Abandoned cart emails are sent when you have a customer that has added items from your online store to their cart, but doesn’t end up completing their purchase. When this happens, you can send an abandoned cart email if you’ve already got their email address.

Sending your customers (or potential customers) abandoned cart emails is considered transactional since the transaction has already been initiated – meaning that your customer has added items to their cart with the intent to make a purchase.

Why your customer may abandon their cart

Your customers could abandon their cart for a multitude of reasons, but the top five reasons, according to a study conducted by WorldPay, are:

1. Presented with an unexpected cost
2. Just browsing
3. Found a better price somewhere else
4. Overall price too expensive
5. Decided against buying

How to approach abandoned cart emails

In an attempt to recapture those sales, sending abandoned cart emails to get your customers back to your site might be your best option. However, unless you already have their email address, you can’t follow up with them. One of the best ways to combat this is to include your email capture field as high as possible on the check out page. You can also consider adding a pop-up or opt-in field where you encourage your customers to provide an email address early on in their shopping experience. 

You’ll want to send out any abandoned cart emails within 30 minutes of abandonment, and address any issue that may have caused your customer to abandon their cart in the first place. The top reason customers will abandon their cart is an unexpected cost. If you include a coupon or an offer for free shipping in your abandoned cart emails, it might be just enough to get them to come back and complete their purchase.

Before you even start sending out emails, dive into your data through Google Analytics – setting up a conversion funnel can help see where your customers are dropping off. Reworking your website or marketing approach can be tailored to this data.

Ways to make sure your abandoned cart emails are compliant with CAN-SPAM

To make sure that the abandoned cart emails you send are compliant with CAN-SPAM, you should:

• Include a valid, physical address in the email
• Accurately represent your brand with clear or personalized “from” and “reply-to” names and email addresses
• Include a link to unsubscribe with instructions
• Unsubscribe users promptly (10 business days by law)
• Include a descriptive subject line
• Have an honest privacy policy that users can find easily on your website that outlines the information you are collecting and how it will be used
• Make sure that the design of abandoned cart emails is specifically transactional messaging

While abandoned cart emails are purely transactional, there’s a lot of thoughtful marketing that goes into those campaigns. If you want to stay focused on shipping out sales, and not figuring out why carts were abandoned, contact Web Rocket Media today.