Abandoned cart emails are often the first email journeys that get created for a new e-commerce store, and are a backbone of driving revenue from automated emails. Despite the simplicity in their messaging (“hey, did you forget something in your cart?”), they are highly effective at getting prospective shoppers to convert.
In many cases, abandoned cart flows are set up early on and then neglected in a sort of ‘set and forget’ philosophy. While they will likely continue to convert, there are simple optimizations you can do to these journeys (besides just sending more emails). Let’s jump into 3 different strategies we’ve used with our clients to improve their abandoned cart conversions through emails in Klaviyo.
And as a heads up, none of these strategies involve creating additional discounts in the flow just because they’ve abandoned their cart. While that is a strategy that can be implemented, we’re going to hold that one aside as we try to avoid deeper discounts to drive more sales.
Tip #1: Remind first time customers of their signup offer
A signup offer, whether it’s for free shipping or some dollar or percentage off their first order is an incredibly common (and effective) way to drive new subscribers to sign up for your email list. While many of those subscribers might convert early on in their lifecycle, most will not. Most of the time these promotions are shared during a Welcome Series flow, but if a subscriber makes it through that entire journey without purchasing, it’s typically never shared with them again and instead the next promotion is set up to capture these unconverted subscribers.
An abandoned cart flow is a great place to remind new customers about their signup promo in order to convert them.
Here’s how you can do it. In the flow, add a conditional split to your flow with the conditions of “has placed order where ‘discount code’ = ‘your welcome promo code‘”. That check will be reliable enough to split the audience. 99% of first time purchasers will be using your promotion, so you can comfortably know that if they haven’t used it yet, they are one of these first time purchasers you can tailor the messaging for to remind them to use their signup promotion.
Tip #2: Segment the flow based on cart value
In the e-commerce and DTC space, conversion rates spike around a free shipping threshold, and potential customers are very aware of those thresholds they need to reach in order to qualify. At MH Digital, we often split up cart abandonment messages based on the value of the items in the subscribers cart and remind them that they have reached or are near free shipping tier in order to drive increased conversions and AOV (average order value).
In order to create this segmentation in Klaviyo, add a trigger splits to the flow with the conditions of:
- “$value is at most: X”
- “$value is at least: X+$0.01 AND $value is at most: Y-$0.01″
- “$value is at least: Y”
Where X is a cart value where another item or two might have them reach the free shipping threshold, and Y is the free shipping value.
From there, you can set up variations of creative to mention either:
- A default abandoned cart message
- A “you’re close to free shipping” message
- A “Your cart qualifies for free shipping!” message
Tip #3: Update your emails during big sale periods
For a lot of e-commerce stores, their cart abandonment emails never get updated during sitewide promotion periods. These promotions are a key period when subscribers who are on the fence of purchasing would likely convert. While they may be in a position to receive a promotion announcement email, it’s possible they miss it – and then your cart abandonment emails would still reflect the standard messaging and not reinforce your promotion.
Updating your abandoned cart emails with content that highlights your promotion is an easy way to optimize the flow.
How to do this efficiently:
Updating an additional 3-6 emails can be a daunting task for a promotion period that may only last a few days. Here’s how we do this efficiently:
- For the emails in your abandoned cart flow, add a email variation to create a “B” version of each email.
- Update the subject line, preview text, and add a snippet in the body copy to reflect that they can take advantage of the sale.
- Create a saved block in the style of a simple banner you can place at the top of the email and add that saved block to each email.
- Update the distribution percentage to 100% for variation B for the length of the sale.
- Update the distribution percentage back to 100% for variation A after the sale is over to quickly revert to your standard messaging.
These steps will allow you to efficiently swap the emails at the start and end of the promos, and as an added bonus will let you easily compare performance of those emails against the standard ones during the sale period.
Takeaways
Not every one of these strategies will be right for your email marketing strategy, but these are all options to try, and don’t require tremendous creative lift or creating additional promotions just for abandoned carts.
Need help implementing these or other strategies to drive up your revenue from abandoned cart flows?