How To Set Up Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails On Shopify

With so much happening in the online world, it's not surprising that the eCommerce world is seeing its fair share of abandoned carts.

We've all been there! We get a 'shopper's high' from browsing products and adding items to our online shopping carts.

But,  when it comes to the actual purchasing part, unless it's something we really set out to get, we may hesitate and rather continue our abandonment ritual.

Any item that is placed in a shopping cart but never makes it through the full purchase process is considered abandoned by the customer.

So how do you get a customer to return to their cart and complete the purchase? With an abandoned cart recovery email of course!

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What Is An Abandoned Cart Recovery Email? 🤷‍♀️

These are an essential part of your email marketing tools that create a fully optimized, efficient eCommerce customer experience.

Think of them as friendly reminder emails. A nudge that gives the customer instant access to their cart using active links and entices them to complete their purchase.

Abandoned cart emails are a proven sales recovery tactic that leads to more conversions.

Checkout recovery emails on Shopify can be customized to include a discount code, product image, or call to action button that makes your message unique and appeals to your target audience/buyer persona.

(note: to customize the email content, you'll need to navigate some HTML)

Do Abandoned Cart Emails Work? 🧐

Absolutely! A cart abandonment email has a strong click-through rate; above industry average for marketing emails.

Abandoned carts are not lost opportunities but rather an opportunity for re-engagement and opening up a whole world of potential customers.

How Do You Email Abandoned Carts? 🛒

Reminder emails are super easy to set up! You can either send these manually or create automatic cart abandonment emails.

Be aware these emails will not be sent under the following circumstances:

• If a potential customer creates an abandoned checkout(s) and then completes the sale before the recovery email gets sent.
• If there was a payment processing error when the customer tried to complete their checkout.
• If your shop does not support shipping to the customer's address.
• If you allow potential customers to enter a phone number instead of an email address at checkout, and the customer chooses to enter a phone number.
• If the products in the checkout are unavailable for purchase (sold out products).
• If all the products in the checkout are free, and the customer does not visit the shipping page to add a shipping fee or the shipping fee is also free.

Remember that we don't want these follow-up emails to be spam!  They are only sent as necessary to encourage those reluctant customers to complete the checkout process and work on increasing conversions.

Now let's take a look at our step-by-step guide to setting up abandoned cart emails on Shopify!

How Do I Send Automatic Abandoned Cart Emails On Shopify? 💻

Setting up abandoned cart email automation will save you a lot of time, especially if you own a large eCommerce store. Each automatic email contains a direct link to the abandoned cart and has a template that can be edited so you can easily create branded emails.

To send automatic cart reminders, just follow the easy steps below:

On your Shopify admin page, go to settings in the left-hand navigation menu and then click on the checkout option.

Scroll down to the Abandoned Checkouts section and check Automatically send abandoned checkout emails.

You can then choose to send recovery emails to anyone who abandons a checkout or only to email subscribers who abandon a checkout.

If (in the Customer accounts section) you have checked Accounts are optional, we recommend sending emails to anyone who abandons a cart.

In the Send after section, you can now select how many hours after abandonment you want Shopify to wait before sending the email.

These time intervals have been selected by Shopify based on abandoned cart data and are there to maximize the number of recovered checkouts.

The recommendation is 1 hour or 10 hours, but play around and find what is best for your shoppers. If you select Never then you can manually send emails.

Once you have chosen your settings, click Save and your automatic emails will be set up.

How Do I Manually Send Abandoned Cart Emails On Shopify? 📝

To manually send an abandoned cart reminder email you will need to access the abandoned order directly. You can do this by clicking on Orders on your Shopify admin page and choosing Abandoned checkouts.

If there are abandoned orders, they will be listed here as follows:

Select the order that you want to recover and, on the order page, click Send a cart recovery email.

You will be provided with a link to the cart which can be copy-pasted into the email.

If you want to fully customize the email you can enter a custom message, click the box beside each email address you want to send the email to, and then click Review email.

Once you have reviewed the email, click Send Notification or click Back if you want to make any changes.

The recovery status on the order will show as recovered if the customer returns to complete their order.

Cart Email Strategies 🤓

So now you know how to send manual and automatic cart abandonment emails but what about the content? How long should an abandoned cart email be and what makes them successful?

Like any marketing email, they are going to need to contain a simple message that is to the point, an attention-grabbing subject line, a direct link to the product(s), and be optimized for your unique target audience.

Let's take a look at some cart email strategy tips and tricks to increase those conversion rates...

• Use Personalized Or Bold Email Subject Lines: "Hey [customer name]! You left something behind..." or "Getting hangry? There are snacks waiting in your cart!"
• Add A Sense Of Urgency: Scarcity is a powerful psychological sales trigger. You can add a sense of urgency to your emails by mentioning that an item added to the cart is almost sold out or that the items in the cart are not reserved and may not be available for long.
• Include a call to action: Tell your customers what the next steps are and invite them back to your store. For example, click on a link to their order, redeem a coupon code, click a button for free shipping, etc.
• Add your store's branding and logo: This makes the email looks more professional and secure.
• Utilize creative copy: Don't be afraid to add humor and stay true to your brand's tone. Remember that incentives and compelling visuals add to the success of your emails.
• Include related products: Entice your customers with recommended products that are similar to the ones in their abandoned cart. The customer might hesitate on the items in their cart but could be drawn more easily to others.
• Tempt with social proof: Social proof Includes product ratings and reviews and is an incredibly influential marketing tool. Use this to create a little bit of FOMO and improve the chances of your customer completing the purchase.

Conclusion 🌈

So now you know that you could open up a whole new world of potential customers just by setting up an abandoned cart campaign.

With its proven increase in conversion rates, you can recover a good percentage of abandoned carts and increase your sales. And who doesn't want that?

Our personal opinion? Set up a cart recovery email automation to save yourself time and, unless you know or are keen to learn HTML,  perhaps recruit a helping hand to customize the emails.

If you enjoyed reading this How-To guide, feel free to check out our other tutorials!