5 Standout Ways to Optimize Your Abandonment Cart Email Strategy

11.Sep.2020 Poulami - Abandoned cart email

Running a business is an overwhelming job and more so when you gotta make it profitable at the same time. However, executing marketing campaigns, checking on your inventory, picking your brain to drive website traffic, and simultaneously running a profitable online business is often easier said than done. After all, too many factors are involved to determine the success of your online brand. 

Even when you think you got every single puzzle piece in its place, you would still fall short to achieve the desired business goals. Why so? Well, one of the reasons could very well be the exceedingly huge abandoned cart rate. The effect of an abandoned cart remains overlooked by most online businesses and is probably one of the underrated factors for a bad business quarter. The effect of an abandoned cart rate is huge and can be a major roadblock to your revenue or business growth. But, how bad is it?

In 2019, the average abandonment rate was at a whopping 69.57%. 

This number tragically implies that the business strategy funnel is leaking money and it’s high time to buck up and recover the money that is left on the table due to online cart abandonment. Abandoned cart rate spikes up when shoppers visit your eCommerce store, adds products but don’t complete their purchase. 

In our previous posts, we have talked about how to recover the sales with the help of abandoned cart email and various other sectors like how to write a killer subject line or different strategies that would help you reduce the loss.  

However, that was just the tip of the iceberg and there’s a lot more to just building an abandoned cart email strategy. Unless you know which element is working for you and whatnot, it won’t be of any help.

That’s why today we are here to discuss further on how to optimize your abandoned cart email strategy that gets you the required conversion and helps you recover more sales than ever.  So, let’s get started.

5 Steps Toward Successful Abandoned Cart Email Sequence

To optimize and build a successful abandoned cart email strategy, you would have to take a few factors into consideration:

1. The abandoned cart email strategy should be molded in accordance with consumer psychology – that requires you to put your consumers and their purchasing lifecycle, first. After all,  the abandoned cart email is all about reminding your customers about why they wanted the products in the first place and eventually convincing them to complete the purchase.
2. Secondly, today, around 46% of the emails are opened on smartphones (Mobile Statistics) so to run a successful email sequence, you must also consider looking into the technical aspects like optimizing your cart recovery emails for mobile devices.

Step 1: Collect the Email Address Early On

This strategy is probably the most important one, that begins even before the shopper lands on your eCommerce website and eventually decides to abandon it before checking out. But why? Well, it is important for two reasons.

1. The checkout process can be too overwhelming or complicated for the shoppers and this might lead to them abandoning your cart and never return. This might happen due to several reasons like either there are too many steps, or a hidden delivery cost, etc. And figuring the reason on what ticked your customer off can eventually help to reduce the abandoned cart rate.
2. Next being, if you fail to capture their email early on, once they abandon the cart, you have no way to contact them and most importantly remind them about their abandoned cart with the help of abandoned cart recovery emails.  
3. Use the power of Behavioral pop-ups: You can use behavioral pop-ups to ask for emails without disturbing your visitors: By showcasing the right pop-up at the right time, you get the shopper’s attention. You can use TargetBay’s BayServe to increase your email capture rate. These pop-ups work like a CTA and give them direction. For that reason, it doesn’t look like a barrier.

Online Checkout Examples

Let’s compare the checkout page examples of Asos and Netatmo and look at the hits and misses.

Hits of the Asos Checkout Page

1. The very first field that a customer is expected to fill is their email address. 
2. Here, if you look closely, a customer has to add their email details to unlock the next checkout steps.
3. The next steps that lead to checkout are revealed gradually one after another.
4. Although the Promo code section is located, right at the top, it is designed to stay collapsed by default so that it doesn’t take any attention off the shoppers away from adding their email details.

What can it achieve?

• A welcome email sent immediately to the shopper’s inbox helps shoppers understand your genuinity and your brand’s reliability.
• Capturing the email address first hand and then unveiling the steps towards checkout one-by-one will help your customers to not get overwhelmed with too many details on a single web page.

Now, let’s take a look at Netatmo’s checkout page.

Here for Netatmo’s checkout page, it looks very different from the previous one. 

The whole checkout form is put out on a single page, which is meant to help customers decide the details they wish to fill in first. Although this might look like a way to help customers overcome the overwhelming feeling, ideally this doesn’t solve the purpose of getting the shopper’s email address first hand. Besides, the shopper might just even leave your e-commerce store before they let you know about their email address

This would mean that this kind of checkout page doesn’t give you enough power to collect the email address even before the checkout process ends. Consequently, it means you miss out on another lead that can’t be emailed an abandoned cart email.

Summary: Design your checkout structure page in such a way that doesn’t overwhelm your customer instead make it and manage to capture the email even before the shopper leaves or not.

Step 2: Send in a Sequence of Emails 

Abandoned cart emails need to reach your shopper’s inbox before they change their mind. Simply put, they are time-sensitive. So, if you want to bolster your abandoned cart email strategy, you need to stick to a specific time frame so that your emails could impact in the nick of time and help you recover the lost sales. These sequences of abandoned cart emails are meant to remind the shoppers why they wanted to buy from you in the first place and what it means for you to be able to serve them. 

However, if you wait too long, you might just miss that chance. A three email sequence is thought to work the best in recovering the almost-lost shoppers. Wonder why? Well, we have some statistics in place to support the claim. 

What’s the Best Time to Send the Sequence of Abandoned Cart Email?

Here, we would discuss in brief, what’s the best time to send an email for resolving the abandoned carts. We will also talk to you about the sequence and time frame within which you must send the abandoned cart email to have the right impact.

First Abandoned Cart Email

Undoubtedly, the first abandoned cart email is the most important considering you are appealing to your customer to go back and complete the purchase. This email should be sent in not less than 30 minutes to 1 hour after the shopper leaves. While a lot of brands would argue that sending a coupon code can help you win the customer back, but, we would suggest reserving your discount deals for the second/ third abandoned cart email.

The first email should address the customer and try to fix the problem. Try to craft the email in such a way that it sounds like you are extending a helping hand and you strive to solve all customer issues. One great approach would be to offer a tab for customer support so that if they face any issue, they can reach out to your brand. Another would be to provide a direct link to the checkout page so that there are fewer chances of distraction and it also saves your customer valuable time.

Bonus Tip: Do not sound sale-sy at all!

Second Abandoned Cart Email 

Your next follow-up email should reach your customers in the next 24hrs. This followup is more like a reminder to your shoppers that they have items in their cart waiting for them and urge them to complete their order. Plus, this email should essentially talk about your brand and its values that would help your customers to connect with you on a personal level.

Third Abandoned Cart Email 

This is the final email you should be sending to your consumers in the abandoned cart email sequence. It should land in your shopper’s inbox, nearly 2 – 3 days after the first follow-up email. This email should be able to evoke a sense of urgency and also provide them with a discount deal that would also tease them to complete the purchase. Plus, these emails can also include many customer reviews or even a blog post that highlights the features or the benefits of the product/service. 

Step 3: Segment Your Customers

Other than your abandoned cart email being properly structured and timed, they need to be relevant to the customer too. Well, let me explain. Not all shoppers display the same shopping habits, so the key is to personalize it beyond names. Personalizing the emails by adjusting the email content according to a certain group of consumers would be a masterstroke.

Segmenting your “abandoning” consumers can be done based on many factors like location, frequency, shopping history, whether they are brand new or returning customers, and much more.

What’s the need to segment your customers?

The above examples show how you can segment your customer into 4 sample sets. However, the reason any new customer decides to abandon their cart can have different reasons from a regular customer who has done it for the first time. Deep-diving to the bottom of the problem would help you understand your consumer behavior better and segment it well. Try to explore the ways for addressing their issues – try different content, test what works the best, or ask for feedback.

However, be careful of all customers who regularly visit your eCommerce business and abandon the cart knowingly such that they get access to discount details. Plus, you should also be able to segment high-end customers differently from the ones who probably would have left a mere flip flop You may want to approach the latter ones (high-end customers) differently than a customer who left behind a pair of cheap flip-flops.

Step 4: Optimize Your Emails for Mobile Devices 

You can concentrate all your efforts on designing a gorgeous email and write an equally compelling personalized subject line and content but it falls flat when opened by a consumer on their smartphones, all your efforts are in vain. 

Email statistics #1

59% of respondents check their personal email on the go (on mobile devices), while 65% check their email at home (The ultimate mobile email statistics overview)

Most of the world population (!) checks their emails on mobile devices so if you haven’t yet optimized your abandoned cart emails for mobile, it’s high time that you do it now. After all, responsiveness plays a vital role in providing a seamless consumer experience. And, if you miss out on optimizing, you would probably miss out on the chance of recovering your lost sales. So, before you jump the gun, try to optimize the emails for all smartphone models and also refrain making it an all-out image email as with low internet speed means more time to open the email. 

How to Optimize Your Emails for Mobile?

1. Stay careful with too much media on the email
2. Responsiveness is a must.
3. Don’t put out too many texts and pay attention to the words.
4. Craft killer subject text lines
5. Last but not the least, mind the “fat fingers”

Always, keep your content light and simple, and try not to overdo it.

Step 5: Test, Test, (Test)!

Now that you know the basics of how to optimize your strategies, it’s time to test it out! Split testing or A/B testing precisely. A/B testing is all about comparing two different versions of your abandoned cart email to check out their potency. 

Usually, while version A works as a control (the original) one, the second or B version is the variation that you are likely trying out. For, this all you gotta do is split a batch of emails and send it to different recipients and then figure out which one is performing better in terms of the email open and click-through rates. 

What can you test in emails? 

You can test various elements in your email. Let’s look at the examples:

• Subject line preheaders
• Images: Animated images or static images 
• CTA
  • Placement of the CTA button.
  • Colors either bright or subdued
  • The content inside the main body

The A/B testing would only be successful if you have enough data to come to a conclusion and make informed decisions. Although testings are super useful, doesn’t mean that you would have to test out every little element. Start with one element first, like subject lines, until you get to craft a killer one that gives you high open rates. And, if the data looks inconclusive, just move on to test the other email components and eventually find out the obvious winners.

The Bottom Line

Abandoned cart emails are the tools to remind your customers about the items they wanted and most importantly why they wanted, which led them to add it into a shopping cart. Plus, some of your online customers might just want to be informed or willing to receive such reminders so that they can easily get back to shopping from your online business – even on the go. Overall, optimizing your abandoned cart email plays a vital role in eventually recovering the sales.