ECommerce marketers lose about 2 to 4 trillion dollars per year due to customers abandoning their carts. A study by Mailchimp shows that 69% of the shoppers leave their carts unattended. By setting up a cart abandonment email campaign, you can easily convert 1/10th of the targeted audience.
What are cart abandonment emails?
Cart abandonment emails are emails sent to customers whenever they do not complete a purchase after adding the products to the cart. These emails are also known as remarketing emails or recovery emails. You can automate the entire process by adding a trigger and by using a dynamic email template.
A trigger can be any action that indicates that the cart has been abandoned. For example, you can set a trigger that will send a cart abandonment email if the customer has not made the purchase within one hour of adding the products to the cart. You can use Marketo templates to make your first cart abandonment email.
How to make the most of your abandonment emails?
- Timing them right
As mentioned earlier, you can use time as one of the triggers for sending remarketing emails. You can send your remarketing email within an hour after abandonment. However, there is no set rule regarding the time. You can adjust it according to your strategy and the content of the email. Just ensure that your customers should receive the email while they are still considering purchasing the item.
Furthermore, you should also consider the value of the product before setting the time for your trigger. Customers need more time to consider before making high-value purchases. Therefore, you should try out a few different timings and use the one with better results.
- Using curiosity inducing subject lines
Most of your customers will overlook your cart abandonment emails if they have a dull subject line. After all, 47% of your target audience opens or ignore an email based on its subject line. A higher open rate based on the subject lines will translate to a more successful email remarketing campaign.
Now, there are few things you can do with the subject lines to grab the attention of your audience-
- Discounts and offers are good trigger words. Hence, you can use promotional codes and offers in your cart abandonment emails to incentivize your customers.
- If you don’t want to give away discounts, you can tweak the subject lines. You can offer extended warranties as gifts.
As you can see above, Bonobos provides a whopping 20% discount to the customers to complete their purchase. Beware, you should not give discount codes frequently as this will encourage the customers to abandon their carts to get the offer.
- Including a summary of abandoned items
There could be numerous reasons why someone abandoned their cart. Therefore, it is crucial to remind them of the reason for adding the products to their carts. The cart abandonment emails should include a list that briefly describes all the products in the cart. You can use the size, color, and price of the product in the description. Additionally, you can add images of the product to provide a visual prompt to the targeted customers. You can also promote the best-selling item in your customer’s cart to drive in more revenue. Marketo templates have a space where you can add a brief overview of your product for your cart abandonment emails.
The cart abandonment email by Zumiez has done exactly that. In their remarketing email, they have included the picture of the product along with all the crucial descriptions. In addition to that, they have a rather appealing and slightly humorous subject line to draw the attention of their targeted audience.
- Using segmentation and personalization tactics
You already know that giving away discount codes and offers will surely drag your customer back to your website to complete the purchase. However, it will not be financially feasible to offer discounts to every customer that abandons their cart. On top of that, more customers will intentionally leave their carts unattended with the hopes of receiving a lucrative offer.
To avoid this problem, you can use segmentation and personalization tactics to target a select group. Try to segment the customers who regularly buy from your website. By sending them personalized coupons, you will be retaining their loyalty. This way, you won’t have to compromise with your profit margins on a daily basis.
- Adding a strong call to action
CTA is the key that will convert a window shopper into a long-term customer. Your cart abandonment emails must have a strong CTA, which leads the recipient directly back to their carts. Yes, you can simply put in a CTA which asks your potential customer to return to their carts to complete the purchase. Or you can use the discount coupon as a CTA button which leads them directly to their cart and automatically attaches the offers. You can also create urgency with your CTA to stoke the FOMO habits of your customers. Just ensure that the tone of your CTA should be inviting rather than being pushy.
The remarketing email by Saatchi Art perfectly encapsulates this point. They have not only used a FOMO-inducing sentence but also a discount code as the CTA button.
Final word
Some customers, who are not yet ready to buy the product, might get irked by your cart abandonment emails. And you, as the seller, should respect their space and give them time to think about their decisions. You might not convert one of your target audiences into a customer, but that does not mean that you should “abandon” them. You can include them in your other email marketing campaigns and try to convert them later with more alluring offers.
