How the Three Automated 'Abandon Emails' Can Earn 6% Of Your Store Revenue And Are essential for your email marketing strategy
A white paper by Hustler Marketing - July 2021
We analysed 50 of our client stores to give you all the lowdown on what the “Abandoned” Checkout, Browse And Cart email flows respectively are, and how they contribute 6% of your overall store revenue. We also share some of our most exclusive email automation strategies and best practices on these flows.
Introduction
Turn visitors and non-decisive shoppers into customers
If you’re an ecommerce store, you probably know that a huge number of your website visitors don’t end up placing an order. They either browse the store and leave, add things to cart and leave or drop out of almost at the end stage of finishing an order – at the checkout page!
But the good news is that lost carts can be recovered if you do your email marketing automation right.
Unlike a physical store, where the abandoned shopping carts lie, well abandoned, and noone to reclaim, you can indeed get the customer back in an ecommerce store. And we’ll tell you just how to win those (almost) lost customers back with the Klaviyo Abandoned Checkout, Abandoned Browse, And Abandoned Cart Automated email flows respectively
In this white paper by Hustler Marketing, we will tell you what these crucial flows are, their impact on your store’s revenue, how to set them up, and our tried and tested best practices to do them right.
Defining the Abandoned Checkout, Abandoned Browse And Abandoned Cart Email Flows
1
Abandoned Checkout
This is an event wherein a customer has abandoned their cart after coming to the checkout page. This is the most common occurrence for ecommerce stores and therefore the most important flow to have in your email flow strategy.
2
Abandoned Browse
The Abandoned Browse event happens when a customer was browsing your store and clicked on a product, but abandoned their session before they added anything to the cart.
Note, they never got to the checkout page. So how does the system track their email?
Either A) They were a returning user and were logged in. or b) The system tracked them through special cookies on the page. (this is complicated to explain here and merits a post of its own.)
3
Abandoned Cart
The Abandoned Cart event happens when a customer has added items to their cart but never clicked on “checkout” option.
This is a new Klaviyo flow that even fewer stores implement, but we strongly recommend doing so.
Impact of abandon Flow Emails on store’s
total revenue
How much lost revenue can the different email automations like Checkout Abandon, Browse Abandon, and Add-to-Cart Abandon flow recover for your ecommerce store?
Here’s what we found out from our data:
On average, the stores made 6.26% of their total revenue from a combination of Abandoned Browse, Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Checkout flow emails.
Here’s a breakup of % of individual flows compared to the overall store and overall email revenue:
% of store revenue (avg) | % of email revenue (avg) | |
Welcome Flow (for context) | 7.5% | 30% |
Abandoned Checkout Flow | 3.74% | 14.5% |
Abandoned Browse Flow | 1.73% | 5.27% |
Abandoned Cart Flow | 1% | 2.93% |
All “Abandon Flows” Combined | 6.26% | 22.53% |
How many lost carts can be recovered with Abandon Flow emails
To find out, we deep dived into the data of our 50 stores who have all 3 or 1 or 2 of the three flow emails set up. For the purpose of this white paper, we observed the total numbers of emails fired after checkout abandon and the % of orders placed after every email. We then observed how many of these resulted in actual orders.
So for example, if 4000 people on a store abandoned their checkout, 4000 emails were fired, at least once, or even twice or thrice or more (depending on how many cart abandon emails were set up by the store) And then if out of those 4000, 100 people placed an order, it counts as a 2.5% recovery rate.
So from our research we found that between the 3 emails on an Abandoned Checkout flow alone, stores can recover an average of 15% of their overall abandoned checkouts!
Add the Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Cart emails, and this number will jump even more.
Orders placed after 1st email | Orders placed after 2nd email | Orders placed after 3rd email | |
Checkout Abandoned Flows | 4.6% | 3.3% | 7.7% |
Notice how the orders came pouring in throughout the number of Abandoned Checkout (CA) emails throughout the 3 CA emails but what’s most incredible is that the MOST numbers of orders placed across our 50 stores on average was the THIRD Abandoned Checkout email!
How to set up a
Abandoned Checkout Flow on Klaviyo
Klaviyo makes it easy enough to set up automated email flows, but of course you need to understand the customer journey and have a strong logic to set up any flow. Here’s an exclusive snapshot of a Abandoned Checkout Flow logic we set up for one of our clients:
Best Practices To Get The Best Results Out Of Abandon Flow Emails
1
Design your checkout in a way that
email is the first thing you capture
Having the customer’s email is the first requirement for any email automation to be even possible. Hence, this point is super important because you want to ensure that you have the customer’s email the first thing if they drop out after filling this form. It’s for a good reason that on Shopify’s default checkout page for ecommerce stores, the first field in the checkout form is the email box.
2
Set up multiple
Checkout Abandon Emails
As you noticed in the cart recovery table above that Checkout Abandoned emails continue to get orders throughout their cadence. Most of our stores have 3, while some have as many as 5 and 10 emails for just this flow alone!
3
Be careful about the
“wait time” before your emails fire up
What’s the ideal wait time after an abandon event and before an email can go out? Usually within 15 minutes. But you can even give it 24 hours in case the product is slightly on the expensive side. An industry standard best practice is to send at least 2 Abandoned Flow emails within the first 30 hours of whatever the triggering event was. Some even send three. But it’s very important that no email goes out after a checkout has been completed or the user has “unsubscribed” to your email. (It happens.)
4
How to design a
Cart Abandon email template
Considering that a Checkout Abandon email is likely to be one of the first email a new customer ever receives from you, set the precedent for what’s to come. Make it on brand, add a lot of personality, and above all, make the message compelling.
While the system will auto-populate the items the customers left in their cart, but you can decide the copy, the layout and the design. You can choose to do a basic to-the-point email like this:
If you’re a custom gift store, that allows the customer to upload their own image or text on a product, the Abandoned Checkout Flow or even the Abandoned Cart flow becomes even more interesting, as the product that the email will generate will automatically have the image and/or text your uploaded.
A customer is unlikely to have the heart to say no to a product that’s customised for them, just waiting to be delivered to their doorstep!
5
Good Checkout/Cart Abandoned
Email Subject lines
Good subject lines are at the heart of a successful email marketing campaign. In case of a Checkout Abandon flow, most probably the customer is hearing from you for the first time, so make it count. Some of the subject lines suggestions for for the Abandoned Checkout and Abandoned Cart flows are given here:
- You left something behind.
- Hey, [first name]. You added this to your cart
- We can’t hold this forever
- About your order with [STORE NAME]…
- We’ll have to give it to someone else.
- Final chance to use your discount!
Go crazy! You can be as basic or imaginative with your subjectline here and infuse a brand element like FreeBirdees here:
6
Add a discount
in an Abandon Flow email
There’s a reason the customer would’ve abandoned their browsing or cart on a store. One of them could be that they realised the product was either too expensive or the shipping made it so. Since you were anyway going to offer a first time customer a 10-25% discount through a coupon as per the Welcome Flow, you can do the same for a Cart Recovery email and offer a discount to incentivise the customer to hurry up and finish their purchase. But be careful about overdoing this. Discounts should be added randomly and not every time otherwise your customers will learn the trick. Here’s a handy primer on how and when to offer a discount in a flow email.
7
Create
a sense of rush
A common best practice in all Abandoned Cart And Abandoned Checkout flow emails is that you highlight that the customer’s saved cart may not remain for a long time and so they have limited time to act. This is a recurring feature in most of the Checkout Or Cart abandon emails we do for our stores.
8
Optimize the flows
at regular intervals
Yes, flow emails are a one-activity and a gift that keeps on giving. Once set up, they fire automatically while you sit back and enjoy the revenue pouring in. But like every marketing strategy, flow emails too need a lick and a polish every once in a while. Observe and analyse your flow performance every once in a while – say every 3 months- and if you find that the emails are not performing as per the benchmarks we just mentioned above or as much as you’d like them to, it’s time for an update. Tweak the subject lines, the copy, the design, and maybe even the offer and run AB tests to see if the results improve.
On a side note, you may even need to do some List Expansion measures at regular intervals to grow your email list.
9
Hire experts
To build your email automation flows
Setting up, analysing, designing and managing these flows looks like too much work and you’d rather let the experts handle this highly critical activity as part of your email strategy? Relax, we’ve got you covered! Building complex, scalable and constantly optimised flows that convert into actual revenue is our forte at Hustler Marketing. Give us a call and we’ll set up your flows, and more!
Conclusion
The trifecta of the “Abandoned” flows namely: Abandoned Checkout Flow, Abandoned Cart and Abandoned Browse email flows are an integral and must-have part of your marketing automation, and a key component of your email marketing strategy. They contribute an average of 6% and even as high as 20% to the overall store revenue in some cases. Setting up them is a one-time activity, but when done right, their rewards reflect in the bottomline month after month.
Klaviyo makes them simple enough, but you probably need email marketing experts to help you set them up. Sending these emails at the right time, after the right intervals, and with the right messaging can bring all those carts and almost lost revenue back to your store’s registers, making it impossible to “abandon” the abandoned flows.
Get Professional Marketing Automation Help With Hustler Marketing
Are you ready to take your ecommerce store to a whole new level using email automation and add more revenue?
Email us or book a call with our experts so we can discuss how to set up email flows and more for your store.
