Abandoned Cart Emails: A Data-Driven Guide To Recovering Lost Sales
Abandoned Cart Emails: A Data-Driven Guide To Recovering Lost Sales
Abandoned Cart Emails: A Data-Driven Guide To Recovering Lost Sales
R EJOIN ER .COM
TABL E O F CONT ENTS
INTRODUCTION
Why We Wrote This Guide 1
CH AP TE R 01
Why Customers Abandon 70% of the Time 3
CHAPTER 02
How to Measure Your Online Store’s Abandonment Rate Using 5
Google Analytics
CH AP TE R 03
How to Identify a Higher Percentage of Visitors 7
CH AP TE R 04
Abandoned Cart Email Best Practices 8
CH AP TE R 05
Calculate Your Return on Investment 34
IN TRO DUCTION
The idea that 70% online consumers engage with your site to the point where they are about to
check out and abandon is nerve wracking.
The Baymard Institute, an eCommerce usability think tank, has aggregated cart abandonment data
from various industry sources over the last 9 years. Bad news: Despite major advancements in
technology and eCommerce user experience design, the average cart abandonment rate has
remained constant.
Industry pundits portray cart abandonment as a problem that costs online retailers billions of
dollars in lost revenue every year. Good news: This is an exaggeration. It’s human nature to test the
waters before making a purchase while online shopping. There’s no technology, Shopify plug-in, or
perfectly optimized online shopping cart in the world that will eliminate it. We must accept the fact
that cart abandonment is a very natural part of the eCommerce buying cycle.
What we can do is change our perspective and see shopping cart abandonment
as a conversion rate optimization and customer service opportunity for us as
eCommerce professionals.
How? By taking a customer-centric approach. Customers are giving you an amazing signal of
purchase intent when they abandon a transaction on your site. Think of cart abandonment emails
as your second chance to continue the conversation with this incredibly important group of poten-
tial customers.
By building a quality abandoned cart email program, one of three things will happen when
you follow up:
This guide is written to help you maximize those four outcomes with every cart abandonment email
that you send. In addition, you’ll learn to measure the cart abandonment rate on your site, how to
identify a higher percentage of customers shopping on your site and how to calculate the expected
ROI of an abandoned cart email solution.
As you can see, three out of the top five reasons given for abandoning an eCommerce website are
cost or price related. The others describe customers who weren’t quite ready to buy yet:
Below, you’ll learn about strategies to make sure you never miss out on an order because of a price
concern or unexpected shipping costs (most consumers expect free shipping these days). You’ll also
learn how to target those “just browsing” customers and uncover million dollar insights into why
customers aren’t buying from you in the first place.
If you’re just getting started, setting up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics is a simple task that
you can use to establish a baseline cart abandonment rate. Not only does it empower you to under-
stand how and when people drop out during your conversion process, it also allows you to measure
your cart abandonment rate over time.
There are two central ideas when it comes to setting up these reports for your site: A goal and a
funnel.
URL Destination
• Example: Confirmation page Duration (on site/page)
• Example: On website for 5 minutes Number of Pages/Screens Visited
• Example: User visited 5 pages User Event
• Example: Clicked Buy Now Button
A funnel represents the path that a customer takes to reach your goal. For the purposes of measur-
ing cart abandonment, we’re going to use a URL destination as our goal. Typically, that destination is
your thank you page or order confirmation page after a user completes an order.
To get started building funnels on your site, we put together a short video to walk you through the
process. We hope it’s helpful!
There are several strategies that can be employed to identify a higher percentage of customers even
before they get to checkout, thus capturing a larger number of people for our cart abandonment
program to follow up with:
TRIGGERED POP-UPS/OFFERS
Triggered on-site offers can entice anonymous visitors to opt-in, creating an identifiable session
much earlier in the buying process. On-site lead magnets can be paired with your abandoned cart
email program, so that after a customer opts-in, their session is tagged while shopping on your site.
NEWSLETTER APPEND
If you’ve built up an in-house email marketing list, leveraging your weekly newsletter send can
greatly increase the percentage of identifiable customers browsing your website. Your ESP should
give you the ability to append the customer’s email address within a query string parameter,
should they click through the email. If your cart abandonment email partner can field that query
string parameter and tag the session, you’ve just increased the percentage of identifiable sessions
on your site.
PRE-SUBMIT TRACKING
By using pre-submit tracking, high intent customers can be identified in real-time, as soon they
enter an email address on your checkout form, even if they don’t complete the checkout form. We
recommend placing the email address field as close to the top of the checkout form as possible.
Then, you will need to double check that the customer is opted-into your email list before sending
them your abandonment campaign.
STR ATEGY
So, place your email capture field as high on the checkout page as possible to give yourself the
best chance to identify a guest customer before they abandon. Since registered customers have
already given you their email address, you can use this to track their behavior as they move around
your site.
To identify more customers earlier in the funnel, consider a triggered pop-up or opt-in that
encourages customers to provide their email address earlier in the process. Tying the opt-in into
your campaign will enable you to identify a higher percentage of customers that express purchase
intent, even if they don’t make it to the cart or checkout page.
CH AP TE R FOUR
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
When Is the Best Time to Send an Abandoned Cart Email? (And How to Do It Right)
Abandoned cart emails are your chance to continue the conversation with an extremely important
group of customers: those that demonstrated the highest amount of possible purchase intent but
still didn’t buy. Your job is to provide amazing customer service and find out why. To uncover these
insights, include your toll free number prominently within the email and write your copy
using a helpful customer service tone.
Send from a live, monitored inbox and ask your customers for feedback. Asking simple questions
like, Was there a problem? or How can we help? will generate real, qualitative responses about what
friction points are causing customers to abandon in the first place. This is priceless information. To
make customers feel more comfortable about providing you this feedback, send from a real
person’s name and include a photograph of a real person in the footer of the email.
Abandoned cart email success is about more than just conversion and revenue. Though it’s import-
ant to track engagement/conversion metrics with Google Analytics and your Email Service Provider
of choice, these metrics only tell one part of the story. Open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate,
bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, attributable revenue, and revenue per email are the baseline
engagement metrics for your campaigns.
Also track the number of phone calls that your campaign generates and
document the feedback you’re getting from customers.
Track how many customers reply to your emails with unanswered questions or usability problems
they experienced on the site. There are enormous qualitative benefits to be had by running this
campaign that won’t be captured in the “recovered sales” column. Don’t underestimate these benefits.
By asking customer service focused questions like, Was there a problem? or How can we help? you are
inviting customers to start a dialogue with you about their shopping experience. The insight gener-
ated by having these discussions will be priceless for your conversion rate optimization efforts.
Qualitative feedback from customers will quickly unearth trends around where the friction points
exist in your checkout process and what issues are causing customers not to convert in the first place.
Make it a regular practice to review this feedback with your development team
and prioritize the on-site issues that are causing customers to bail on your
checkout process.
Our customers regularly receive million dollar insights from their cart abandonment email cam-
paigns with this approach.
It’s hard to believe that there are still email vendors and eCommerce platforms sending batched cart
abandonment email campaigns in 2018. This is a big missed opportunity for the retailers they serve.
A batched approach sends to all customers who abandon in a twenty four hour time period, at the
same time.
Getting that first email out within 60 minutes of a customer’s last interaction on your site is
critical for two possible outcomes:
1. Getting a response from the customer about why they didn’t buy (before they buy
somewhere else).
2. Providing great customer service and winning back the sale.
Including discount codes in your abandonment program seems like a no-brainer. It is to some
degree, but be aware of the pitfalls:
Another frequent concern is that discount codes included in cart abandonment emails will be leaked
into the public domain. This can be eliminated by generating one-time use codes dynamically
and making them unique to individual customers. This means that every customer will receive a
unique code that can only be used once.
The more nuanced argument against including discounts is the belief that you’re cannibalizing a sale
that had a likelihood to happen anyway, thus giving away margin. This is partially true.
There will be a percentage of customers who abandon cart that would have
come back to complete their purchase without an incentive.
The only way to measure the true incremental lift of sending an offer versus not sending it is
to run a control group test. Control group tests measure the purchase behavior of groups who
don’t receive any emails and compare the value of those customers to a test group of customers
who do receive an offer. Comparing the revenue generated by the control group to the test group
gives us a true understanding of how much additional revenue is being generated and if there is
enough lift to warrant a coupon or offer.
To increase the effectiveness of your chosen offer, consider making the coupon expire and used
limited-time messaging to encourage the cart abandoner to take action before it’s too late.
In 2018, online shoppers are conditioned to expect free shipping all the time. Ahem, thanks Amazon.
At a minimum, consumers expect free shipping above a certain threshold of spend.
If the economics of your business don’t allow for always free shipping, consider offer-
ing some type of shipping incentive for those customers that are spending enough.
Remember, one of the primary causes of shopping cart abandonment are unexpected costs. Don’t
let the lack of free shipping deter your next high value customer.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
Abandoned cart emails are the perfect opportunity to make your customers smile. The notion that
you are reaching out to them about an imaginary shopping cart that was left behind on your website
is humorous in itself.
Your copywriting tone and photography can both be used to make the interaction
light hearted and fun.
D E S I G N & OP T I MI ZAT I ON
Don’t distract them with secondary call to action buttons or links that don’t directly support achiev-
ing that objective. Links to social profiles? Test removing them. Primary website navigation? Get rid
of it! At Rejoiner, we frequently find ourselves having success employing the mantra, “One send, One
goal”. Simplify your abandoned cart templates so that the customer’s attention is focused only on
clicking through the abandoned cart email to a seamlessly regenerated cart that is ready to convert.
CH AP TE R FOUR
Personalization broadly refers to any tactic that makes an email more relevant to the person receiv-
ing it, based on what information you know about the recipient. Basic personalization includes
things as simple as including the customer’s first name in the salutation or subject line. For
abandoned cart emails, including the contents of the customer’s cart is also a common personal-
ization tactic. This could be as simple as including the name of one of the products they abandoned
in the email copy or recreating the cart itself inside of the email template.
More sophisticated personalization techniques use demographic, geographic, and even environmen-
tal data to make emails more relevant to recipients. Imagine personalizing a browse abandonment
email for a clothing brand, knowing the weather in the recipient’s geography was rainy that day.
An email preheader is a small amount of copy that renders under the subject line in the preview
pane of most email clients. Give your pre-headers careful consideration, as they act as a secondary
subject line and can positively (or negatively) influence open rates.
Email preheaders can be hidden in the body of the your template using CSS or visible depending on
the requirements of your template design.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
The Quickest Win for Increasing Email Open Rates: Stop Neglecting Email Preheader Text
Over 50% of the 5,000,000 monthly emails sent by Rejoiner are opened on a device that is different than
the one the customer originally abandoned on. Think about that for a second. More than half the time,
customers will consume your email on a different device than where the first touch occurred.
If you are not employing session regeneration and customers are not signed in on their mobile
devices (hint: they probably won’t be), customers will have a disjointed experience and will be less
likely to go back and re-add items all over again.
Design and code responsive email templates so that they render well on mobile devices, as this
is more than likely where customers will consume them. More importantly, regenerate cart sessions
across devices so customers have a seamless shopping experience from device to device.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
Session Regeneration: The One Feature eCommerce Companies Overlook (And How We Lifted
Conversions From Email by 33.96%)
Segmentation can be used for more granular targeting of your ideal customers and also for
filtering out customers you may not want to send to. For example, you would want to filter out
customers in the geographies that you don’t ship to. You also may want to treat wholesale custom-
ers differently than retail, or filter them out entirely.
For targeting purposes, segmentation enables you to identify customers with specific traits that
you may want to message differently than others. For example, you may want to develop a special
campaign for particularly high value orders and use a different offer for a new customer who has
never purchased before.. The only way to accomplish this is with a flexible segmentation engine that
can segment your customer data using demographic, transactional, and behavioral filters.
We routinely hear vendors refer to their cart abandonment campaigns as set it and forget it, as if that
was a benefit. This mentality leaves an enormous amount of revenue on the table. A better
approach is to think about your cart abandonment campaigns as a constant work in progress.
Split testing is the most powerful tool at your disposal to improve engagement metrics like open
rate, click-through rate and conversion. There is no silver bullet to magically drive conversion
upwards overnight, but consistent testing can string together many small wins and a big
increase in revenue generated. Our team can increase a cart abandonment campaigns' recovered
revenue up to 100% with consistent testing over 6 months.
Focus your testing efforts on subject line improvements first, then progressively test the other
facets of your campaign. We've created a helpful guide that outlines 22 different ways you can test
your campaigns to grow revenue.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
Email A/B Testing: How We Test Our Clients’ Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns To
Maximize Revenue
We’ve established that cart abandonment is a natural part of the eCommerce buying cycle. What’s
also natural is that a percentage of cart abandoners will return to your site and convert without
further intervention.
Develop an understanding of what percentage of customers come back and convert on their own
(organic return to purchase ratio) and how long it takes. These data points will help you schedule
your abandoned cart sequence so that order cannibalization is minimized and will ensure that you
only follow up with true cart abandoners.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
How to Measure The True Profitability of Your Email Campaigns Using Holdout Tests
Don’t forget about tracking other important signals of purchase intent. Cart abandonment
represents a customer with high purchase intent but browse and wishlist abandonment are also
effective behaviors to trigger on.
Browse abandonment campaigns focus on customers who are opted into your in-house email list,
have engaged with your newsletter or other email marketing, have spent time browsing product
detail pages, but haven’t made it to the cart yet.
They may have browsed specific product or category pages and your goal is help them pick up
where they left off after they leave your site. Incorporating category top seller recommendations or
new products that have just been added to the catalog within your browse abandonment emails are
effective tactics.
Wishlist abandonment focuses on customers who have expressed buying intent by saving items for
later using the wishlist feature on your site.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
If your first email wasn’t successful at converting the customer or eliciting a response, try sending a
second and third email. Track customer replies and suppress the remaining emails for customers
who respond with customer service questions or convert.
Sending 3 emails: first email at 30-60 minutes, second email at 24 hours and the third email at 3
days post abandon is the most common cadence retailers start with.
We’ve all gotten an abandoned cart email with a subject line like, Oops, did you forget something? or
You left something in your shopping cart. It’s fine to start your program with these proven winners as a
baseline, but don’t be afraid to test humorous or more conversational variations. Try employing
emojis, write your subject line variants with a friendlier, more informal tone, and use this opportunity
to create a positive customer service moment.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
5 of the Best Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines (Backed by Data from 7,140,646 Sends)
Recommendations increase click-through, conversion and the relevancy of your abandoned cart
email program. There are many approaches to integrating product recommendations into your
emails, but our strategy focuses on recommending products in the same product category that
a customer has abandoned. These should be similar products or complementary add-ons to the
abandoned products in your customer’s cart. You can also recommend top sellers across the entire
catalog, items frequently purchased together, or new products to get your customers buying more
from you.
Rejoiner’s recommendation engine allows you to predict what customers are likely to buy next and
then intelligently serve images of those products into your cart abandonment campaigns with the
goal of increasing click-through rate and average order value.
1. If someone receives an email but no longer wants the product, you can serve them images
of other top selling items in that category that they make like instead. This helps increase
click-through rate back to your store and gets this person back into buying mode again.
2. If someone receives an email for a product they were interested in and are about to buy,
you can intelligently serve them with images of other products that are frequently
purchased together, which will allow them to add more items to their previous cart and
increase average order value in the process (making your cart abandonment campaigns
much more profitable).
The best way to combat the SPAM folder is to send highly segmented recovery emails that your
customers actually want to open. Aside from that, follow best practices for CAN-SPAM compliance.
Include your physical mailing address and a 1-click opt-out link at the bottom of every email.
Sync your unsubscribes across email vendors if you use more than one to maintain continuity.
Never use misleading subject lines or envelope information and honor opt-out requests as quickly
as you can.
GDPR requires merchants to maintain an entirely different and more rigorous set of standards for
consent before abandoned cart emails can be sent to people residing in the EEA (European
Economic Area).
Explicit consent must be captured from all end users in order to collect data about their browsing
behavior and/or purchase preferences, before you ever send any email. Beyond that, explicit opt-in
consent must also be provided before an end user can be sent any type of marketing or email.
A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a DNS record that identifies third-party mail servers that
you have authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. In the eyes of a receiving email server
(Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), an SPF record is a signal that you've given a third party permission to
send an email using your domain in the email's From: address.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method to verify that your messages’ content is trustworthy
and was not altered from the point at which the message left your servers. This is achieved by
adding a public key to your site’s DNS record, which must match the private key your server uses to
sign outgoing messages.
F URT H E R R E A D I N G
Email Deliverability: Best Practices For Having Your Emails Actually End Up In The Inbox
Once you’re ready, head on over to our ROI calculator, run the report, and share it with your team.