4 Steps to Building a Cart Recovery Email Strategy

Cart abandonment is astonishingly common for e-commerce businesses. A recent study from the Baynard Institute found that close to 70% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. That means that only about 1 in every 4 customers finishes their purchase. Given these stats, you can easily see that fixing your cart abandonment can give you a hefty push towards increasing your sales!!

Why don’t people complete a purchase? The quick answer is that something is holding them back. Financially, your customer may be unable to make the purchase and will revisit the idea of buying when they have more money. Uncertainty is another common reason that your customers abandon their cart. Getting distracted is another reason.

Is your business following up with the 70% of the people that abandoned? Do you try to re-engage these customers so that they are encouraged back to your website to complete the sale? If not, take some time to read on… you might be able to get 70% more sales just by implementing a cart recovery strategy.

We’ve done the challenging work and found 4 easy things that you can do to help improve cart abandonment.

1. Segmenting your users and having specific communications

Segmentation is crucial to slicing and dicing your cart abandoners so that you can follow up with tailored messages based on where they are in the client lifecycle. The reason a new buyer could desert their cart can be varied from the factor a dedicated consumer may not finish their acquisition.

By segmenting your abandoners right into various categories like new abandoners, repeat abandoners, and existing customers that abandon, you can send out extra relevant messages.

Bear in mind, haul recovery is a fight, and segmentation is the sword that can aid you to win the fight.

2. Subject Line

Make your subject lines specific and friendly “you left something in your cart?” could sound accusatory. Your main aim should be to build a stronger relationship with your customer. Your email is simply a friendly reminder. You should also create urgency where you can. For example, let’s say you have a sale that ends today. Your cart abandonment email might say, “Hi Sarah, we noticed left a few items in your cart and our sale ends in 4 hours!”.

3. Personalise

“Hey Jess, it’s in the bag!” or “We only have one Sally skirt left in red, don’t miss it” are email headlines that personalise and grab attention. People are generally more likely to open an email that contains their name in the subject line. Personalisation is also relatively easy – so you should always look at personalising your cart recovery emails wherever possible.

4. Send more than one

Your first cart recovery email can successfully boost your conversions; often greater success can be achieved with more than one recovery email. A great rule of thumb is to send a reminder, then a second email creating urgency and then if it suits your business, a third email offering an incentive to purchase. This process might look something like this:

• 24 hours after cart abandonment, a reminder email is sent, “Hi Amy, we noticed you left a few items in your cart”
• If Amy does not complete the sale (and items are still abandoned in her cart), another email is sent 3 days later, “Hi Amy, there’s only 2 shoes left in your size! Complete your purchase now to avoid missing out!”
• If Amy still doesn’t purchase, a third (and final) email is sent 4 days later, “Hi Amy, buy today and receive 10% off your cart! Buy Now!”

This type of email abandonment journey gives the customer multiple communications to complete their purchase through tiered urgency, starting with a basic “please complete your purchase” to a final “we’ll give you a discount to complete”.

Creating a cart recovery strategy is an extremely important step for any e-commerce store. While it’s unlikely that you can “save” the full 70% of customers who may abandon your cart, even saving a small percentage of these can drastically improve sales. The best part is, an email cart recovery process is simple to implement and relatively automated. While it may take some time to set up, once it has been implemented, it’s very low management – making it simple for all businesses to manage. Want help with setting up a Cart Recovery Email Strategy? Contact Us to get started or read more about email marketing here.