8 novel ideas to improve your existing abandoned cart email strategy

You may already have an abandoned cart email strategy in place, but is it enough to stay at the top of the eCommerce game? Online shopping is a happening arena, and new-age shoppers are better informed and tech savvier than ever before. This is precisely why retailers have to stay current in their cart recovery efforts. 

Cart abandonment has always been considered a stumbling block to eCommerce success, and so, a majority of brands makes no attempt to see the stunning opportunities associated with it. However, despite its staggering potential, only 19% of even the top 1,000 eCommerce companies engage in any kind of shopping cart abandonment recovery. The even sadder fact is that a considerable share of eCommerce companies who already have an existing cart recovery strategy is not upgrading their tactics to accomplish more. As an ambitious marketer, nothing concerns me as much as mediocrity. 

Given that cart abandonment is a huge problem for marketers, we’ve collected a list of 8 advanced tips and broke each in detail to help retailers upgrade their existing cart abandonment strategy. Read on to know your cart better ????. 

8 Ways to Strengthen Your Existing Cart Recovery Strategy

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is a process that demands constant improvement. Even though automation can eliminate human involvement in email marketing up to 80%, great outcomes can only be achieved through experimentation innovation. 

Grow Your Subscriber List Continuously

Needless to say, getting more email subscribers is how you scale your email marketing efforts. Even after establishing a stable email marketing automation, one has to keep capturing the email addresses of abandoned shoppers. There are different ways to get information from your website visitors without disrupting the shopping experience. 

• Run Facebook ads aimed to collect email addresses. Create a piece of valuable content that solves a problem for your target audience, and asks their basic information in exchange for the same.
• Place valuable lead magnets at appropriate pages to get the visitors to offer their information voluntarily. 
• Use exit-intent pop-ups to capture email addresses right before someone leaves the checkout. 
• Giveaway contests are a great way to collect email addresses

Last but not least, optimize the form in a way it won’t hurt the shoppers’ purchase intent. And make sure you have included only a limited number of fields. Nike’s approach towards collecting information from its customers is an ideal example of this. 

Split Test Your Subject Lines

An imperative part of sending out email campaigns is getting the recipients to open it. Subject lines are the deciding factor whether or not people are going to open your email. 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line whereas  69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. Now that you know the significance of testing your subject lines, here are some ways to efficiently perform subject line split testing. 

• Use subscribers’ names not just in the email body, but in the subject line as well. After all, emails with personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened.

• Give a first-person perspective to your abandoned cart subject lines. According to Optimizely research, emails with first-person subject lines shown a 33.9% higher conversion rate. I, We, Us, My, etc, are some of the first-person words to try,

• Add an urgency element to the subject line. A study about mobile email trends found that email subject lines with a sense of urgency had 22% higher open rates.

• Experiment with long and short subject lines. According to Yes Lifecycle Marketing, email subject lines that were between 1 and 20 characters performed the best. An average English word is 4.5 characters, which means, subject lines that were between 4-6 words did best.

One last thing about abandoned cart email subject lines: keep it interesting. Say what your recipients want to hear, and your open rates will improve before you know it. 

Create Segments Based on How Subscribers have Interacted with Your Email Campaigns

One of the general misconceptions about triggered emails is that setting up automated campaigns is the end of the story. This is so wrong that it can totally wreck your cart recovery campaign. Successful marketers engage themselves in constant optimization to make sure they bring out the best outcome from each campaign they send. So, how do they do that? 

In order to incorporate the element of personalization, modern-day marketers segment their email subscribers based on how they interact with previous campaigns. Having a sufficient amount of user-behavioral data, this can be achieved without much hassle. Let me explain this by adding some context to matter. 

• Segment your subscribers based on their preferences. Suppose that a customer is more driven towards emails that offer some lead magnets or something of value. You can provide such users with similar resources to improve your email conversions. 
• Segment subscribers who frequently engage with your emails vs. those who engage less frequently. 
• Segment subscribers into how active they are when it comes to your email campaign. Group them into either active users or inactive users. 
• Send emails segmented based on your subscribers’ level of happiness with your organization, Those with a high Net Promoter Score, for example, might provide opportunities to gather reviews, referrals, or even upsells. 
• Group your subscribers based on their position in the sales funnel. New subscribers need to be nurtured. Warm leads need to be primed for the sale and eventually sold. 
• Segment subscribers based on the change in email engagement. Sometimes people simply get busy, and they may ignore you. You must try whatever it takes to re-engage such users. 
• Another opportunity is to segment your subscribers based on the device in which they open the email. Email Monday sources several shows that 61.9% of email opens occurred on mobile in 2019.

Experiment with Email Timing and Frequency

On average, the triggered email series recaptures 29% of the abandoned shopping carts it targets, turning them into sales. There is no doubt that sending multiple cart recovery emails than sending just a single retargeting email. 

Moreover, there’s an optimal window when customers are most receptive to a cart abandonment email. Contacting abandoned shoppers too soon results in lower conversion rates, and waiting too long gets even worse results.

Still worried about low email engagement? Learn about the best time to send an email.

Improve the Offer During the Sequence

Nearly two-thirds of eCommerce brands don’t include offers in their abandoned cart emails. Not just that, some 80% of companies that do send an offer to send it in the first two emails. However, hardly anyone improves their offer during the sequence.

Escalating your offer is definitely something you can experiment with. Abandoned shoppers are high-purchase-intent customers, and that purchase intent decreases over time. There are two ways to introducing incentives. You can either hit cart abandoners with your best offer quickly or escalate the offer throughout the email sequence.

Combine Your Abandoned Cart Emails With Other Retargeting Efforts

Sometimes an abandoned cart email can’t win the battle alone. Combining your email remarketing efforts with other cart recovery strategies can boost the chances of conversions. For instance, you can run retargeting ads or incorporate exit-intent popups to support your email marketing strategy. 

With behavioral popups, you can convert visitors into leads and sales before they leave. A study published by Venture harbour, you can expect an average of 5-10% increase in conversions with a targeted popup strategy. 

Don’t Miss Out on the Chance to Recommend Other Products

There’s no actual limit to personalizing your cart recovery emails. Another great way to personalize emails is via product injections. Abandoned cart software like BayEngage can integrate product recommendations directly into the email—based on customers’ interests and preferences. A study found that product recommendations are also very effective in remarketing emails. They can lead to a 30% increase in sales conversion rates and 35% in click-through rates in such emails. A cart abandonment email is a motivator for the customer to click through. In some cases, product recommendations are an even bigger motivator than remarketing emails. Here is an example: 

To get started with this powerful feature, all you have to do is set up an abandoned cart email trigger, incorporate product recommendation block to the bottom, and then activate the workflow. Further that, every subscriber on your list that abandons a shopping cart in your store will receive a reminder to complete their transaction plus some recommendations of other products they might like as well.

Review the Results and Further Enhance Your Abandoned Cart Email 

Finally and above all, measure the results of the effort you put into cart recovery, and further improve your abandoned cart email strategy. In other words, engage in rigorous testing. 

So, what are the elements that can be tested to achieve maximum results?

• As mentioned earlier in the document, test multiple subject line variations to find out what works best for each segment of abandoned shoppers. 
• Experiment with segmentation. Group your abandoned shoppers based on order value & customer lifetime value. Offering incentives should be done based on this. 
• Test different time slots and review the results. 
• Product recommendations are known for improving email ROI and average order value. Therefore, experiment with different types of recommendations—like similar products, previously viewed, frequently bought together, and more. 

A/B testing your email campaigns is a great way to increase the open and click-through rates. In TargetBay, we even test different abandoned cart email templates against each other to see which one works best. Speaking the truth, this has so far turned out very well for us. Best of all, try our Abandoned cart software to send more targeted emails and improve your existing abandoned cart email strategy.

Wrapping Up — There’s More!

There is no limit to optimizing your cart abandonment strategy. Besides the tips that we’ve shared above, you must pay attention to the visual content too. Though you are actively communicating on your email through words, design, on the other hand, is creating a perception in the recipient’s mind. 

Another matter of concern is how well you know your customers. Keep in touch with them; reach out to your shoppers through different social channels, connect with them, build a relationship, and comprehend their interests and expectations. Cart abandonment is not merely reserved to new customers, loyal customers are likely to abandon their carts too. Your existing remarketing strategy should accommodate the interests of both parties.

Want to learn more about recovering shopping carts? Check out our ultimate guide for abandoned cart emails.