Five lesser-known tips on abandoned cart recovery you’re probably not doing
If you’re struggling to get your abandoned cart recovery to work, you’re not alone.
Cart abandonment affects every ecommerce store, and we at Recapture are extremely familiar with your pain. We’ve spent the last six years learning and mastering strategies for abandoned cart recovery to boost revenue for Shopify stores. Since our launch, we’ve recovered over $200,000,000 and processed well over $2 billion in gross merchant volume. Today, we’ll spill our top five industry secrets based on our years of data to help make your abandoned cart email campaigns more successful so you can really bring home the bacon.
Tip #1: Ditch your fear of sending too many emails.
Based on our data of thousands of customers on Recapture, we noticed a disturbing trend. Most merchants don’t send more than one abandoned cart email to their potential customers. Which left us wondering: why would you not send more?
We get it, you don’t want to overwhelm your email subscriber list that you worked so hard to build. But you could be doing more. Merchants who only send one follow-up email to their customers may get some purchases on their abandoned cart campaigns, but that should be the start, not the end. Our data shows one thing in common across all successful stores in Recapture: multiple abandoned cart emails.
Here’s a screenshot from our demo store, which is anonymized data from a real, live store on Recapture. They’ve used Recapture since 2017, and you can see why they’ve been so loyal by the success of their email campaigns.
This store sends three abandoned cart emails, and historically, the first email has recovered over $417,000 since the campaign launch in 2017.
This figure by itself is impressive, but they didn’t just send one email campaign. The second two emails combined made an additional $721,000. That’s 175% more revenue recovered from the second two emails just because they followed up two more times.
This result is not unique or special. According to our customer data, on average the merchants who send three emails make at least 100% more revenue in their abandoned cart recovery than those merchants who send just one email. The money is in the follow-up.
Tip #2: Know your customer’s biggest objections and respond before they even think about them.
Socrates once quipped, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom,” but in ecommerce, knowing your customers is the beginning of the sale. Your abandoned cart campaign strategy should address your customer’s objections and answer them in advance.
Things like:
Do I know this company well enough to buy?
Do I like what they have to sell?
Can I trust them to send my products on time and in good condition?
This “Know-Like-Trust” sequence can’t be avoided, but you can help move the customer along quickly along their buying journey.
When you have abandoned carts, the customer already likes your product enough to add something to a cart, but maybe they’re having trouble with the trust or the knowing part. You can help address their questions using your abandoned cart emails.
In your first email, let them know how to find help to any support-related questions. Provide clear ways to contact your store via email, chat, phone, carrier pigeon (please don’t do this one), or whatever you prefer. Build trust and let them know you’d love to hear from them, but don’t stop there; use proactive support.
If you have a support team, get the top three to five questions they most frequently answer and place the questions/answers right in the email. Or, if you have an FAQ page on your site, make sure that it is clearly linked in your first and second emails.
Lastly, the best way to ensure new customers trust you more is to show them how previous customers feel about you. Add reviews and testimonials from happy buyers directly in your second email. Link back to the actual review, so they know you’re not making this up.
Tip #3: Save the discount for the last email.
Ever get the same email from a store over and over? Did it convince you to buy or bore you to death? That’s the sequence we see all too often at Recapture. Afraid they’ll lose the customer if they don’t offer a discount right away, merchants send the discount in the first email. And then just repeat that discount again and again for the next ones (if they send them at all)!
Once a customer receives the discount code, they’re going to lose interest in your future abandoned cart emails. Always save the discount for the last email of the sequence. There’s one exception to this rule–and that’s using a Discount Ladder. If your profit margins support it, and you want to entice your customers a little bit more each email, you can offer progressively bigger discounts. For example:
Email 1: 10% discount
Email 2: 15% discount
Email 3: 20% discount (final email)
Customers expect that abandoned cart emails contain discounts, so when you offer them, it should be the best offer you can afford. When using a discount ladder, you can expect that customers who just want the discount will mostly buy after Email 1, but those really on the fence will wait until Email 3, and everyone ends up happy! Just make sure your profit margin isn’t so thin that these discounts ruin profitability.
Tip #4: Pick engaging, unique subject lines.
You probably received enough abandoned cart emails to know what subject lines are overused. Things like
“We’ve saved your cart!”
“Oops, you forgot something…”
Or the ever compelling: “Your cart is waiting”
Everyone is bored by these. We hate to be harsh, but you have to do better. And you can do better because you know your audience better than anyone else, right? (RIGHT?) Find compelling subject lines that your audience would find interesting, funny, or relevant. Here are some examples:
Take Adidas’s strategy, where they assume you lost your WiFi connection and didn’t finish your purchase:
Subject line: Sorry to hear about your Wi-Fi.
Adidas is making a play on lost connections and your abandoned cart but in a clever way. It’s compelling without being cheesy.
Here’s another if you sell food/consumables: “We don’t want you to go hungry!” You could follow it up with another couple of subject lines like, “Should we put this back in the fridge?” or “Can we give that to Lora instead?” to help instill a fear of missing out, all while keeping with a food theme.
Lastly, use every tool available to you–most abandoned cart services (including Recapture) allow you to set the Preview Text of the email. According to Email Blaster UK, over 60% of all email opens happen on a mobile device. And mobile devices also heavily use the Preview Text feature in addition to the subject line. If your preview text is empty, you’re missing out on a crucial bit of real estate to help convince customers to open your email. Don’t skip that important line of text, it could make the difference between “open” and “ignore” by your customers.
Tip #5: Use a service that supports both abandoned carts and abandoned checkouts (yes, there’s a difference!)
Did you know that there are two types of abandoned carts in a store? Most merchants don’t! Abandoned checkouts happen when a customer adds items to their cart, visits your checkout page, and fails to complete their order with payment.
By contrast, an abandoned cart happens when the customer adds something to the cart and then simply leaves your store. They don’t go to the checkout page at all. Both types of abandonments happen in your store all the time, but Shopify’s abandoned cart email only tracks abandoned checkouts.
Abandoned carts represent a substantial number of customers that you could reach out to and secure a purchase. Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t help with this, but Recapture does! To get the most profit out of your recovery email campaigns use a service that tracks BOTH abandoned carts and checkouts, like Recapture.
