this audience, you should include a special offer, different from or better than your usual abandoned cart offer.
For example:
If your usual abandoned cart offers a 10% coupon, your non-customer abandoned cart flow should offer a 15% or 20% coupon.
Abandoned Cart for Repeat Buyers
If you want to give your loyal customers special treatment, you can build a separate abandoned cart experience for repeat shoppers.
Like for non-customers, you can give your repeat shoppers a better offer, or change the copy to let them know you appreciate their loyalty.
Seasonal Abandoned Cart Flows
Whenever your store has a shopping promotion or a seasonal sales event, you should use a different abandoned cart experience.
This includes themed abandoned cart emails for different holidays such as Christmas, Valentine’s day, and Halloween.
This is important if your promotion is a better deal than your abandoned cart offer, and especially if your offers can’t be combined.
Summary Notes
- Abandoned cart emails are fundamental for online stores
- An abandoned cart automation consists of a trigger, time delay, and then the abandoned cart emails
- The best abandoned cart experiences are simple, with an image of the product
- You should customize your abandoned cart experience for non-customers and repeat buyers
- Looking for design inspiration for your abandoned cart emails? Check out these reallygoodemails!
Following this guide will help you build the right abandoned cart emails for your brand.
But many marketing agencies would rather just resell our white-label email marketing services, so that we can build the best abandoned cart emails while they focus on client management.
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