Email Marketing Strategies for Abandoned Cart Recovery

When running an e-commerce business, it is normal to encounter abandoned carts. According to the Baymard Institute’s meta-analysis, 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. But what is not normal is not preparing a strategy to convert these abandoned carts into sales. But the question is how, and the answer is quite simple: email marketing.

Email marketing acts as a bridge between customers and brands, allowing brands to interact with customers freely and personally. You can utilize email marketing to reach your customers and remind them of their abandoned carts.

You have to concoct the best email marketing strategy to turn your customers’ abandoned carts into orders. Fortunately, we are here to help you find the best strategy to craft the perfect abandoned cart email for your customers.

While sending an email for abandoned cart recovery, you have to ensure that you do not sound commercial, but instead, your tone should be more conversational. If the tone of your email is commercial, it may display an adverse effect. ESPs like TrueSend understand this well and help you create and send perfect emails.

There are many things to keep in mind when sending out the abandoned cart recovery email, and we are here to help you. So, let us get started on the abandoned cart email strategy you can deploy, beginning with the psychology behind abandoned carts.

Why Do People Abandon Carts?

To concoct the perfect strategy for abandoned cart recovery, you must first understand the psychology behind the abandoned carts. If we do not understand the problem, we cannot find the solution to fix it. Here are some of the most popular reasons why people often abandon their carts:

• Comparison Shopping: Sometimes people check multiple e-commerce sites to get the best, most economical deal.
• Unexpected Costs: Additional charges, such as shipping and taxes, sometimes appear only at the last step.
• Complex Checkout: When there are too many forms, and the checkout process is more complex than it needs to be.
• Distractions: People might get distracted while checking out with real-life activities.
• Lack of Trust: For first-time shoppers, it might be a matter of trust. Doubts about the website’s legitimacy or fear of scams can lead them to not place an order at all.
• Save for Later: Sometimes people browse catalogs and add products to their carts to check out later. This is done purely for convenience.

Understanding these reasons on a human level can help you strategize more effectively for your abandoned-cart email marketing campaign. In this era of email marketing, your abandoned cart recovery email cannot be simple and boring like “You forgot this.”

TrueSend understands that you need to be more interesting and convincing than that to engage your customers. So, they offer solutions for abandoned cart recovery emails, which are specific to your industry and brand.

While there are other strategies that can help you recover abandoned carts, the one strategy you must keep in mind is the perfect 3-step abandoned cart email sequence strategy. Let’s explore this strategy to up your abandoned cart recovery email marketing game!

Perfect 3-Step Abandoned Cart Recovery Email Sequence

This abandoned cart recovery email marketing strategy includes the three perfect steps to reach your customers, but not overwhelm them. The email in this 3-email sequence starts with a helpful reminder, followed by social proof, and ends with a final chance incentive.

Email 1: The Helpful Reminder

This email is sent shortly after the customer abandons the cart, when they still have their products fresh in mind (around an hour after the cart was abandoned). While writing this first email, make sure that:

• Your tone is helpful, light, and inquisitive.
• Your goal is to offer assistance while reminding the customer that they have an abandoned cart on your website.
• You add an image of the product they added to the cart.

This works especially well for people who accidentally forgot to check out due to distraction or saved their carts for later.

Email 2: The Social Proof

This email is sent 24 hours later, when your customers have started to ponder whether they should have checked out. While sending the “social proof” email, your email must:

• Use a confident and persuasive tone.
• Build trust with your potential customers.
• Contain customer reviews, star ratings, and user-generated content (UGC).

Utilize the bandwagon effect to get your potential customers to become your customers. This type of email especially works for people who have doubts about your brand.

Email 3: The ‘Final Chance’ Incentive

This is your last chance to recover your abandoned cart. This email is sent in the 48- to 72-hour window after the cart has been abandoned. While sending this email, make sure:

• The email must convey a tone of friendliness and urgency combined.
• The email must overcome price sensitivity.
• You include a limited-time, one-time-use discount code just for them. This makes the customer feel special while also instilling a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out).

This is just a nudge, a gentle last reminder to your customers about their abandoned carts. This email is especially effective for people who abandoned their carts due to price or complex checkouts.

This 3-step email sequence is persuasive without causing any annoyance to your customers. It allows you to recover abandoned carts most of the time. You can incorporate this email marketing strategy to ensure that potential sales become actual sales without losing customers over minor inconveniences.

But how can you write the best email for your abandoned cart recovery? Well, allow us to make sure your email is perfect for abandoned cart recovery.

High-Conversion Copywriting Tactics for Abandoned Cart Emails

While writing for e-commerce, including the abandoned cart emails, you have to make sure your tone and message are clear. The following are some tips you must keep in mind when writing the email:

• Keep your abandoned cart email subject lines interesting. People often send these emails like generic emails, which can kill customers’ interest. If your email is boring, it will stay in the inbox, forever unopened.
• Personalize the email beyond the name. In today’s world, sending emails and addressing customers by their first name is the bare minimum. You have to mention the products they were browsing and even include photos of them.
• Use a single, bold CTA. The goal of the abandoned cart delivery email is to make a sale, not to attract attention to your socials.
• Instill brand personality into these emails. When people like a brand, they will buy from it regardless of anything. So, remind them why your brand is loved by them with the tone of your email.

Benchmarking Success Rate: What Metrics Matter?

To determine whether your email marketing strategy for abandoned cart recovery is working, you cannot rely solely on open rates. You have to look at other metrics besides the open rates to perfectly measure the effectiveness of your abandoned cart email strategy, like:

• Recovery Rate: The percentage of abandoned carts that resulted in a completed sale. A healthy rate is between 10% and 20%.
• Revenue Per Email (RPE): Total revenue generated by the sequence divided by the number of emails sent.
• Unsubscribe Rate: If this is high, your frequency is likely too aggressive.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

We have talked at length about what you can do right to ensure the recovery of abandoned carts, but what can you do wrong while sending an abandoned cart email? Let us discuss some common mistakes people make while sending these emails, so you don’t make those mistakes.

Firstly, you must avoid sending your first email late. The first email after a customer abandons a cart must be sent within a couple of hours, preferably within one hour. Secondly, you have to be persuasive without sounding aggressive. Do not use all caps and excessively unnecessary punctuation like exclamation marks.

TrueSend

Stop looking at abandoned carts as failures or missed opportunities; instead, consider them to be potential sales. With TrueSend, an effective and modified ESP, you can turn your customers’ “maybe” into “for sure.” TrueSend offers world-class email marketing services and tools to ensure you can turn every cart, even abandoned ones, into sales.

TrueSend offers solutions that convert clicks into sales, including List Cleaning Services, Inbox Placement Services, SMTP Relay Services, Abandoned Cart Emails, IP Warmup Services, and Free Bulk Email Services to improve your open rates.

Revolutionize your email marketing services with TrueSend. We offer email marketing services tailored to your industry and brand to personalize your success. Choose TrueSend for your email marketing services to become a global success!