Truth is bitter. And statistics have done the job for us—the average cart abandonment rate is 69.82% across all businesses. But as they say, we have a silver lining to this situation with abandoned cart emails having a whopping 45% open rates. 

While statistics overwhelm us with various reasons why customers abandon their online shopping cart, it also shows that we can recover the lost purchases with a timely cart abandonment email.  

In this blog, we'll look at what exactly is an abandoned cart email and dig deeper into the reasons why customers abandon their carts. Based on that customer sentiment analysis, we'll give you foolproof abandoned cart email examples, best practices, and tools to help you win those lost sales.  

What is an abandoned cart email? 

An abandoned cart email is a follow-up email that you send to your customers that they have left items in their shopping cart. It’s sent to the customer when they are about to leave the site without completing their purchase or as a reminder after they've left your site. 

Abandoned cart emails are triggered by any item in your customer's cart, not just specific ones. This means if your customer adds something to their cart and then decides not to buy it, your eCommerce platform will send an automated email to your customer, letting them know this happened. 

This type of cart recovery email is great for increasing sales as your customer sees what item they were considering buying before deciding against it. The best way to use an abandoned cart email is to encourage them to complete their order. For example, you could offer a discount or free shipping on future orders if they return to your store to complete the purchase. 

Why do customers abandon their carts? 

There are several reasons why customers might abandon their carts. Here are some research-backed causes: 

Lack of convenience  

Online shoppers want convenient ways to shop. Three factors were identified by Baymard Institute researchers as contributing to cart abandonment: slow shipping, a complex check-out process, and having to create an account. These three factors ranked among the most common causes for abandoning shopping carts at online retailers. 

If you want to ensure that your customers have an easy time buying from you, then one thing you could do is ask them why they're leaving their cart. Displaying a popup when people leave your site without completing their order may be one way to collect customer feedback. You could ask them if they had trouble finding the products they wanted, if there was anything confusing about the ordering process, etc. Surveys would allow you to see which parts of your site need improvement. 

Unexpected costs 

In fact, according to Baymard Institute’s research, 49 percent of shoppers cited “extra cost” as their main reason for abandoning online shopping carts. Shipping was identified by 41 percent of respondents as the leading cause of these additional expenses. 

In fact, most shoppers expect free shipping these days due to online marketplaces such as Amazon. Almost 75 percent of consumers deem free shipping essential for making purchases, according to a recent survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF). 

Though offering free shipping is doable, unfortunately, it can be challenging for small businesses to absorb this cost. As a workaround, eCommerce retailers can bundle the shipping cost to the retail product price. 

Long Checkout Process 

A lot of shoppers have abandoned their carts because the checkout process takes too long or is too complicated. The average checkout flow has 18% of people abandoning carts with an average of 14.88 checkout form fields which, in essence, means there is a lot of input data required to complete checkout. According to Baymard, the optimal is an 8-form field checkout—and, that is half of what it is out there. 

When building your checkout flow, make sure to include only what's needed for the transaction. The best thing about using an eCommerce platform like Shopify is that it allows for customer profiles with saved payment information. This way, customers can make future checkouts easier and faster. 

How to prevent customers from abandoning their carts? 

While we enlightened you with the prime reasons behind cart abandonment, it's vital that we show you how to combat the same. Following are three tried and trusted ways to mitigate cart abandons.  

Provide free shipping 

Offering free shipping can help improve conversion rates when especially 49% of online shoppers point to extra cost as their top reason for abandoning carts. In addition, ensure that there aren't any hidden costs that your customers will see only while checking out.  

Have a guest checkout 

Research cites that 31% of online shoppers abandon their carts while forced to create an account to checkout. So, allow for guest checkout. 

Retarget with a cart reminder email 

Retargeting marketing strategy is yet another good strategy for recovering lost sales from cart abandonment. You can leverage customer data and behavior to reach out and lead them back to your site to complete their purchases. 

How does abandoned cart recovery work? 

When someone leaves your cart without purchasing anything, you need to recover their items immediately. 

To do this, as discussed above you must first identify the reason why they didn’t finish their order. 

For example: Maybe they found another similar product cheaper elsewhere. Or perhaps they decided to wait until they had time to look around your website again. 

Once you know the reason, you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. 

Here are three ways you can recover lost items: 

Use automated emails 

Automated emails are a good way to remind customers that they haven’t completed their order. They can be set to automatically send out emails whenever someone leaves their cart. 

Send follow-up emails 

Another option is to send a series of emails asking them to come back and complete their order. 

Add items to their next order 

Finally, you can try sending them an email asking them to add a few of their favorite items to their next order. 

These are all effective ways to recover lost items. However, you shouldn’t rely solely on these methods. Instead, you should always monitor your stats closely to ensure you’re recovering lost items effectively. 

What are some best practices for abandoned cart emails? 

While an abandoned cart email strategy can potentially recover lost purchases, it can only be a success while following the best practices. This includes the usage of a robust tool such as Swan AI to track when customers leave their carts. 

The other best practice to uphold is to use a personalized cart email template. By personalized, we mean for you to address the customer by name, show the product image that has been abandoned in the cart, and a suitable incentive (according to the customer's behavior) to trigger the purchase.  

This abandoned cart email strategy will help you build customer relationships and increase sales. Moreover, based on the stats of these personalized emails, you can monitor the content that yields a better recovery rate and effectuate the same by tweaking the messages in your future copies.  

Abandoned cart email examples 

Here are some examples from your retailing peers—those who've mastered the art of cart recovery.  

Remind your customers

Sometimes, your customer would have forgotten to checkout. Maybe, during a coffee break, they could have added items to their cart with the intention to finish the checkout after coming home. But eventually, the day's toil could have drained them that they would have forgotten to complete the purchase.  

Here's where you could embrace J.Crew's abandoned cart email campaign and remind the customer of what they've left in the cart. You could also have other calls to action buttons for other pages on the site in case your customer prefers to look through the new arrivals, trending products, etc.  

Create urgency   

Not at all times do your customers forget to checkout. Another possible reason for increasing shopping cart abandonment rate is the customer's dislike towards a product or a consideration that it's too pricey. In times such as these, you could imitate Pacsun's cheekiness and create an urgency that'll stimulate the customer to rush and complete the purchase.  

Attract your customers 

Sending the right marketing message plays a crucial role in any abandoned cart email sequence. And Madewell has nailed its copy.  

There's this twist of saying how a product looks good in the shopping bag but even better when the customer had it on. This marketing email is a creative way of appealing to your customers and inviting them to take action right away.  

Best email marketing apps to automate abandoned cart emails 

To take your sales recovery tactic to the next level you need the assistance of email marketing tools. There are so many email marketing softwares that help you automate your abandoned cart email series.  

These email automation tools also have an email design canvas wherein you could either choose pre-existing checkout recovery email templates and customize them or build one from scratch for your recovery drip campaigns.  

While curating your email workflow, ensure the following: 

• Correct email addresses of the email recipients   

• An attention-grabbing subject line 

In addition to these, here are a couple of checklists to keep in mind. They are not compulsory but can surely go a long way in recovering your lost sale.  

• List the cart items  

• Supply product recommendations  

• Offer additional discount where needed 

• Give a coupon expiring within a limited time 

• Show popular items from your store 

• Address any technical issue that customers faced while checking out 

• Write actionable email CTAs 

• Provide social proof and customer testimonials 

Go and recover your lost sales! 

There are so many reasons for cart abandonment. But so are the opportunities to recover abandoned carts. Ensure to give more convenience to your customers, be transparent with the pricing, and eliminate long checkout processes. In addition, incentivize customers with free shipping, guest checkout, and retargeting emails. This can help you lower abandoned cart rates to a certain degree.  

Follow the best practices we mentioned in this blog and mimic what your retailing peers have done. You needn't reinvent the wheel—just follow the steps. And don't forget to choose wisely on an email marketing tool to automate the cart recovery campaign series.  

We are sure that you'd be able to convince your customers and get them to complete the purchase. Not sure how to start? Connect with us and we'd be happy to help.