Driving traffic to your ecommerce website is no easy feat. It requires extensive efforts in paid advertisements, SEO optimization, and providing a seamless user experience. However, all your hard work can go to waste if potential customers abandon their shopping carts. Almost 70% of shopping carts are abandoned on average.” But fear not, there’s a solution: abandoned cart emails. These automated emails not only remind customers to complete their purchase but also offer personalized content and attractive incentives to increase conversion rates. In this article, we’ll explore the best practices for creating effective cart abandonment emails that can help your ecommerce store recover lost sales, boost revenue, and foster customer loyalty.
Common Reasons for Cart Abandonment
Before diving into the best practices, let’s explore some common reasons why customers abandon their carts. By understanding these pain points, you can address them in your cart abandonment flow and minimize future cart abandonments:
- Complicated checkout pages: A confusing and lengthy checkout process can discourage customers from completing their purchase. Implementing a single-page checkout and enabling guest checkout can streamline the process and enhance efficiency.
- High shipping costs: Unexpectedly high shipping fees often lead customers to abandon their carts. Providing transparent shipping cost estimates upfront or offering free shipping can alleviate this concern.
- Better deals elsewhere: If customers find better deals or a more user-friendly experience on a competitor’s website, they might abandon their carts. Ensure your pricing strategy and website experience are competitive and appealing to retain customers.
- Technical website problems: Glitches, slow-loading pages, and non-responsive designs can frustrate customers and discourage them from checking out. Regularly test and optimize your ecommerce site to provide a seamless experience across all devices.
- The customer isn’t ready: Not all cart abandonments are preventable. Some customers may simply be browsing or not yet ready to make a purchase. Sending cart abandonment emails keeps your brand top of mind for when they are ready to buy.
Why is This Flow So Effective?
Abandoned cart emails are highly effective in recovering lost sales and boosting conversions for ecommerce businesses. Here’s why:
- Capitalizing on Purchase Intent: Customers who abandon their carts have already shown a strong intent to purchase. Abandoned cart emails allow you to re-engage these customers and remind them of the products they were interested in, increasing the chances of conversion.
- Addressing Hesitations: Sometimes, customers abandon their carts due to specific hesitations or concerns. Abandoned cart emails provide an opportunity to address these concerns directly, offering additional information, incentives, or personalized offers to overcome any hesitation and encourage customers to complete their purchase.
- Gathering Feedback: Abandoned cart emails serve as a valuable feedback mechanism, allowing you to gather insights into the reasons behind cart abandonment. This feedback helps you optimize your emails, improve the customer experience, and refine your marketing strategies.
How to Setup Abandoned Cart Abandonment Flow in Klaviyo?
- Go to the Flows tab in your Klaviyo account.
- Click Create Flow.
- Search by “abandonment cart” to customize the type of flow you start with.
- Select any prebuilt tempelate or you can create from scratch.
- The trigger is checkout started.
- We recommend to add conditional splits. For example, if the cart is abandoned by an existing customer, you might just want to send the reminder. But if it is done by first time buyer, you might want to offer some discounts.
- We also recommend to have trigger splits for low vs high cart value. You might want to set minimum cart value in order to offer discounts.
- It is good practice to add the conditional split of ‘placed order after starting this flow’ after each email in your abandoned cart series to improve your email deliverability.
- In case some customers do not complete their purchase even after going through the entire email series, you can update their profile property to track the progress.
Abandoned Cart Email Best Practices
Now that we understand the reasons behind cart abandonment, let’s explore the best practices for creating effective abandoned cart emails that can entice customers to complete their purchases:
- Send abandoned cart emails promptly: Timing is crucial. Send the first abandoned cart email within 24 hours of the customer leaving your site to maximize your chances of recovering the sale. Include a list of abandoned items, recommendations for other products, and special offers or discounts.
- Keep the email design simple and clean: Opt for a simple yet eye-catching design that clearly communicates the purpose of the email. Include personalized content such as abandoned item images with hyperlinks, a clear call-to-action (CTA) to complete the purchase, and additional product recommendations.
- Personalize the subject line and email copy: Personalization is key to capturing the customer’s attention. Craft subject lines that mention the abandoned products or offer discounts and incentives. Use engaging copy that aligns with the customer’s interests and prompts them to take action.
- Use engaging product images: High-quality product images create excitement and help customers visualize their potential purchase. Ensure the images accurately represent the product and highlight its features. Consider adding labels like “Hurry! Low stock!” to create a sense of urgency.
- Include a clear CTA: The CTA should be attention-grabbing and direct, encouraging the recipient to complete their purchase. Use clear and action-oriented phrases like “Complete your purchase” or “Get your order now.” Infuse a sense of urgency with a deadline or limited-time offer.
- Provide incentives: Incentives help overcome initial hesitation and persuade customers to complete their purchase. Offer free shipping, exclusive discounts, or giveaways to make customers feel they are getting a great deal and encourage them to finalize their purchase.
- Use social proof: Leverage social proof to build trust and credibility. Highlight customer testimonials, showcase user-generated content, and display star ratings or total sales figures to demonstrate the popularity and quality of your products.
- Offer tailored customer support: Analyze customer behavior and address any issues they may have encountered during the checkout process. Include customer support contact information and offer assistance to resolve any concerns or technical difficulties.
- A/B test different email templates: Experiment with different email templates by A/B testing them to determine which version yields the highest open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Continuously optimize your templates until you find the most engaging and effective design.
- Track your results: Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, time spent reading the email, and conversions. Make adjustments to your subject lines, CTAs, or images based on the data to improve your email performance.
Source: Klaviyo
Some Example Emails
Conclusion
Implementing an effective cart abandonment flow is essential for ecommerce businesses to recover lost sales, boost revenue, and improve customer experiences. By utilizing cart abandonment emails, you can personalize your communication, offer incentives, and build customer relationships. Remember to create a series of emails, time them appropriately, use compelling subject lines, showcase abandoned products, and provide multiple channels for customer support. With careful planning and optimization, your abandoned cart emails can become a powerful tool in increasing conversions and maximizing your ecommerce store’s success.
