Cart Abandonment Emails – Best Practices You Must Follow

As the holiday season approaches, you must have already set up your triggered email campaigns. The success of your campaigns depends on how you set your brand apart from the competition during the peak season. For an e-commerce business, this is a big time and the rush of online traffic during this period is the most suitable for gaining brand visibility.

Unfortunately, not all of those who check out your products will end up buying them. They might add them to the cart and still not finish the purchase. Cart abandonment happens to the best of the brands and since most of the online shopping happens around this time, cart abandonment too is most common during the holidays.

To combat the situation, you need to run effective cart recovery campaigns to bring them back to the products that they were once interested in, and persuade them to complete the purchase. A study from Soundest shows that automated cart recovery emails witness 34% more open rates, 7% more click rates and 1.8% more order rate.

So, while you are preparing for this year’s holiday email campaigns, you also need to focus on cart abandonment emails. In this blog, we take you through the best practices you need to follow to design the perfect cart abandonment campaign.

Cart Abandonment Email Best Practices

Crafting the perfect cart-abandonment email is no rocket science but in order to ensure that you have created the perfect email template design, let’s take a look at the best practices you need to follow:

1. Send emails at the right time

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year and the customers’ inbox is cluttered with holiday promotional emails throughout the season. Sending your cart abandonment emails at the right time works in your favor. It is ideally recommended to send the first cart abandonment email within 1-3 hours of abandonment. Send the second follow-up email a day after and a final email in the series within 72 hours of the abandonment. Follow your sales cycle and tailor the follow-up messages accordingly.

2. Use attention-grabbing subject lines

Good subject lines get clicked! The subject line of your cart abandonment email needs to be intriguing and insightful enough to make the abandoner open the email. You only have few words to get the subscriber to open the email, so make it as catchy, sleek and captivating as possible. Some of the popular cart abandonment email subject lines are as follows:

• Hey [name], you left something behind!
• Forgot something?
• Hurry! We’re holding your cart for 24 hours!
• Free Shipping for items in your cart!
• Take another look!
• You left items in your cart.
• Complete your purchase!
• Your cart misses you!
• Did you forget to finish your order?

Also, with more subscribers opening their emails on their mobile phones, it is necessary that you keep the subject lines short. Make them customized to grab attention, create a sense of urgency by mentioning that the item is selling out fast and make use of intriguing emojis to stand out.

3. Highlight the abandoned products

Send tailor-made emails that remind the prospective customers about the products they were looking for and their interaction with your brand. Highlight the product image, color, and other specifications and give a link that would take them to the exact product page on your website, making it easy for them to buy.

You can also cross-sell similar products or most popular products that would complement the product in the cart. Recommend different color options of the product or show similar products that they may like and buy. This helps in broadening the horizon of your brand, especially during the peak holiday season.

4. Use dynamic and personalized content

Segregate the cart abandoners based on what made them do so by studying their shopping habits, browsing history, purchase behavior, etc. For example, for those who might have abandoned due to high shipping costs, offer them free shipping and for first-time visitors, offer an extra discount over the holiday offers.

Reward the loyalty of your regular customers by providing free or express shipping and discounts on the abandoned items. Send tailored emails to your customers and make sure the copy of your email is customer-centric and addresses their emotions and impulse.

5. Make the CTA prominent

The CTA of your cart abandonment email must be compelling and bold as it is the only action you want your customers to take in the email. Make it obvious and inviting by using bold colors and fonts that complement the theme. The CTA should be action-oriented for example “Complete Checkout”, ‘Finish your Order”, “Go to my Cart”, “View Products”, “Continue Shopping”, “Buy Now”, etc. Test the CTA well to make sure it renders consistently across all platforms.

Wrapping Up

Find out what works well for your brand by combining different design elements and monitoring their impact on your cart abandonment email campaign. Remember that there is too much revenue unclaimed in your carts during the holidays and you need to make the most of your cart abandonment email campaigns especially during this time.

Need help in designing and coding cart abandonment emails for your brand? Uplers are here to help! Get in touch with us and send in your requirements.