Abandoned Cart Email Best Practices:
A Data-Driven Guide to Recovering Lost Sales
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Why we wrote this guide
This is a research study focussing on extracting knowledge from frequency, timing, subject lines, calls to action, and offers for abandoned cart email programs of over 1,000 e-commerce brands.
It is the ultimate abandoned cart email strategy guide written after 10+ years of experimentation and research, plus millions of sent abandoned cart emails.
Abandoned cart emails help retail businesses recover sales from people who abandon their shopping carts. We wrote this guide to help anyone who wants to learn how to maximize their chances for success right out of the gate.
The fact that 70% of online consumers engage with your site to the point where they are about to check out and then they abandon the items is nerve wracking. The Baymard Institute, an e-commerce usability think tank, has aggregated cart abandonment data from various industry sources over the last nineteen years.
Bad News: Despite major advancements in technology and e-commerce user experience design, the average cart abandonment rate has remained constant.
Industry pundits portray cart abandonment as a problem that costs online retailers billions of dollars in lost revenue every year.
Good News: This is an exaggeration. It’s human nature to test the waters before making a purchase while shopping online.
There’s no technology, Shopify plug-in, or perfectly optimized online shopping cart in the world that will eliminate it. We must accept the fact that cart abandonment is a very natural part of the e-commerce buying cycle.
What we can do is change our perspective and see shopping cart abandonment as a conversion rate optimization and customer service opportunity for us as eCommerce professionals.
The importance of abandoned cart emails
It’s no secret that abandoned cart emails are one of the most valuable email marketing campaigns you can send.
But, it can be tough to know where to start and what to send in your own cart abandonment emails. We gathered and analyzed the data from 1,000 direct to consumer brands. This way, you can get a good idea of where you should start your abandoned cart email campaigns, or make adjustments to existing campaigns you’re already running.
To begin, you should know the track record of using abandoned cart emails to improve revenue and customer service is so good that all of the world’s best brands implement and continue to watch and improve on their abandoned cart email series.
68% of abandoned carts triggered an abandoned cart email.
1,233 total emails were sent to retrieve abandoned carts.
Here’s how those abandoned cart email campaigns looked, by the numbers.
Email frequency
Even though over half of online retailers send just one abandoned cart email, sending multiple emails is actually the best approach. In our research, we noticed the following:
- 21% sent 2 cart abandonment emails.
- 16% sent 3 cart abandonment emails.
- 7% send 4 cart abandonment emails.
- 2% sent 5 or more cart abandonment emails.
Using an abandoned cart email series gives you more opportunities to send offers that increase conversions. That‘s why a series of emails recovers the most abandoned cart revenue.
However, it’s important to test and optimize the number of abandoned cart emails you send. The goal is to recover as many abandoned carts as possible, without over contacting customers.
If your abandoned cart series annoys people into unsubscribing, you can’t market to them in the future with any further promotional emails. So, too many abandoned cart emails can wind up hurting your overall email marketing revenue.
Send as many abandoned cart emails as you can, but monitor your unsubscribe rate carefully! If you see a spike in unsubscribes at a certain point in your abandoned cart series, reduce the number of emails in your abandoned cart series.
Also, the reasoning works the other way, too. It’s a good idea to extend your abandoned cart email series if the customer is engaging with your emails. For example, you can create an 8 email series. But, only continue to send emails after the third or fourth if the customer opens or clicks-through in the previous email.
This sort of triggered email delivers exceptional performance because they only target customers that have demonstrated the most interest.
Why customers abandon cart 70% of the time
Though shopping cart abandonment is a behavior we can’t eliminate; we can try to understand its route cause. The study we commonly reference was conducted by WorldPay. A sample of 19,000 consumers were asked why they leave e-commerce sites without paying:
Three out of the top five reasons given for abandoning an e-commerce website are cost or price related.
The other reasons listed mainly describe customers who just weren’t quite ready to buy yet:
- Presented with unexpected costs
- Just browsing
- Found a better price elsewhere
- Overall price too expensive
- Decided against buying
In this guide, you’ll learn about strategies to make sure you never miss out on an order because of a price concern or unexpected shipping costs (most consumers expect free shipping these days). Below, you’ll learn about email marketing strategies to make sure you never miss out on an order for any of these reasons. You’ll also learn how to target those “just browsing” customers and uncover million dollar insights into why customers aren’t buying from you in the first place.
How? By taking a customer-centric approach. Customers are giving you an amazing signal of purchase intent when they abandon a transaction on your site. You need to think of cart abandonment emails as your second chance to continue a conversation with this incredibly important group of potential customers.
By building a quality abandoned cart email program, one of three things will happen when you follow up:
- You'll win the order 10-15% of the time.
- You'll find out why the customer didn't buy and use this qualitative information to proactively improve your buying process.
- You'll create a great customer service moment and leave an everlasting positive impression on that customer.
- You’ll use humor to create a positive, emotional connection to your prospective customer.
How to measure your store’s cart abandonment rate
There is an endless supply of tools available to help you measure how customers move through each page of your checkout funnel so you can easily visualize where the drop off occurs. A common approach is to use a free tool like Google Analytics in combination with another specialized analytics provider like Rejoiner. Most solutions are intended for aggregated reporting on how all customers are moving through the funnel, but an important feature is the ability to make the distinction between an identifiable customer and an anonymous one. We’ll cover more ways to identify a higher percentage of site visitors shortly.
Measuring cart abandonment rate
If you’re just getting started, setting up a conversion funnel in GA4 s is a simple task you can use to establish a baseline cart abandonment rate. Not only does it empower you to understand how and when people drop out during your conversion process, it also allows you to measure your cart abandonment rate over time.
- Install the GA4 tracking code on your site using Google Tag Manager (GTM) or directly with gtag.js.
- Enable Enhanced eCommerce tracking if your platform supports it for automatic tracking of eCommerce events.
2. Track eCommerce Events
- add_to_cart: Triggered when a user adds an item to their cart.
- begin_checkout: Triggered when a user starts the checkout process.
- purchase: Triggered when a user completes a purchase. Use GTM to set up these event tags, including relevant parameters like item_name, price, and currency. If not using GTM, manually implement them using gtag.js.
3. Analyze Cart Abandonment in GA4
- Navigate to the "Explore" section in GA4 and create a Funnel Exploration.
- Define funnel steps: add_to_cart, begin_checkout, and purchase.
- Use this to identify where users drop off and optimize accordingly.
You will end up with something that looks like this:
How to identify a higher percentage of visitors
For e-commerce stores where only a small percentage of customers make it into the checkout process, and an even smaller percentage are registered, this presents a challenge (less people to follow up with if you don’t know who they are—because you don’t have their email address yet).
There are several strategies that can be employed to identify a higher percentage of customers even before they get to checkout, thus capturing a larger number of people for our cart abandonment program to follow up with:
Triggered pop-ups/offers
Triggered on-site offers can entice anonymous visitors to opt-in, creating an identifiable session much earlier in the buying process. On-site lead magnets can be paired with your abandoned cart email program, so that after a customer opts-in, their session is tagged while shopping on your site.
Newsletter append
If you’ve built up an in-house email marketing list, leveraging your weekly newsletter send can greatly increase the percentage of identifiable customers browsing your website. Your ESP should give you the ability to append the customer’s email address within a query string parameter, should they click through the email. If your cart abandonment email partner can field that query string parameter and tag the session, you’ve just increased the percentage of identifiable sessions on your site.
Pre-submit tracking
By using pre-submit tracking, high intent customers can be identified in real-time, as soon as they enter an email address on your checkout form, even if they don’t complete the checkout form. We recommend placing the email address field as close to the top of the checkout form as possible. Then, you will need to double check that the customer has opted-into your email list before sending them your abandonment campaign.
Data sharing co-ops
Some martech vendors offer the ability to tap into a centralized pool of identifiable customers and devices. In this situation, merchants have opted-into sharing their end user’s data with other merchants using the platform. This approach plausibly enables a retailer to access a larger group of identifiable customers who would have previously been anonymous.
Abandoned cart email best practices
Identifying and engaging customers
Identify guests, registered customers, and existing email subscribers
A successful abandoned cart program engages both guests and registered customers. Rejoiner’s pre-submit tracking enables you to identify anonymous customers as soon as they enter an email address on your site, in real-time.
Etix, a leader in online ticketing, used this feature to millions thousands of potential customers they didn’t even know existed because they weren’t registered. During the first year of using pre-submit tracking, they tracked 1.1 million abandoned transactions from customers who were only filling out a few form fields on their checkout page and never hitting submit.
So, place your email capture field as high on the checkout page as possible to give yourself the best chance to identify a guest customer before they abandon. Since registered customers have already given you their email address, you can use this to track their behavior as they move around your site.
To identify more customers earlier in the funnel, consider a triggered pop-up or opt-in that encourages customers to provide their email address earlier in the process. Tying the opt-in into your campaign will enable you to identify a higher percentage of customers that express purchase intent, even if they don’t make it to the cart or checkout page.
Handle conversion tracking for phone orders and third party payment processors
Unified conversion tracking across all of the payment methods you offer to customers is essential to staying in step with customers. Customers may abandon an order on your website, then complete the order over the phone.
Tie conversions from your internal order processing systems back to those being tracked by your email provider. Ensure that customers are never confused by your emails because one system wasn’t talking to another.
Timing of email campaigns
Offer Timing
Of the brands that send abandoned cart offers:
- 50% send their first offer in the first email.
- 30% send their first offer in the second email.
- 18% send their first offer in the third email.
- 2% send their first offer in the fourth email.
Of the brands that send abandoned cart offers:
- 61% only send 1 offer email during their cart abandonment email series.
- 27% send 2 offer emails during their cart abandonment email series.
- 8% send 3 offer emails during their cart abandonment email series.
- 3% send 4 offer emails during their cart abandonment email series.
- 1% send 5 or more offer emails during their cart abandonment email series.
45% of brands that send an offer will include one in every cart abandonment email in their series.
Offers in cart abandonment sequences:
- 18% of the 1st cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 36% of the 2nd cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 59% of the 3rd cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 62% of the 4th cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 64% of the 5th cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 40% of the 6th cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 100% of the 7th cart abandonment emails included an offer.
- 100% of the 8th cart abandonment emails included an offer.
We’ve already established that sending a series of abandoned cart emails is the best method. However, it’s a bit surprising how many companies send an offer in the first abandoned cart email.
As we mentioned earlier, many cart abandoners don’t need an offer to entice them to complete their purchase. And, sending an offer too early can train customers who would otherwise be willing to pay full price to abandon carts and wait for an offer.
So, it’s most optimal to send your first offer in the second or third email. This maximizes your conversions, without giving away too much profit margin. And, your offers will reach the more stubborn cart abandoners before they’ve made up their mind not to buy.
First Email Timing
- 5% send within 30 minutes of cart abandonment.
- 40% send within 1 hour of cart abandonment.
- 68% send within 6 hours of cart abandonment.
- 89% send within 12 hours of cart abandonment.
- 98% send within 24 hours of cart abandonment.
Second Email Timing:
- 5% send within 30 minutes of cart abandonment.
- 40% send within 1 hour of cart abandonment.
- 68% send within 6 hours of cart abandonment.
- 89% send within 12 hours of cart abandonment.
- 98% send within 24 hours of cart abandonment.
Third Email Timing:
- 20% of 3rd cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 24 hours of cart abandonment.
- 48% of 3rd cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 48 hours of cart abandonment.
- 69% of 3rd cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 72 hours of cart abandonment.
- 88% of 3rd cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 96 hours of cart abandonment.
Fourth Email Timing:
- 25% of 4th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 48 hours of cart abandonment.
- 60% of 4th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 72 hours of cart abandonment.
- 70% of 4th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 96 hours of cart abandonment.
- 79% of 4th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 120 hours of cart abandonment.
Fifth Email Timing:
- 36% of 5th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 72 hours of cart abandonment.
- 50% of 5th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 96 hours of cart abandonment.
- 71% of 5th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 144 hours of cart abandonment.
- 86% of 5th cart abandonment emails are sent within the first 168 hours of cart abandonment.
Although companies are doing a lot of different things, we’ve tested this. In our experience, the best time to send the first abandoned cart email is 30 minutes to an hour after cart abandonment. Sending your first abandoned cart email at 30 minutes usually nets the best conversion rates.
Following that, your second and third abandoned cart emails should arrive within 3 days of cart abandonment. Your second and third emails will often generate a majority of your abandoned cart email campaign revenue.
The data shows that most companies stop their abandoned cart emails after about six days, which makes sense. After a week, your abandoned cart emails may start interfering with your other promotional emails or causing people to unsubscribe because they feel you email them too much.
When to add a second and third email to your abandoned cart email sequence
If your first email wasn’t successful at converting the customer or eliciting a response, try sending a second and third email. Track customer replies and suppress the remaining emails for customers who respond with customer service questions or convert.
Here’s the most common cadence retailers start with:
- First email at 30-60 minutes post abandon
- Second email at 24 hours post abandon
- Third email at 3 days post abandon
Trigger in real-time using the customer’s last action on your website
It’s hard to believe that there are still email vendors and e-commerce platforms sending batched cart abandonment email campaigns in 2025. This is a big missed opportunity for the retailers they serve. A batched approach sends to all customers who abandon in a twenty-four hour time period—at the same time.
In comparison, a real-time-campaign triggers email sends on a per-customer level, based on their last interaction on your website.
Getting that first email out within 60 minutes of a customer’s last interaction on your site is critical for two possible outcomes:
- Getting a response from the customer about why they didn’t buy (before they buy somewhere else).
- Providing great customer service and winning back the sale.
Send customers a service email within 30 minutes of the cart being abandoned
The first email you send should have no other purpose other than to provide responsive customer service. Customers will abandon a purchase simply because they have unanswered questions, had a payment issue, or experienced a network delay while checking out.
Take the opportunity and use your first email to create a memorable customer service moment. Encourage customers to pick up the phone and call you or prompt them to reply to the email with their questions.
Writing effective emails
Subject lines
We’ve all gotten an abandoned cart email with a subject line like, Oops, did you forget something? or You left something in your shopping cart. It’s fine to start your program with these proven winners as a baseline, but don’t be afraid to test humorous or more conversational variations. Try employing emojis, write your subject line variants with a friendlier, more informal tone, and use this opportunity to create a positive customer service moment.
Subject lines are one of the easiest things to A/B test. This is why many companies have very well optimized subject lines. The extrapolated data shows that 60% of subject lines do not use the word “cart,” or include the phrase, “complete your purchase,” or ask the question, “did you forget something?” (and the data is even more lopsided if you look at each of these words and phrases individually).
This means that most brands most likely tested these and either found that they didn’t perform as well as something else. Or, they realized that many other abandoned cart emails used similar subject lines and opted for something that differentiated their brand, making them stand out.
Now, it’s true that any email subject line must give the recipient a reason to open the email and a glimpse of what’s inside the email, which is why emails with an offer inside tell the recipient that there’s an offer.
But, the most effective abandoned cart email subject lines accomplish this differently than the competing brands.
So, avoid the common phrases and words.
But, be clear about what’s in the email.
Calls to Action (CTAs)
Your abandoned cart email CTA is another element that’s easy to isolate and A/B test. So, the data here is instructive.
Notice that the most common CTAs are either, “complete your purchase,” or include the word “complete.” That’s because it’s the most specific CTA that drives to the end state you want: a completed purchase.
While a CTA like, “return to cart” may get decent click-through rates, the overall conversion rates will likely suffer because a customer could click the CTA, return to their cart, and then immediately abandon it again, all while dutifully following your instructions.
That’s why the abandoned cart email CTAs that are most effective are those that are the most specific about the end state you want to achieve.
When Is the Best Time to Send an Abandoned Cart Email? (And How to Do It Right)
After sending millions of emails, here’s what we know about when to send abandoned cart emails, and how to create emails that will recover some of the $4 trillion in revenue left in abandoned shopping carts.
Offers and discounts
Employ discounts and offers intelligently
Including discount codes in your abandonment program seems like a no-brainer. It is, to some degree, but be aware of the pitfalls.
Common concern centers on training customers to abandon transactions on purpose, just to receive a discount. This can be mitigated with intelligent frequency capping.
Frequency capping catches the customers who are abusing the system and stops any emails from being sent to them.
Dynamic discount codes
Another frequent concern is that discount codes included in cart abandonment emails will be leaked into the public domain. This can be eliminated by generating one-time use codes dynamically and making them unique to individual customers. This means that every customer will receive a unique code that can only be used a single time.
The more nuanced argument against including discounts is the belief that you’re cannibalizing a sale that had a likelihood to happen anyway, thus giving away margin. This is partially true.
There will be a percentage of customers who abandon cart who would have come back to complete their purchase without an incentive.
The only way to measure the true incremental lift of sending an offer versus not sending it, is to run a control group test.
Offer methods
This dataset is short, but sweet. Yes, most companies use static codes. But, the bottom line is that dynamic discount codes are better than static codes.
Dynamic discount codes are customizable. And they can only be used one time, which eliminates the problem of people sharing or leaking discount codes.
So, dynamic discount codes are more likely to be used (because a code like “mydiscount10%” is easier to remember than a random string of characters). And dynamic discount codes are impossible to abuse.
Adding offers directly to the abandoned cart is a great way to reduce friction in your checkout process. However, it’s harder to implement than discount codes, which explains why so few abandoned cart emails use this method.
Always offer free shipping or a free-shipping threshold
In 2025, online shoppers are conditioned to expect free shipping all the time. (Ahem, thanks again Amazon.) At a minimum, consumers expect free shipping above a certain threshold of spend.
If the economics of your business don’t allow you to always offer free shipping, consider providing some type of shipping incentive for those customers who are spending enough. Determine what that amount is and add a banner or pop-up notifying the shopper when they have qualified for free shipping. Many customers will add items to reach that value threshold.
Remember, one of the primary causes of shopping cart abandonment are unexpected costs. Don’t let the lack of free shipping deter your next high-value customer.
What Impact Does Free Shipping Have on Online Retail Sales?
After sending millions of emails, here’s what we know about the impact of free shipping and how to create emails that will recover some of the $4 trillion in revenue left in abandoned shopping carts.
Offer Timing
We found that 35% of brands who send cart abandonment emails send offers in their emails. While we also noticed that 4% improved their offer over the course of their emails.
Control Group Tests
We found that 35% of brands who send cart abandonment emails send offers in their emails. While we also noticed that 4% improved their offer over the course of their emails.
Control group tests measure the purchase behavior of groups who don’t receive any emails and compare the value of those customers to a test group of customers who do receive an offer.
Comparing the revenue generated by the control group to the test group gives us a true understanding of how much additional revenue is being generated and if there is enough lift to warrant a coupon or offer.
To increase the effectiveness of your chosen offer, consider making the coupon expire and use limited-time messaging to encourage the cart abandoner to take action before it’s too late.
31% of all cart abandonment emails included an offer ranging from free shipping to discounts to free products.
Offer Types
- 81% of offers were for percentage discounts.
- 12% of offers were for dollar discounts.
- 5% of offers were for free shipping.
- 2% of offers were for a free gift with purchase.
Offer Value
- 40% of all offers were for 10% off.
- 20% of all offers were for 15% off.
- 12% of all offers were for 20% off.
- 5% of all offers were for free shipping.
- 5% of all offers were for $10 off purchase.
- 3% of all offers were for 5% off.
- 3% of all offers were for 30% off.
- 3% of all offers were for 25% off.
- 2% of all offers were for a free gift with purchase.
- 1% of all offers were for $5 off.
The remaining 6% were miscellaneous offers that alone are less than 1% of the total offers.
First Thing: using offers in your cart abandonment emails increases your conversions. However, you need to deploy your offers intelligently.
How much you offer depends on your business and how much of a discount you can afford to give. There is a method to the madness, though.
Bigger numbers usually generate better results. That’s most likely why 10%, 15%, and 20% off were the most common offers. At those percentages, the actual dollar amount of the discount is often less than the percentage itself. So, companies use the percentage to make the discount look bigger.
Use a little arithmetic when you craft your offers. Determine how much of a discount your profit margin will bear, on average. Then, calculate what percentage of a discount that would work out to be. Always use the higher number as your discount (i.e. use 10% over $7. But, use $7 over 5%).
Free shipping can also be a powerful discount. Unfortunately, thanks to things like Amazon, free shipping has become almost an expectation, rather than an incentive. However, evaluate your checkout flow analytics. If a lot of customers are dropping out at the shipping stage, free shipping could be your highest converting offer.
If you decide to offer free shipping, based on your checkout analytics, use holdout tests to verify that offering free shipping is indeed increasing revenue, and test your free shipping offer head-to-head with alternative offers. That way you know when you’ve found the best offer.
Offers by Industry
Of the retailers that send cart abandonment emails:
- 35% of Apparel retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 43% of Automotive retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 38% of Beauty & Cosmetics retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 29% of Consumer Electronic retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 57% of Eyewear retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 50% of Floristry retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 14% of Food & Beverage retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 32% of Footwear & Accessories retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 58% of Health & Wellness retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 29% of Hobby, Recreation & Leisure retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 38% of Home retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 29% of Jewelry retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 0% of Pet retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
- 67% of Travel Accessory retailers send offers in their cart abandonment emails.
The data here is a bit more nuanced than our last section. While it’s true that offers are a proven tactic for increasing conversions, they require you to give away some profit margin. The wild variation in industries that employ offers is likely due to varying profit margins.
It’s possible that your prices are already as low as they can go, and abandoned cart offers simply aren’t feasible. In that case, you may have to use other methods for increasing conversions (scarcity, priming, contrasting, etc.).
In any case, it’s critical that you deliberately calculate the best discount for your business, rather than simply using the most common discounts. If the numbers show that you can offer no discount at all, that’s okay. You can still send great abandoned cart emails that will rake in revenue for you.
Additional best practices
Approach your campaign with a customer service focus
Abandoned cart emails are your chance to continue the conversation with an extremely important group of customers: those that demonstrated the highest amount of possible purchase intent but still didn’t buy. Your job is to provide amazing customer service and find out why the purchase was not finalized. To uncover these insights, include your toll-free number prominently within the email and write your copy using a helpful, customer service tone.
Send from a live, monitored inbox and ask your customers for feedback. Asking simple questions like, “Was there a problem?” or “How can we help?” will generate real, qualitative responses about what friction points are causing customers to abandon in the first place. This is priceless information.
To make customers feel more comfortable about providing you this feedback, send from a real person’s name and include a photograph of a real person in the footer of the email.
Document qualitative learning
Abandoned cart email success is about more than just conversion and revenue. Though it’s important to track engagement/conversion metrics with Google Analytics and your Email Service Provider of choice, these metrics only tell one part of the story. Open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, attributable revenue, and revenue per email are the baseline engagement metrics for your campaigns.
Also track the number of phone calls your campaign generates and document the feedback you’re getting from customers.
Track how many customers reply to your emails with unanswered questions or usability problems they experienced on the site. There are enormous qualitative benefits to be had by running this campaign that won’t be captured in the “recovered sales” column. Don’t underestimate these benefits!
Build abandoned cart emails into your customer feedback loop
By asking customer service focused questions like, Was there a problem? or How can we help? you are inviting customers to start a dialogue with you about their shopping experience. The insight generated by having these discussions will be priceless for your conversion rate optimization efforts.
Qualitative feedback from customers will quickly unearth trends around where the friction points exist in your checkout process and what issues are causing customers not to convert in the first place.
Our customers regularly receive million dollar insights from their cart abandonment email campaigns with this approach.
Make it a regular practice to review this feedback with your development team and prioritize the on-site issues that are causing customers to bail on your checkout process.
Product recommendations
Use recommendations to increase click-through rates and average order value
Recommendations increase click-through, conversion and the relevancy of your abandoned cart email program. There are many approaches to integrating product recommendations into your emails, but our strategy focuses on recommending products in the same product category that a customer has abandoned.
These should be similar products or complementary add-ons to the abandoned products in your customer’s cart. You can also recommend top sellers across the entire catalog, items frequently purchased together, or new products to get your customers buying more from you.
Rejoiner’s recommendation engine allows you to predict what customers are likely to buy next and then intelligently serve images of those products into your cart abandonment campaigns with the goal of increasing click-through rate and average order value.
There two main ways this works:
ONE: If someone receives an email but no longer wants the product, you can serve them images of other top-selling items in that category that they may like instead. This helps increase click-through rate back to your store and gets this person back into buying mode again.
TWO: If someone receives an email for a product they were interested in and are about to buy, you can intelligently serve them with images of other products that are frequently purchased together, which will allow them to add more items to their previous cart and increase average order value in the process (making your cart abandonment campaigns much more profitable).
- 14% of second cart abandonment emails include recommendations.
- 17% of third cart abandonment emails include recommendations.
- 15% of fourth cart abandonment emails include recommendations.
- 14% of fifth cart abandonment emails include recommendations (2/14).
- 20% of sixth cart abandonment emails include recommendations (⅕).
- 0% of seventh cart abandonment emails include recommendations (0/2).
- 0% of eighth cart abandonment emails include recommendations (0/1).
Product recommendations can be a reliable tactic for increasing average order values, and even lifting conversion rates. However, recommendations are only effective if they’re executed correctly, which is likely why so few cart abandonment emails include them.
To effectively deploy cart abandonment product recommendations, you need analytics and email software that can track user behavior and dynamically insert recommendations into your cart abandonment emails. Otherwise, the recommendations may not be relevant, which is unlikely to positively affect your cart abandonment email performance.
Additionally, the increase in product recommendations included in the later cart abandonment emails is because only cart abandoners who haven’t completed their purchase receive the later emails in the series.
Customers who haven’t clicked through to their original cart after receiving several cart abandonment emails are prime targets for alternate product recommendations.
These customers added items to their cart. So, they’re clearly interested in their brand. But, failing to complete their purchase after a few cart abandonment emails indicates that they may be more interested in related products than the original item they abandoned.
Email content
Scarcity
44% of all cart abandoned emails used scarcity in the subject line or body as a tactic to drive conversions.
In our research we found that:
- 36% of 1st cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 50% of 2rd cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 54% of 3rd cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 62% of 4th cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 71% of 5th cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 80% of 6th cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 50% of 7th cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
- 100% of 8th cart abandonment emails use scarcity.
We also noticed that 19% of all scarcity comes from the cart expiring or not continuing to be reserved. 23% of all scarcity comes from the offer expiring. 58% of all scarcity comes from the item selling out or no longer being available. However, only 10% of these “selling out” emails explicitly mention low stock or limited quantities.
Humor
Abandoned cart emails are the perfect opportunity to make your customers smile. The notion that you are reaching out to them about an imaginary shopping cart that was left behind on your website is humorous in itself.
Your copywriting tone and photography can both be used to make the interaction light-hearted and fun.
11% used humor in the subject line or body as a tactic to drive conversions.
In our research we found that:
- 12% of 1st cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 11% of the 2nd cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 8% of 3rd cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 8% of 4th cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 7% of 5th cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 20% of 6th cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 0% of 7th cart abandonment emails use humor.
- 0% of 8th cart abandonment emails use humor.
These two batches of stats illustrate two things that have been tested over and over:
- Scarcity is a tactic that reliably drives conversions.
- Humor is not a reliable conversion tactic.
That’s not to deride humor in emails. There’s nothing wrong with using humor when there’s an opportunity for it. But, if you must choose between funny and scarce, choose scarcity.
The effect on click-through rates and conversions is easily testable, which is likely why 44% of cart abandonment emails employ scarcity up front, while only 11% used humor in the subject line.
Additionally, scarcity is much easier to use than humor. It’s difficult to predict what people will find funny. But, we know that limited time offers and limited stock generate more sales than offers that never expire and unlimited stock.
And, that’s actually a mistake that a lot of companies are making. Over half of the abandoned cart email campaigns—58%—used limited stock as the scarcity device. But, only 10% explicitly mentioned the limited supply. Regardless of how you’re creating scarcity, you need to draw attention to it. Otherwise, customers won’t even notice that there’s any scarcity at all.
Images and session regeneration
These two statistics demonstrate something that we’ve already proven: showing the items in the abandoned cart and enabling customers to complete purchases on a different device than they started on increased conversions.
Including pictures of the abandoned products increases email personalization and reminds customers of what they’ve got waiting for them in their cart.
However, cross-device session regeneration is a huge conversion optimization. Most people will finish their transaction on a different device than the one they were using when they abandoned the cart. So, session regeneration reduces buying friction for a massive portion of your cart abandoners. And, it has no impact on customers who use the same device.
Most abandoned cart emails use these tactics because they work.
Design & optimization
Don’t distract from a clear call to action
That being said, abandoned cart emails should have one primary goal:
Drive a high-intent customer back to your website to purchase.
Don’t distract them with any secondary call-to-action buttons or links that don’t directly support achieving that main objective.
Links to social profiles? Test removing them.
Primary website navigation? Get rid of it!
At Rejoiner, we frequently find ourselves having success employing the mantra, One Send, One Goal. Simplify your abandoned cart templates so that the customer’s attention is focused only on clicking through the abandoned cart email to a seamlessly regenerated cart that is ready to convert to a sale.
Personalize beyond salutation
Personalization broadly refers to any tactic that makes an email more relevant to the person receiving it, based on what information you happen to know about the recipient. Basic personalization includes things as simple as including the customer’s first name in the salutation or subject line.
For abandoned cart emails, including the contents of the customer’s cart is also a common personalization tactic. This could be as simple as including the name of one of the products they abandoned in the email copy or recreating the cart itself inside of the email template.
More sophisticated personalization techniques use demographic, geographic, and even environmental data to make emails more relevant to recipients.
Imagine personalizing a browse abandonment email for a clothing brand, knowing the weather in the recipient’s geography was cold or rainy that day.
Use preheaders to get more opens
An email preheader is a small amount of copy that renders under the subject line in the preview pane of most email clients.
Give your preheaders careful consideration, as they act as a secondary subject line and can positively (or negatively) influence open rates.
Email preheaders can be hidden in the body of your template using CSS or visible depending on the requirements of your template design.
The Quickest Win for Increasing Email Open Rates: Stop Neglecting Email Preheader Text
In email marketing, capturing attention is key, and email preheaders—those brief text snippets in inboxes—can make all the difference. Explore their importance and get helpful tips to boost open and click-through rates.
Assume your customers will open abandonment emails on a mobile device
Over 50% of the 5,000,000 monthly emails sent by Rejoiner are opened on a device that is different from the one the customer originally abandoned on. Think about that for a second!
More than half of the time, customers will consume your email on a different device than where the first touch occurred.
If you are not employing session regeneration and customers are not signed in on their mobile devices (hint: they probably won’t be), customers will have a disjointed experience and will be less likely to go back and re-add items all over again. It’s annoying!
Design and code responsive email templates so that they render well on mobile devices, as this is more than likely where customers will consume them. More importantly, regenerate cart sessions across devices so customers have a seamless shopping experience from device to device.
Session Regeneration: The One Feature e-commerce Companies Overlook (And How We Lifted Conversions From Email by 33.96%)
Session regeneration allows users to seamlessly continue their shopping sessions, regardless of the device they use to return to a site. This feature is crucial as a significant number of consumers begin a purchase on one device and complete it on another. By implementing session regeneration, retailers can reduce friction in the checkout process, leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer satisfaction.
Segment abandoned carts for better targeting & filtering
Segmentation can be used for more granular targeting of your ideal customers and also for filtering out customers you may not want to send to. For example, you would want to filter out customers in the geographies that you don’t ship to. You also may want to treat wholesale customers differently than retail, or filter them out entirely.
For targeting purposes, segmentation enables you to identify customers with specific traits who you may want to message differently than others. For example, you may want to develop a special campaign for particularly high value orders and use a different offer for a new customer who has never purchased before. The only way to accomplish this is with a flexible segmentation engine that can segment your customer data using demographic, transactional, and behavioral filters.
Adopt a mentality of ongoing optimization
We routinely hear vendors refer to their cart abandonment campaigns as set it and forget it—as if that was a benefit. This mentality leaves an enormous amount of revenue on the table.
A better approach is to think about your cart abandonment campaigns as a constant work in progress.
Split testing is the most powerful tool at your disposal to improve engagement metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion. There is no silver bullet to magically drive conversion upwards overnight, but consistent testing can string together many small wins and a big increase in revenue generated.
Our team can increase a cart abandonment campaigns’ recovered revenue up to 100% with consistent testing over six months.
Focus your testing efforts on subject line improvements first, then progressively test the other facets of your campaign. We've created a helpful guide that outlines different ways you can test your campaigns to grow revenue.
Email A/B Testing: How We Test Our Clients’ Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns to Maximize Revenue
Discover 22 different ways you can test your campaigns to grow revenue!
Use control groups to measure your organic return to purchase time and ratio
We’ve established that cart abandonment is a natural part of the e-commerce buying cycle. What’s also natural is that a percentage of cart abandoners will return to your site and convert without further intervention.
Develop an understanding of the following:
- what percentage of customers come back and convert on their own (organic return to purchase ratio)
- and how long it takes!
These data points will help you schedule your abandoned cart sequence so that order cannibalization is minimized and will ensure that you only follow up with true cart abandoners.
How to Measure the True Profitability of Your Email Campaigns Using Holdout Tests
Holdout testing involves creating a control group of customers who do not receive specific email campaigns, allowing marketers to compare their purchasing behavior against those who did receive the emails. This comparison helps determine the incremental revenue generated by the campaigns and identifies potential instances where discounts or promotions may be unnecessary, thereby preserving profit margins.
Go beyond cart abandonment with browse and wishlist follow-up emails
Don’t forget about tracking other important signals of purchase intent. Cart abandonment represents a customer with high purchase intent but browse and wishlist abandonment are also effective behaviors to trigger on.
Browse abandonment campaigns focus on customers who have opted into your in-house email list, have engaged with your newsletter or other email marketing, have spent time browsing product detail pages, but have NOT made it to the cart yet.
They may have browsed specific products or category pages, and your goal is to help them pick up where they left off after they leave your site. Incorporating category top-seller recommendations or new products that have just been added to the catalog within your browse abandonment emails are effective tactics.
Wishlist abandonment focuses on customers who have expressed buying intent by saving items for later using the wishlist feature on your site.
Browse Abandonment Emails: How to Turn Window Shoppers Into Customers
Visitors are spending more time on site ‘window shopping’, and it’s our job as email marketers to use the data from their visits to deliver emails that move them further down the buying cycle.
Abandoned cart email examples from top eCommerce brands
We studied the cart abandonment strategies of 1,000 of the world’s top direct to consumer brands. Then, our designers curated 100+ of the best abandoned cart email examples into this handy swipe file. If you want to see what the best in the business is sending out, this is where you will find it!
Helpfully sectioned out into categories, it’s easy to find what best suits your business needs: Animation, Great Visuals, Humor, Recommendations, Social Proof, Scarcity, Text Only, and Brand Value Props. You’re sure to find inspiration within!
Compliance and deliverability
Maintain CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliance
The best way to combat the SPAM folder is to send highly segmented recovery emails your customers actually want to open. Aside from that, follow best practices for CAN-SPAM compliance. Include your physical mailing address and a simple, 1-click opt-out link at the bottom of every email.
Sync your unsubscribes across email vendors if you use more than one to maintain continuity. Never use misleading subject lines or envelope information and honor opt-out requests as quickly as you can.
GDPR requires merchants to maintain an entirely different and more rigorous set of standards for consent before abandoned cart emails can be sent to people residing in the EEA (European Economic Area).
Explicit consent must be captured from all end users in order to collect data about their browsing behavior and/or purchase preferences, before you ever send any email. Beyond that, explicit opt-in consent must also be provided before an end user can be sent any type of marketing or email.
Increase deliverability with SPF & DKIM authentication
A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a DNS record that identifies third-party mail servers that you have authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. In the eyes of a receiving email server (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), an SPF record is a signal that you’ve given a third party permission to send an email using your domain in the email’s From: address.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method to verify that your messages’ content is trustworthy and was not altered from the point at which the message left your servers.
This is achieved by adding a public key to your site’s DNS record, which must match the private key your server uses to sign outgoing messages.
Email Deliverability: Best Practices for Having Your Emails Actually End up in the Inbox
Struggling with email deliverability? Learn how to keep your emails out of the spam folder with actionable tips on authentication, monitoring key metrics, and improving inbox placement rates to maximize your email marketing ROI.
Calculate your return on investment
It only takes a few minutes to project how much revenue your retailer could be recovering with abandoned cart emails. We’ll need to know a little bit about your site traffic, average order value, and conversion funnel, which is all easily pulled from Google Analytics.
Using a standard identifiable rate of 30%, Rejoiner could send abandonment emails to 1,200 customers on a monthly basis.
ROI Breakdown
*Based on established abandoned cart email conversion rate
Let's generate $302,400.00 together over the next 12 months.
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Although much of the data trends toward making use of what’s been proven to work, there are a few areas where the majority of companies are not utilizing the best practices for generating conversions.
So, there’s plenty of room to differentiate yourself and outperform the competition by simply creating better emails that more reliably generate conversions than the competition. Use this data to follow the trends, and go against the grain where it’s going to be the most profitable.
What to do now
If you’re ready to optimize your own abandoned cart emails, learn how to send the best abandoned cart email campaigns.
For the last 10 years, Mike has worked with brands like Moosejaw, Hydroflask, Peak Design, Triumph, Hearst & Guthy Renker to provide the strategy & technology with which they use email to drive revenue growth. He's also the Founder of Rejoiner, a SaaS marketing platform built for ecommerce businesses.
