Abandoned cart emails are a great way to get those final sales on abandoned carts. If your business is like most others, you probably have an “abandoned cart” page where visitors can see products they left behind and add them back to their cart.
Cart abandonment is about 85% on mobile and averages at 65% across all industries.
You have probably seen so many abandoned cart emails in your own inbox and sometimes you are given a discount to complete your purchase - which makes the process all the more fun!
Likewise, if you want to entice your visitors to complete their purchases and not just leave them there, abandoned cart emails are a great way to do so.
Here are the benefits of abandoned cart emails, the different types of abandoned-cart emails, and how to effectively set up your own system.
What are Abandoned Cart Emails?
An “abandoned cart” email is a type of marketing email that is sent to people who have added products to their online shopping carts, but did not complete the purchase.
This email is sent with the hopes of getting the customer to come back and buy those products that they left behind - sometimes giving them an incentive to complete the purchase.
Abandoned cart emails are also sometimes called “retail recovery” emails.
These emails are sent automatically by many e-commerce platforms, but you can also send them manually if your platform doesn’t have this feature. You can either use software like Mailchimp or sign up for an email software/automation tool like Hubspot, Autopilot, or Mailerlite.
Why Are Abandoned Cart Emails Important?
Studies suggest that as much as 70% of all online purchases start with customers adding products to their shopping carts and then abandoning them before completing the purchase.
Getting these customers back to finish their purchases is a great way to increase your revenue. These emails can also be a great way to boost your customer satisfaction. Customers who might have forgotten about their abandoned carts and were never given a chance to come back and complete their purchases will appreciate your reminder emails and will also appreciate the additional discount or incentive offered.
This is a great way to recover lost business as customers who were in the middle of purchasing obviously have purchase intent but they were taken away from your website for other reasons - perhaps they got distracted, perhaps your loading time was slow, maybe they found a better deal, or maybe your UX (user experience) wasn’t that appealing.
Therefore, abandoned cart emails can provide customers with the motivation they need to finish their purchase and this also keeps your company top-of-mind.
The Different Types of Abandoned Cart Emails
There are many different types of abandoned cart emails that you can send. Here are a few of the most popular types:
- Urgent reminder - This abandoned cart email is sent quickly after a customer leaves the product behind in their cart. The message will ask them to come back and finish their purchase.
- Reminder - This abandoned cart email is sent a little bit later and reminds customers about products they forgot about or left behind in their carts.
- Discount reminder - This abandoned cart email reminds customers that they left behind products in their carts, but also offers them a discount on those forgotten products.
- Gift reminder - This abandoned cart email is sent to customers who left a gift card in their carts but did not complete their purchases.
How To Set Up Abandoned Cart Emails in 3 Steps
If you want to send abandoned cart emails, you’ll need to set up an abandoned cart email campaign. Creating an abandoned cart email campaign is really simple and doesn’t take much time.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1. Add the products you want to promote to a special “Abandoned Cart” list. You can do this on the eCommerce platform where your store is hosted or by adding the products to a special “Abandoned Cart” list inside your email software.
Step 2. Create an email with the products you want to promote, the discount for these products, and a link back to the original shopping cart (or a special “Abandoned Cart” page on your website).
Step 3. Send the email campaign to the customers who left products in their carts but did not purchase.
4 Tips to Make Your Abandoned Cart Emails More Effective
If you want your abandoned cart emails to be as effective as possible, you can do a couple of things.
Send all abandoned cart emails at the same time. You’ll want to send all of your abandoned cart emails at the same time, rather than sending them out over a period of days or weeks.
This way, all of your customers will receive their emails at the same time, rather than receiving some emails days before others. This will help to maximize the impact of your emails.
Use urgency. Urgency is an important part of any successful marketing campaign. If you want your abandoned cart emails to be most effective, you’ll want to add an element of urgency to your emails. You can do this by telling customers that there is only a limited amount of time for them to respond to avail of the discount offer, gift card, or free addition.
Include social proof - Customers love buying things that they know worked for others. For example, if your customer has left an electronic item in their cart, you can include testimonials, stats or pictures that let the customer know how popular this product is and what they are missing out on if they do not purchase it now.
Be simple - Abandoned cart emails need to be simple and you need to ensure the most important information is above the fold so that when viewed on a mobile device, your customers are able to see what they need to without scrolling. The design should be neat, simple, and intuitive - too much is always overwhelming.
Now that you know about abandoned cart emails, you should also know that the open rate for abandoned cart emails is quite high - 45% or higher and the click-through rate is about 8-9%. However, you can’t achieve that if your emails don’t land in the Priority Inbox and go to spam. You need to make sure your prospects see your emails.
It’s important to warm-up your email domain before you start sending abandoned cart campaigns and you can use services such as Pribox to do so. Once you have a hot email domain, start sending out your email campaigns and increasing revenue!
