Did you know that over 75% of people abandon their shopping carts when shopping online?
It means that every 4th visitor who adds something to their cart on your store really purchases – the others leave it.
That really sucks, right?
But don’t you worry, we also have some good news.
What you can do is you can get a bunch of potential customers to come back and purchase at your store.
It’s great because you only set this once, and conversions are coming almost with no extra effort.
How to do it?
With an average conversion rate(ACR) of 18.64%, abandoned cart emails can help you win back a significant portion of potential customers.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to do it, even if you’re not a marketer or copywriter, and we’ll cover the following:
- What abandoned cart emails are,
- How can you bring back your customers with this kind of email,
- 11 best-abandoned cart email examples that can help you drastically increase sales
So if you’re ready to bring your visitors back to their cart and purchase, let’s begin!
Why Do People Abandon Shopping Carts?
Here are different reasons for cart abandonment, according to Baymard Institute research:
One way to reduce shopping cart abandonment is to provide cart abandonment emails in your marketing and sales strategy.
What Are Abandoned Cart Emails?
Cart abandonment emails are sort of emails sent automatically when a buyer comes to your store and adds an item to their cart.
To help you produce compelling abandonment cart emails, here are a few tactics that you should keep in mind when creating it for your store.
1. Use Winning Subject Lines
Regardless you designed a great cart abandonment email with great conversions, in case a customer doesn’t open the email, your efforts will be for nothing.
Your abandoned cart emails’ success mostly depends on the attractiveness of the subject line.
A smooth subject line can grab the potential customer’s attention and increase the open rate and purchases at the end.
You should make sure not to get your subject lines too complicated.
Here are some other examples that you can use and adapt for yourself:
- There are X products left in your cart!
- Finish your order now and get 15% off.
- Why did you leave?!
- Your item is lonely in the cart.
- Hey{{FirstName}}, you forgot something.
- Still, thinking about {{ProductName}}?
- Don’t let your items run away!
- Hey you, still interested in the {{ProductName}}?
- Today – Free shipping for your order.
Remember that with cart abandonment emails, it’s best to get straight to the point.
And what’s great is to include emoji’s in your email because they can attract the buyer’s attention.
2. Get the Timing Right
The right timing for sending the cart abandonment emails is essential for its success.
For example, sending your first email one hour after the cart is abandoned is a good way to go. But, of course, this may vary based on your business, products, and audience.
Do it while the buyers are warmed up. If you wait for too long, you will lose that shopping urge that caused the buyer to add the item to the cart so that they may leave.
Many researchers noticed that most eCommerce businesses that use a series of cart abandonment emails have the best order rates.
To be straight, they are getting 69% more orders on average than merchants who send only one cart abandonment email.
The greatest thing you can do is to do A/B tests with your timing sequences and the number of emails you send until you discover the winning formula for your audience and products.
3. Be Personal
I cannot say how critical email personalization is to your success, especially in cart abandonment emails.
Just offering buyers the items they’ve left in their cart already indicates some level of personalization.
But you can personalize your abandoned cart emails even one step further:
- Include the recipient’s name in your email or your subject line.
- Confirm that the items left behind in the cart are indeed worth purchasing.
- Before sending an email, see if that mail would make you return to the cart and purchase, and be honest and objective.
- Send the cart recovery email from a real person’s email address rather than a “no-reply” address.
4. Be Specific
Buyers sometimes forget about the items they previously added to the cart.
This is why some of the best cart recovery emails remind the receiver what they left in their cart.
Showing people the items in their cart personalizes the abandoned cart email and reminds them of what they will miss out on if they don’t purchase now.
What’s useful is to show items with images, so the recipients would remember what they were thinking about buying.
Using cart recovery software that’ll help you automatically include the personalized product in your abandonment cart emails can save you a lot of effort.
5. Add a CTA Button
Bold, centralized, and attractive CTAs can genuinely grab buyers’ attention and drive them toward an action you want them to take.
With cart abandonment emails, the action of potential buyers is pretty clear – finishing the buying process.
Therefore, you should make this process as easy as possible for them.
Let them know what products they abandoned, show it, and then insert an easy-to-see, contrasting CTA right below that product image.
We suggest you avoid words like “Buy” or “Pay” in your CTAs.
These words usually produce a “high friction” since you’re suggesting the person do something they might not be ready to do.
But a CTA like “Return to your cart,” “Continue shopping,” or something in that manner gets people to take the next step before they buy.
6. Use persuasive text
Besides attractive images and contrasting CTA buttons, it’s essential to include a persuasive and customer-centric copy that’s ultimately pushing toward conversions.
Make your copy for cart abandonment emails short and sweet, so you can get straight to the point and get buyers back to where they left off.
7. Use Scarcity
Scarcity is a compelling psychological trigger that is usually included in many marketing messages.
Why?
Because it gives results. Simple as that.
Using scarcity as a part of your cart recovery emails it must be included for the best possible results.
Accenting what customers miss out on if they don’t purchase items in their cart instantly invites them to complete the purchase process.
For example:
What you should do to make scarcity effective is:
- Give prospects a reason to return to where they left the cart.
- Add a genuine scarcity to your cart recovery emails.
8. Offer a Discount
There’s no secret that customers love free stuff. With that in mind, I advise you to offer an email-exclusive incentive that no non-subscribers can get.
Maybe your products are a bit more expensive than the visitor initially thought, or they added another item to the cart, increasing the total cost.
Offering a discount in your cart recovery email could be the final push they need to complete their purchase.
High-converting emails with discounts also include scarcity and show readers that their products are at risk of selling out if they don’t purchase them now and use the discount.
It’s essential to remember not to discount your products too often because buyers might come to expect them in the future, so they don’t want to buy products at the total price.
Also, offering discounts and awards such as “free shipping” for customers to complete their purchases can really work in your favor.
The best way is to test your incentives in your emails in order to identify what your customers respond to best.
9. Include Customer Reviews and Testimonials
What do you do before purchasing when you want to try something new?
You ask for thoughts and look at reviews, right?
Reviews and testimonials work so well because they rely on real people’s opinions about a specific product or service.
If visitors doubt whether to complete their purchase, a little trick with a testimonial might produce a positive outcome.
This kind of email should be pretty simple, including testimonials that make prospects curious to know if your products are indeed good enough.
What to have in mind when including this in your cart abandoned emails:
- Review your testimonials and choose the three best ones that fit your abandoned cart emails. (Some testimonials that include concerns of other buyers)
- Add testimonials near the bottom of your abandoned cart emails, just before the “Return to the cart” button.
10. Provide customer support
There are many reasons why customers abandon their shopping carts, and it’s impossible to address them in one email.
Likely, the buyer can’t complete the checkout process because there was some technical issue, or they may have doubts about the product (shipping times, refunds, etc.) that a person better answers.
But you can include a contact option for people who want to reach out to ask further questions.
Provide every potential customer assistance or guidance with each cart abandonment email.
By adding your contact information below the CTA button, you can invite prospects to reach you out for a call and overcome any objections they may have.
Give them that opportunity. Don’t wait for them to look for your contact information on your website and write to you because they won’t do that.
Instead, offer them a shortcut in an email to contact you.
What to do:
- Add your contact information to your emails.
- Keep the cart items as the primary focus.
- Give people a chance to communicate directly with you.
11. Add multiple channels
The customers’ shopping journey isn’t committed only to one single channel. Since these are opt-in channels, you should be aware that you’ll communicate with the shoppers via the channel of their choice.
To provide the shopping experience easier for your potential customers and increase your conversions, add cart abandonment SMS and web push notifications into the automated cart abandonment workflow.
Summary
In the internet world of Ecommerce, there’s always a chance to turn the situation in your direction and make the most out of your potential sales that are almost lost.
Abandoned cart emails are one of those powerful tools that allow you to use this chance and turn the situation around.
However, to achieve the most successful purchases, these emails should not be taken lightly. Even though the user is a warm lead, the abandoned cart email still requires a well-thought-out strategy.
A great abandonment cart emails contain different elements that usually vary significantly from business to business.
However, I hope these strategies helped you with creating a perfect abandoned cart email that works for you and your audience and gives results.
Use this guide as a tool to build and apply the tips and run A/B to see what strategy works best for your email subscribers. Using these strategies, you’ll have a great chance to recover the potentially lost revenue and build stronger relationships with your customers.
Too many eCommerce store owners let potential customers fly away because they don’t send cart recovery email reminders that they left something behind.
Don’t be that kind of business.
Also, we can help prevent that.
For all those who have trouble with low-converting checkouts, we created iCheckout.
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iCheckout is the ultimate conversion optimization platform for eCommerce.
Our battle-tested, high-performing strategies are translated into code so you can focus on the thing that truly matters – strategy.
With iCheckout’s planned integrations, you can easily recover abandoned carts and grow your revenue effortlessly!
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