‘Abandoned cart email options everywhere. Not a proper email for the expected fix!’
The cart abandonment rate in 2021 keeps rising, rising, and rising and has hit a whopping rate of 88.05%. Don’t be so positive about bringing down this number. It’s definitely not coming down any time soon.
Having an old WooCommerce abandoned cart email sequence is no longer enough! The strategy is the same but we need to spice it up a bit to compete in the current scenario.
Why Do Shoppers Abandon Their Carts?
Before we deep-dive into the reasons, let us quickly understand what shopping cart abandonment is. This never gets old! Understanding shopping cart abandonment deeply is essential to create strategies not just for WooCommerce abandoned cart email but for any abandoned cart email.
When the users add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase and leave the website, the shopping cart page is considered abandoned.
Baymard’s recent survey identified several reasons for cart abandonment. Here’s a list of some of the most common reasons:
The top three reasons being – unexpected additional costs, checkout processes involving account creation, and a long or complex process. This study does not even talk about the reasons related to buyer psychology in an online store. If you want to know more about the psychological reasons that lead to shopping cart abandonment, have a look at our blog on The Psychology Behind Cart Abandonment.
As a shocking fact, the cart abandonment rate during Holiday Season jumps nearly to 75%, when the traffic is usually high and the urge to comparison shop is even higher. The message is pretty simple here: you’re losing potential customers.
On the other hand, we have a good aspect to focus here:
Some of those potential customers might return to complete the purchase if you send out a well-timed WooCommerce abandoned cart email sequence.
What’s wrong with many automated cart recovery systems?
Most of the WooCommerce cart abandonment extensions consider all users equally and treat them the same – whether they’re guest users or not.
The problem here is you either offer a blanket discount to everyone or worse to no one! There are no avenues for incentivizing them based on criteria such as item(s) tried to buy, order total, used a coupon code already, etc.
The more you offer a discount every time a user abandons the order, your system conditions them to expect the same every single time ahead.
That doesn’t mean offering discount coupons as a whole needs to be halted. Finding the mid-ground here is the key. Let’s say, their cart total is above a set threshold, then you can offer a proper discount to convert them before your cut-off time.
Tackling cart abandonment can be tricky. It is important to study the behavioral patterns of your customers while analyzing cart abandonment. This helps you create multiple cart abandonment emails that speak to each individual reason.
If you’re new to understanding customer behavioral patterns, we should understand Conversion Rate Optimization. We will be discussing more on this in our upcoming blogs. But we will give you a quick sneak peek on how to understand them.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
When marketers talk about conversion rate optimization, they indicate improving—as much as possible—the way customers move through all three of the following stages:
- Discover: learning about your products or service – also known as demand generation.
- Choose: taking the next step towards purchase. In eCommerce terms, this typically means landing on your website.
- Purchase: when someone becomes a customer. For a WooCommerce store, this means a completed checkout!
Ensuring your customer goes through all these stages until the checkout is complete without leaving the funnel will help you increase your conversion rate.
How to create a high-performing WooCommerce cart abandonment email?
#1 Get the timing right
The timing of your cart abandonment email is vital. You cannot afford to miss sending your first WooCommerce Abandoned cart email after an hour of abandonment. The longer you wait, the higher chance you will lose the shopper. The shopping urge that caused the shopper to add the item to their cart in the first place is still active and alive at this stage.
You’re still at the top of their mind, so it’s important to strike that chord now. Industry experts are also vouching to include SMS for abandoned automation.
#2 Use interesting and impactful subject lines
Your subject line needs to be interesting and impactful to grab the attention of the customer and increase open and click rates.
But that doesn’t mean you need to play with jargon. This will annoy your customers. Include ‘free shipping’ for customers while offering discounts to complete their purchase. Little efforts such as these can really work in your favor.
With WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, it’s best to get straight to the point! (It is the straight way or the highway!)
#3 Always show the abandoned product
Including the product along with its image, size, color, pattern, etc. within the WooCommerce abandoned cart email serves as a great reminder of what they’re missing out.
Chances are that they may not really remember what product they abandoned if they had a particularly busy “window shopping” day on multiple websites.
The image is a must – including the product name alone is not going to help. And try to make the image the hero of your email. Make it appealing and informative. You can do it easily now with BayEngage’s responsive HTML abandoned cart email templates that are free and customizable!
#4 Include attractive and easy-to-see CTA button
Adding bold and attractive CTAs helps to grab the attention of the shopper and also push them towards an action you want them to take (All of us need a little push right?)
With our WooCommerce abandoned cart emails templates, you can make the action pretty clear – complete the purchase.
As we already discussed including bright and bold images of the product, place this attractive CTA right next to it. This will make it easy for them.
You can experiment with CTA phrases like “Complete the purchase” or “Buy it now” or “Don’t miss it!”
#5 Use compelling text
Having attractive images and contrasting CTA buttons is all good. But none of this will work out as you planned if you do not have a customer-centric copy that’s ultimately pushing towards conversions.
We prefer the “Butcher and nurture” technique in our Woocommerce abandoned cart email – so you should get straight to the point. (Don’t be too bla with your text and don’t be too nah as well!)
#6 Customer support paves a long way
Be equipped to provide customer assistance or guidance with each cart abandonment email. It’s possible that your shopper is really interested in the purchase process but couldn’t complete checkout due to technical glitches.
Or they have few queries about the product’s details (shipping times, refunds, etc.). Having a detailed FAQ is good. But that does not mean you can skip the customer support team. Few queries are better answered by a person. Give them that opportunity to complete the checkout.
Crazy-Cool WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Email Examples
We cannot leave you just like that. Information is good but looking at actual abandoned cart email examples is always fun and captivating. So, have a look at these two abandoned cart email templates and how they lure shoppers into completing the purchase.
Drop’s abandoned cart email is an ideal example of the effective use of images and copywriting. Here, the eCommerce brand tried to create urgency in the bolded text “ends in 19 days.” Once they create urgency, they anticipate the shopper’s next move and have included their CTA which is clearly bold and visible. But they have also added other items that the customer might be interested in based on the cart history. Wow, smartypants right! This is an excellent strategy to motivate shoppers to complete the purchase and also browse more.
You can never fail with funny, interesting text in abandoned cart emails. Look at how Dote excels at humorous copywriting. In the above-abandoned cart email, they say “Your shopping bag has abandonment issues” and “Save these items hours of therapy and give them a loving home.” This text makes the brand compelling to its customers because it’s funny, entertaining, and lets shoppers blow off steam. Abandoned cart emails such as these help to illustrate your brand’s personality and create brand enthusiasts.
Geared up to Create Your WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Strategy?
Shopping Cart abandonment is a serious issue for all of us – you cannot ignore it anymore! In this blog post, we tried to dig deeper into what cart abandonment is, a quick sneak peek into conversion rate optimization on the need to understand customer’s buying behavior, best practices while creating and sending abandoned cart emails, and two of the best template examples to know how to grab your shopper’s attention. You can check out our previous blog to know more strategies on how to tackle WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Rate.
Always think and keep thinking about that one thing you can do to differentiate your emails from others. Improving your abandoned cart recovery does not happen in one day. It is an incremental process that requires many smaller steps.
Pick one idea mentioned in this blog and plan to take one step forward this week.
Here’s to recovering abandoned carts and dollars with your WooCommerce abandoned cart emails!
