Imagine this: Adam runs an eCommerce business, which makes nearly $150k/month in revenue. However, his worries shot the roof, when his revenue reached a plateau in the last two quarters. Adam applied almost all the tips that promised record-breaking sales, still, there was hardly an improvement.
What did Adam miss out?
Probably a closer look at the analytics would list the dreaded cart abandonment rate as the culprit. The Baymard Institute study suggested that the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate has reached a whopping 69.57%. To lay this in numbers, Adam is potentially losing $350k per month on revenue to abandoned carts!
That’s mucho dinero!
One way to recoup the lost revenue is to build a Shopify abandoned cart email strategy to follow up with shoppers. Even when you have a steady stream of traffic to your site, it makes sense to leave no stone unturned to capture as much revenue as possible. After all, for the last ten years in a row, email generates the highest ROI for marketers. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.
After designing a large share of abandonment cart email strategies, we completely understand your difficulties and believe that your concerns are valid. That’s why we at TargetBay have decided to come up with an essential guide that will help you plan out your Shopify abandoned cart email campaigns, better. Now, without further ado, let’s jump in to see how you can get your almost-lost sales back.
Important Questions Before Building a Perfect Cart Recovery Strategy
Cart abandonment by a shopper can take place due to a number of reasons. However, it’s not necessary for the reasons to be the same for all the businesses. But, before building the campaign, you should also figure out the trigger that pushes consumers to leave your site, be it a long checkout process or constant pop-ups. Whatever reasons be it, there are many variables that need to be tweaked when you decide to build a series of trigger emails. Thus, before you sit down to chalk a killer abandoned cart email strategy, it is essential to ask questions and get answers for it.
- When’s the best time to send an abandoned cart email?
- What makes your Shopify abandoned cart email effective?
If you are clear about your business goals and answers, then building a killer strategy will be a cake-walk. So, let’s quickly get started.
How to Build the Perfect Strategy?
Before jumping into the nitty-gritty, let us take a deep dive into our go-to Shopify abandoned cart recovery email sequence that would help you bring it all together. Plus, this sequence will help you get a bird’s eye view of the pertinent abandoned cart email strategy along with a comprehensive view of the best practices to follow through.
Let’s dive in to find out the sequence of the abandoned cart email you should be sending in:
Abandoned Cart Email #1 – Reminder Email
- When should you send it? Within 30 minutes to 1 hour after cart abandonment.
- What should be the email type? It can be a mix of plain text and pictures.
- What should be the Subject line? The tone should extend a helping hand, asking the customers, if they need any assistance.
- What should be the focus? The focus should be to provide enough help and the right customer service.
Our internal analysis reveals that the best time to send the first Shopify abandoned cart email is between 30 minutes to 1 hour while your consumer is still afresh and clearly on the phone.
Reminding and contacting your cart abandoners too soon or too late can lower the conversion rates. A customer-centric approach will help you make a difference and identify problems with your checkout process to help you fix the issues ASAP.
Industry Example:
What works in these emails?
- This email is brief and the sender is offering a helping hand to the customers before including a Call to Action button.
- The personalized (“Hi, Jeremy” in the above example ) plain text email only helps you go notch up to increase the email open rate.
- This email reminds shoppers with witty text about the products they had left in the cart along with providing a direct link to their cart. Using links highly relevant to the content will likely increase the click-through.
- The casual conversation nature in the Shopify Abandoned cart email template copy helps to reinstate the personal touch to attract customers. The P.S. works like a charm.
- This email copy reminds the customers that their first instinct is right and provides confidence to the user’s decision.
Abandoned Cart Email #2 – Play by Your Brand USP’s
- When should you send it? Within 24 hours after abandonment.
- What should be the email type? It can be a mix of plain text and pictures.
- What should be the Subject line? The email subject line should clearly state the brand standpoints and how your brand is different.
- What should be the focus? This Shopify abandoned cart recovery email should be focused on to walk the customer through your brand strengths.
Even when the first email looks to be most effective, a single abandoned cart email is clearly not enough. A second and third email helps you recapture the revenue left behind on the table.
Industry Example:
What works in this email?
- The look and feel of the email match with the product page which helps you to excite the customer all over again and remind them of their previous enthusiasm.
- The tweak in the CTA from “Buy Now” to “Return to My Cart” only helps you as your customers realize that you are not trying to sell hard.
- Plus, adding an extra support button provides confidence to the customers to get in touch if there is by any chance a problem arises
- This Shopify abandoned cart email stands out because of the marvelous hero shot of its product.
- There is no mention of a discount as it would come up in the last abandoned cart email.
Abandoned Cart Email #3 – Dole up your email with discounts
- When should you send it? 3 days after the customer abandoned the cart.
- What should be the email type? It should be a mix of text, product shots, and catchy taglines.
- What should be the essence of the subject line? The tone of the subject line should be able to grab the attention of your customers in a few seconds. Also, don’t forget to add the discount deal.
- What should be the focus of the email? Your Shopify abandoned cart email template should adhere to brand goals but also offer a deal sweetener for the new users.
Industry Example:
What worked in this email?
- Again, this abandoned cart email adheres to all the brand goals and still showcase the product as the hero.
- The unique one-time discount deal for the new customers is surely a winner.
- It also shows the urgency and coerces the customer to purchase as the deal by setting a timeline.
Now that we have seen the industry example of the best Shopify Abandoned cart recovery email designed to convert your nearly lost customers into shoppers, let’s now take a deep dive into the best practices that would eventually help you build the perfect strategy.
6 Best Practises for the Abandoned Cart Email Strategy
1. Customer-Centric Approach Adds the Most Value
As much as you need the timing to be right, it’s vital to speak to your customers in the right tone. The customer-centric approach in your Shopify abandoned cart email template will help you leave a lasting impact on the customer and you’ll be able to get qualitative feedback, even when the customer doesn’t make a purchase.
Industry Example:
In this email template, the friendly tone in the email helps the business to talk to the point and not beat around the bush. Plus, a clear-cut CTA would also help you stay ahead of the curve and convert more abandoners to shoppers.
2. Reduce Buying Friction by Using Data Collection and Dynamic Content
Another very important deal to address is removing any form of barriers that might pose a threat to your revenue. Your customer might not even come back for the third time, if they encounter a problem at any given point, be at the first time or right after receiving one abandoned cart email.
Industry Example:
This Shopify abandoned cart email from Peak Design showcases how to take care of such small barriers by using dynamic content insertion and data that would make it a cakewalk for your customers to make the purchase.
3. Use Session Regeneration
Adding features like a quick session regeneration in the abandoned cart email helps the customer to complete the purchase in a few clicks and help remove any form of indecisiveness from the customer’s mind. After all, your customer wouldn’t want to make that extra effort to refill their cart and instead opt-out from the purchase.
4. Add Alternatives According to the Customer’s Shopping Behaviour
Your abandoned cart emails should also have a few extra alternatives to the products chosen from customers’ shopping behavior. This would not only help to add an extra personalization or humane touch but also help make your customer feel special and only notch up your brand trust among the users. So, step up and add more specifics to the email, to help it perform better.
5. Optimize Your Emails According to Devices
The 2019 State of Email Report from Litmus revealed that 43% of all promotional emails that are opened on mobile devices. Plus, these emails were opened across multiple devices which makes it important to have a consistent user experience.
Thus, to remove any form of inconsistencies in the brand experience across several devices, it’s essential to optimize your emails. So, along with making your Shopify Abandoned cart email template readable, try to make your CTA’s and links also stand out. Check out this example from Frank and Oak and have a look at how similar their user experiences would be on multiple devices.
6. Capture customer emails
Before anything, capturing your customer email id is crucial. Instead of focusing on gathering too much information about your potential customers, getting hold off your customer’s email id is enough to help you follow up with them till eternity. Plus, too many clicks and forms might also push away your consumers. Thus, just this single piece of information would be a great way to help you target, retarget, and market your products/services.
7. Segment your Shopify cart abandonment emails
Although offering discounts and sending out abandoned cart emails make sense, you wouldn’t want to send it to the customers who regularly abandon your cart in lieu of discounts. That’s why the smart business strategy would be to identify and segment the customers. Plus, if you already have data in place and captured enough customer email id, then nothing like it.
With the help of several marketing platforms like TargetBay, you would be able to understand various aspects like which customers clicked on a given email, who visited your store, etc. and the list goes on.
8. Nail the inbox experience
If you want to boost your open rate, it’s essential to step up your game and nail the Shopify abandoned cart recovery email inbox experience, as an average email user may receive 126 emails in a day according to this Projections show. So, grabbing your consumer eyeballs among the other 125 emails plays a vital role.
8.1 Use a friendly From Name and email address
It’s important to send the abandoned cart email from a live monitored email address, as it helps customers to identify it as a genuine address and also respond back to it if they face any issue. A rule of thumb is “Name at Brand” or “Name| Brand”, like this example from Jen.brand@brand.com
Adding a personalized style email like along with a customer support number would help you humanize the interaction and build enough trust. However, avoid using no-reply@brand.com because it only makes your emails look cold and impersonal which can surely turn your customer away.
8.2 Click-worthy Subject Lines
Witty subject lines that are just not promotional, but helpful, catchy works the best. Take a look here to know subject lines help you make your email click-worthy and reduce the bounce rate. Reinventing and stepping up your content wheel will only help you gain more consumers and complete purchases.
9. Personalize your cart abandonment emails
Personalization gives you 6x higher conversion rates and the key is in the details. Try to personalize products too, and set it up so that your Shopify abandoned cart emails dynamically insert the specific products that your customer had in their cart into the cart abandonment email itself.
This email by Skinspace does a great job:
The abandoned cart email matches the look & feel of the product page and prominently displays the image of the product to remind customers of their initial excitement. After all, a picture always speaks louder than words.
10. Say No to All Image Emails
All image emails in this era are a big no-no. Important information should always be listed in the text format rather than an image and images should only be used to make it attractive and brand-oriented. Plus, with the advent of technology, it’s important that your Shopify abandoned cart recovery mail is able to match up to the technological advancements. For instance, now Alexa can read your emails for you and it will ignore images and image alt text in favor of the ones who would send a normal text. Plus, if your consumer’s connectivity is not so great, the email may just stay in buffer mode and you would never be able to recover the lost revenues.
The Bottom Line
It’s a no-brainer that not proactively doing anything about the cart abandonments can lead to revenue loss. So, now that you have extensive knowledge of the best practices and the right strategy in place for how to build your absolute killer Shopify abandoned cart email, you can win back shoppers big time. Although the strategy might need a little tweaking and time according to your business goals, the revenue it generates pays off all the effort. As the customer’s expectations change, try changing your emails and brand voice to reach out and convert more shoppers.
Best of all, try our Abandoned cart software to send more targeted emails and improve your existing abandoned cart email strategy.
