Abandoned cart automation best practices to help you recover lost sales and boost conversions by automatically following up on abandoned baskets.
Anders Stokholm Jessen
FacebookDo all the visitors who add products to their basket on your webshop end up making a purchase? If so, you are either exceptionally skilled or incredibly lucky.
The rest of us need to use a few tricks to retain our visitors and eventually convert them into customers, and to get the best return on investment, we automate these processes. In this blog post, I explain what abandoned cart automation is and how you can leverage it.
Abandoned cart emails, also known as basket abandonment, are a type of remarketing where you send an email to a visitor who has added an item to their basket and then left your website without completing the purchase. The email contains the products the visitor left in their basket but did not check out.
By sending an abandoned cart email, you make it easy for your visitors to resume their purchasing process.
Important information! In order to send an email to a visitor, you naturally need to have their email address and, most importantly, their consent to contact them.
Be clear and concise with your message in your emails and ensure that each has a single purpose. By presenting multiple options to your visitors, you force them to make more decisions. Keep it simple, so the only decision they need to make is to complete their purchase. Avoid, for example, offering the option to buy ‘abandoned’ items and follow you on Facebook, or buy something and browse your sale items. Stay focused and ensure your message is crystal clear!
A single email is often overlooked and rarely has much impact. Therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to send several emails, as long as your message is targeted and relevant to the recipient. But be careful!
Do not spam your recipients. Many consumers find abandoned cart emails annoying (because they are often done poorly). We recommend including no more than 3 emails in your abandoned cart email flow.
We have all been there – scrolling through the inbox when a captivating subject line catches our eye. That is the email we want to read.
It is absolutely essential that your subject line stands out. Invest time in finding the perfect phrasing and test different versions to see which delivers the best results (in other words: open rates).
Depending on how advanced your marketing setup is, you are probably active on several platforms. Therefore, consider how your abandoned cart flow fits into your overall remarketing strategy on platforms like Facebook.
What makes the most sense? Should users who click the CTA in your abandoned cart email land on your homepage, or be taken directly back to the basket they left? The answer is actually somewhere in between. These days, we often start product research on mobile, but finalise purchases on a desktop. Bear this in mind when guiding your recipients back to your webshop. They should return to the shopping experience – not an empty basket because they added items from a different device.
Need a little extra persuasion? Consider offering a small incentive to help your recipients complete their purchase. We have seen great results by including a discount code in our abandoned cart emails, which unlocks a free gift. It should not eat up all your profit, but it does need to be valuable enough to entice your recipient to buy.
Your abandoned cart email flow should begin relatively quickly after a visitor leaves your webshop with items in their basket. As a rule of thumb, send the first email an hour later. The following day, send a reminder, perhaps including a discount or gift code. If you wait too long to start your flow, you risk the customer buying elsewhere.
Overwhelming a customer with too many messages at once causes confusion and does more harm than good. Be disciplined and offer only one clear action. If you bombard them with messages, you lose focus. Abandoned cart emails have one clear goal – drive revenue. Stay true to that objective.
No one likes being bombarded with emails – your visitors and customers included. As mentioned earlier, one email is rarely enough, but sending too many can backfire. In the worst case, you may lose a loyal customer. Send a maximum of 3 emails and always ensure they are relevant.
Make sure there is no doubt about who the sender is. Stay true to your brand identity. Ensure your design and visual expression are consistent with your overall brand. If you usually use humour, authority, or other stylistic elements in your communication, use them in your abandoned cart emails as well.
Otherwise, your recipients may not recognise you as the sender, and your emails may lose their relevance.
Providing an incentive for completing a purchase via email is great, but it is a balancing act. Do not overdo it, or you will train your customers to only buy when there is a discount.
See it as a final nudge for a customer who is already considering buying.
R-E-L-E-V-A-N-C-E – and a large part of relevance is timing. If you take too long to send your emails, you lose relevance.
So make sure you act quickly. Most email systems, including Mailchimp, allow you to send an email just one hour after a basket is abandoned.
REMEMBER!
Your recipients have placed their trust in you by providing their email address and consent for you to contact them. Do not abuse that trust.
Do not spam, be clear in your message, and always prioritise relevance!
With these guidelines in place, you are ready to set up effective abandoned cart automation in your preferred email platform – whether that is MailChimp, ActiveCampaign or another tool of your choice.
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