Shopping cart abandonment is not a new phenomenon. In fact, research from Baymard Institute shows that the average cart abandonment rate is as high as 69.80% and a natural consequence of how people use eCommerce sites.
Their study cites a number of reasons for cart abandonment – the main one being online shoppers using carts like wish lists, looking for the best deals and abandoning them before checkout. Other reasons included high shipping costs, needing to create an account or a too complicated checkout processes.
So what can retailers do to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase besides design changes and rethinking fees? One popular strategy with a high ROI is to send out abandoned cart emails.
Statistics from a SaleCycle report on 500 leading global brands, showed that 44.1% of abandoned cart emails are opened and almost a third of clicks on abandoned cart emails (29.9%) lead to a recovered sale.
WooCommerce abandoned cart plugin
If you have a WooCommerce store there are a range of abandoned cart recovery plugins to choose from. A lightweight option we recommend is Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce.
The plugin has free and paid versions but the free version works just fine to capture email addresses for follow-up emails.
There is a default email template that follows the standard WooCommerce template style, or you can add your own email code into the editor. The plugin template section has a preview and send test email function so you can check layout and content before you enable recovery mode.
Abandoned cart email science
Converting shoppers who have abandoned their carts into loyal customers can be a process of trial and error. Personalized follow-up emails with the right subject line, design and copy, work if they set the right tone. Pinterest is a good place to find email inspiration and Mailchimp has a good article on best practices to get the best open rates.
There’s no such thing as the perfect abandoned cart email, so it’s worth testing out different subject lines, copy and sending times to see which emails recover carts and increase your online sales.
