Working with abandoned cart automations

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Many e-commerce sales are not completed as customers don't go through with the final step—the actual purchase. An average online business misses out on over 75 % of potential sales due to people abandoning their carts. Therefore, decreasing cart abandonment is a reliable approach to recovering revenue that otherwise had been lost.

An effective way to avoid lost revenue, and consequently increase the conversion, is to remind the customers of the forgotten items a few hours or days after abandoning the cart. This strategy has been proven successful by many retailers—statistics show that these email reminders typically have an open rate of 50%, and usually 10% of customers come back to complete the purchase.

Prerequisites

Before you can start sending out abandoned cart emails, there are some things you need to have in place.

Voyado's tracking script

Web behavior tracking lets you collect data on contacts from your website based on their browsing activity, including abandoned carts. Read more about web tracking here and about the script itself on our developer site.

Product feed

Product information for the email comes from a product feed. Read more about it on our developer site. Talk to your Voyado contact if you need to implement a feed.

Email module

Design a nice-looking email module and reach out to your Voyado contact. Our best tips on how to create successful abandoned cart emails can be found here.

Getting started

Verify functionality

When the prerequisites are in place it’s a good idea to verify the functionality. That can be done by building a few simple automations which you can read more about here, and reach out to your contact at Voyado if you need any assistance.

Automation

Build the automations you want and start saving abandoned carts. Read more about how to build abandoned cart automations here, and automations in general here. If you need to communicate your message in multiple languages, take a look at this article about value splits.

Labels

Labels can be put on your contacts to categorize them based on the information you have. When it comes to Abandoned cart, it's a great way to prevent spamming by adding an “Abandoned cart“ label to all contacts that enter such flow and keeping it for a few days after any communication. If contacts with that label are excluded from other communication you have created sort of a quarantine.

Another use case where labels come in handy is when testing for example the delay of email sendout. In that case, you use one automation to divide the abandoned carts into as many groups as you like with a value split and a label activity. Then you add separate automations for each delay you would like to test and add one of the labels from the previous automation as a trigger condition. This can also be done in the same automation with a simple delay activity but in that case, the cart is not reevaluated after the delay.

Read more about labels here.

Trigger split

The timing and frequency of cart abandonment emails are vital to maximize the revenue from the automation. Sending multiple emails will increase the reach, but it’s important to check if the message is still relevant. Whether this is the case can be controlled by using a trigger split and waiting for the customers to purchase after receiving the first email. Then you can send the reminder only to customers who haven't completed a purchase after receiving the first email.

Consider the timing when receipts are sent to Voyado after purchase. If the order process is long, adjust the delay accordingly or refrain from using the technique.

Randomized split

A randomized split is a great way to create a test within an automation. The purpose is to divide incoming contacts into two or more groups that will continue on different paths. You can easily build different chains of activities for each path and follow up on how your contacts react to the different versions. Read more here.

Make sure to optimize the cart recovery. Read how to think regarding timing, repeat flow and email content in the How to succeed with your abandoned cart campaign article.

Want to know more on how to get started? Contact your Account Manager.