How To Create A High-Converting Automated Abandoned Cart Email Series For Shopify
If you have been reading my blog posts you probably know how much I stress having a GOOD email marketing strategy implemented for your eCommerce store. Email marketing can generate a ton of sales for your business if done correctly and it doesn’t have to be a lot of work either thanks to email automation. In a recent blog post, I talked about how to create a highly engaging welcome series for your store which is very important but something else just as important to your email marketing strategy is having a high-converting abandoned cart series. Everyone knows (or everyone in eCommerce) that customers will always be adding items to their cart and then leave without purchasing. Just check out this chart below that shows the percentage of carts that are abandoned by a customer in a year.
The goal of an abandoned cart series is to try and get some of that lost revenue back by following up with the potential buyer with reminders, support, and incentives. An abandoned cart is considered when a customer adds an item(s) to their cart, proceeds to checkout and enters in their email address but then stops going any further with the checkout. There are many reasons why a customer may abandon their cart, for example, a customer may have started their purchase on a mobile device and had a hard time checking out so they stopped, maybe they were just about to purchase and their lunch break finished or possibly they went to make a purchase but left their credit card somewhere.
There are endless possibilities of why people did not finish their purchase but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to purchase from you. This is why following up with them is very crucial because it reminds them about their purchase and gets them back to your store. In my experience, an automated 3-part abandoned cart series has always proven to convert the best so I will walk you through my strategy and structure of each email.
For All Emails In The Series
The main thing to remember when making any of the three emails (and I can’t stress this enough) is personalize them to your brand! If you send out the boring generic abandoned cart emails your open rates and click rates will suffer greatly. Make the subject line unique to the brand and make it so the customer wants to open the email to see what's inside. If a customer sees “ you left something behind” or “ did you forget this in your cart” they will know right away what the email is about and they might not click on it as they likely get a lot of similar emails. To give you an example a client of mine sells CPAP Machines (they help you sleep) so we use the subject line “Did you fall asleep on us?”. This relates to their brand and also generates some curiosity and question of what could this email be about. Here are the stats on this email.
Just like the subject line you want to also personalize the message in the email body to fit your brand as well. If you spent a lot of effort writing the perfect subject line to get a customer to open the email, don’t lose them with a very boring and poorly structured email that says “ here’s what you left behind, come back to finish your purchase”. Again to refer back to my client that sells CPAP Machines check out our opening paragraph in this email we did.
See how that feels a lot more personal and directed at you? That is what you want to aim for. You want to make sure your email is full of all the best practices to maximize your conversions, below I’ll explain best practices for all three emails in the series.
EMAIL #1 (Sent 1–3hrs after the cart is abandoned)
One thing that I see many merchants do wrong is to give away a discount in the very first email of their abandoned cart, this is not the worst thing you could do but you are likely costing yourself some $$$. In email one, the main focus is just reminding the customer about the items they abandoned and providing customer service. You want to make sure the email has a bit of an intro (not too long) then display the items they left behind with call to actions (CTAs). Below where the items are displayed in the email write a sentence or two about how a customer can reach your store (ie phone, live chat, email) if they have any questions about the purchase. You want to avoid having any links that would take the customer away from their cart in this email, these are things like related items or recommended products. Links that would take the customer away from their cart just serve as a distraction, the goal of this email is to drive them back to the cart and that’s it.
Email #2 (Sent 24hrs after the first email is sent)
Email #2 shares a lot of the same best practices as Email #1 but with a few small additions. First thing is you want to make sure your email is personalized to the brand again (no getting sloppy on the following emails). Second thing is this is the time to introduce a discount to your abandoned cart email series. Personally, my favorite strategy is to give them a 10% off coupon on the second email, something to entice them to purchase. You also want to create urgency in the second email and that is easy to do when you offer them a discount. A good best practice to create urgency is to give them a time limit on when the discount expires (usually 24hrs).
The second email is also a good time to introduce some social proof. Just like Email #1 you want to have a few sentence intro but this time under the intro give them a CTA right away to take them back to the cart. After the CTA add in the items left behind and then a sentence about support (just like Email #1). But this time at the bottom of the email add in some pictures from your Instagram account of people using your product or add in some reviews, this will create more trust with your customers. A big reason why customers abandon their cart is lack of trust with a brand, so by showing them some images of people using the product or some reviews could be exactly what they were looking for.
Email #3 (Sent 2–3 days after the second email)
This email is the last one in the series of abandoned cart emails and personally, my strategy here is to make the discount a little higher than email #2. This is your last shot at getting the customer to convert so you hit them with everything you got and really push urgency in this email ie this is your last chance at a discount and your cart will expire in 24hrs. The structure of this email differs from Email #1 and #2 , at this point, you can assume that the customer has likely seen one of the first two emails so keep this third one straight to the point. Write a few sentences about the discount, push urgency and give them a CTA to click on right away to take them back to their cart. By having minimal content in the email this means the CTA will be visible when the email is opened in the inbox, giving a better chance of customer clicking it (the less scrolling to get to a CTA the better).
To finish up this blog I want to add that the strategy I listed above is not the only strategy you can follow for an abandoned cart series. This strategy is the one I find works the best for most brands I work with, but there are so many ways to tweak this strategy to best suit your needs. This is also one of the more straightforward setups that’s easy for most people to follow, you can add endless amounts of conditions and segments to get the maximum conversions out of your abandoned carts. You can also set up a second abandoned cart series for customers who have already purchased with you before, that way they don’t get those same discounts again. Check out this more elaborate abandoned cart series I’ve set up for a client.
Like always if you have any questions feel free to leave comments or you can always contact me at brent@onlygrowth.com and I’d be happy to give you a FREE 30 min email audit and help provide you with some strategy.
Or sign up for your free site audit at https://onlygrowth.com
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