How to Create High-Converting Abandoned Cart Flows: An Actionable Guide

We wrote this guide to show you the step-by-step process we use to build high-converting abandoned cart flows and recover lost revenues. This is the same process we've been using for over a decade that has allowed us to 20x 350+ ecommerce brands and drive over $200 million in revenue. 

Just so you understand how much of lost revenue we're talking about here, let's say your online store has:

• Monthly orders: 200 successful purchases‍
• Average order value: $50‍
• Monthly revenue: $10,000 (200 × $50)

Typical cart abandonment rates are around 70%. So for every 100 completed purchases, about 230 are abandoned. In your case:

• Completed orders: 200
• Abandoned carts: 460
• Total potential orders: 660

If you recover only 10% of those abandoned carts:

• Recovered orders: 46 (10% of 460)
• Additional revenue: $2,300 (46 × $50)
• New monthly revenue: $12,300
• Revenue increase: 23%
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Obviously, this is a very simplistic example, but the point is, even with a modest 10% recovery rate of abandoned carts, you could increase your revenue by 23%!

This actionable guide will teach you the exact strategy we use to recover 10-15% of abandoned carts and create high-converting recovery flows within Rejoiner. We'll cover common mistakes to avoid, explore helpful tools, and illustrate the potential impact of an effective abandoned cart strategy with a real-world example.

Getting Your Cart Recovery Flow Started

As an ecommerce brand, you have to accept the fact that abandoned carts are a natural process of ecommerce shopping that you can never get rid of.  No magic formula or flow is going to make anyone who visits your store buy from you – that's just not happening. 

Instead, what we found to be helpful and that’s been working really well for our customers, is to think of cart abandonment as a conversion rate optimization opportunity, and use it to: 

• Get deep insights into why customers abandoned their carts in the first place. 
• Recover 10-15% of orders.
• Create a low-cost, high-impact re-engagement opportunity that can significantly improve conversion rates.
• Build emotional connection with customers, which helps stay top of mind. 

Before we show you how to build abandoned cart flows (we call them journeys) with conversion potential, there are three prerequisite steps you’ll need to do: 

1. Abandoned cart analysis 
2. Advanced email segmentation 
3. Smart incentives 

1. Abandoned Cart Analysis

Depending on your business size, you might have a few to thousand abandoned carts per day. 

Some are worth $10 and some $1,000+ orders, some are from repeat customers while others are first-time visitors, and some contain your bestsellers while others include less popular items. 

And each category requires different copywriting, design layout, approach and psychology.  

Understanding why these carts are being abandoned and by who is crucial for recovering lost revenue.

That’s why we recommend a more strategic approach to handling e-commerce abandoned shopping cart by analyzing three key dimensions: 

1. Cart value distribution: What is the value of the abandoned cart?‍
2. Product composition: Are customers abandoning your best-selling items or less popular ones? ‍
3. Customer status: Are these first-time visitors, returning customers, or guests? 

So, assuming you've implemented Enhanced Ecommerce in GA4, and data is flowing in, here's how you actually analyze your abandoned carts: 

From your GA4, for abandoned carts, you'll need to track: 

• Add_to_cart event: This event should be fired whenever a user adds products to their carts. Make sure it includes parameters such as, item_id, user_id or client_id, item_name, price, quantity, item_category, session_source, timestamp and currency. .‍
• Begin_checkout event: This event should be fired when a user initiates the checkout process. The goal here is to distinguish between users who simply added items to their cart and those who actually started the checkout process.

This will give you information about: 

• Which product categories have higher abandonment rates
• If there's a price threshold where products tend to be abandoned
• The typical quantity at which items are removed

Then, head over to GA4's Explorations section and set up a custom report with columns for product category, price, customer status, and cart value. Once that’s done, it’s easy to spot trends and segment abandoners based on these factors.

For example, you might notice that first-time visitors are dropping off when shopping for high-end items, or that there's a sudden spike in abandonment once cart values hit the $200 mark (depending on your industry, obviously). This kind of insight is gold for fixing your conversion leaks. 

The end goal here is to create targeted "journeys" or personalized follow-up strategies based on these factors, which leads us to the next step.

2. Advanced email segmentation

Once you have this data, the next step is to create targeted journeys or flows based on the triggers we just mentioned and others that might be specific to your industry. 

You want to bring carts that belong to the same category together and build out a completely different flow with each segment getting its own journey, its own messaging, and its own success metrics.  

So, for example, let's say you're a retailer who sells high-end furniture ranging from $200 to $4000. You've done your abandoned cart analysis and found four key segments:

• "Statement piece" abandoners: Carts containing specific high-demand items, such as a particular designer sofa or a limited-edition dining table.‍
• Existing customers: People who have made at least one purchase from you in the past.‍
• High-value abandoners: Carts containing items totaling $2,500 or more. ‍
• First-time buyers: Customers who have never purchased from you before.

Instead of a scenario where everyone is getting the same emails, same offers and same timing, you need to create distinct "journeys" tailored to each segment. Something like: 

1. "Statement piece" abandoners journeys

• Goal: Recover highly sought-after items and capitalize on their unique appeal.‍
• Messaging: Focus on scarcity and exclusivity. Highlight the design, craftsmanship, and limited availability of the item. Create a sense of urgency.

2. Existing customers journeys

• Goal: Encourage repeat purchases and foster customer loyalty.‍
• Messaging: Focus on the existing relationship and shared history. Highlight new arrivals, complementary items, or exclusive offers for loyal customers.

3. High-value abandoners journeys 

• Goal: Recover large orders and build relationships with high-potential customers.‍
• Messaging: Focus on the investment aspect of the purchase, highlighting the quality, craftsmanship, and longevity of the furniture. Emphasize the value they're receiving.

4. First-time buyers

• Goal: Convert new customers and introduce them to the brand's experience.‍
• Messaging: Focus on building trust and showcasing the brand's reputation for quality and customer service. Highlight easy returns and customer support options.

What makes this approach powerful is that each journey directly addresses the specific friction points for that segment. You're not just changing the email copy and hitting send for the sake of it – you're fundamentally altering the entire recovery strategy based on known customer behavior patterns for each category.

3. Smart Incentivizes 

Different customer segments show distinct patterns in:

• Purchase frequency
• Average order value
• Product category preferences
• Response to marketing efforts
• Brand loyalty behaviors

And so, the goal of your segmentation strategy isn't just classification – it's about making smart, targeted decisions about who gets what type of incentive, when, why, and who shouldn’t be incentivized altogether. 

There are usually five types of abandoned cart offers: 

1. Special discounts/promotions: These are your typical 10%-15% off cart value. To maintain profitability while driving sales, we recommend reserving these discounts for new customers and orders above specific thresholds. ‍
2. One-time coupon codes: Just like the name suggests, these are unique codes that can only be used once. They're associated with each individual customer, so they can't be shared or duplicated, which prevents any situation where there's abuse or misuse of those coupon codes.‍
3. Free gifts: In a situation where you don't want to give away straight up discounts, sometimes these types of free gifts can actually work better. They tend to have high perceived value because they're tangible and make customers feel like part of an exclusive community while allowing you to maintain a healthy profit margin.‍
4. Loyalty program: This is when you encourage long-term engagement with your brand by offering special perks to customers who, for example, join your email list or become loyalty members. ‍
5. Free shipping: A standard customer expectation in today's market. You'll find cases where free shipping is perceived as more valuable than equivalent dollar discounts, especially for lower-priced items or international orders where shipping might be a significant percentage of the total cost.

Now, let's see how to put these principles into practice using Rejoiner.

How to Build High Converting Abandoned Cart Flow Step-by-Step inside Rejoiner

We'll start with creating a basic abandoned cart flow that you can later duplicate and customize for each segment we discussed earlier.

Step-by-step navigation to campaign creation

To create the abandoned cart flow, 

1. log into your Rejoiner dashboard 
2. Click on "Journeys" in the main navigation 
3. Select "Add New Journey" 
4. Name your journey descriptively (e.g., "First-Time Buyer Recovery flow"). 
5. Select your triggers, in this case "Cart Abandon"

Next, you'll need to configure your main triggers. 

1. Set your conversion rule to "end their journey" if the customer converts. The goal here is to make sure our abandoned cart flow ends when the customer converts. 

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2. Set the frequency capping to 1 per month

3. Abandonment buffer tells how long should it take for a customer's last interaction with your site to be called abandoned cart. The default setting is 30 min, but you can always change it.

Building abandoned cart flow 

This is where your abandoned cart analysis comes into play. Based on the segments we identified earlier, here's how to do it. 

To start, in the "Audience Builder” section, 

1. Click "Add New Audience" in your journey
2. Name your Audience (e.g., high value cart"
3. And then define who your audience is.

A Journey begins when a customer triggers it, but the Journey's Audiences dictate who qualifies to move forward. 

And so, audiences here are used to segment customers into different groups based on filters that describe who you want to target. There's no limit to how many audiences you can create, so feel free to add as many as necessary. 

If you want to prioritize a certain audience over others, put them on the left side of the journey.

Continuing from the high end furniture example, you could set three different types of audiences: 

• High-value abandoners: Cart value › $2,500
• Medium-value abandoners : Cart value › $1000 
• Catch-all

What will happen is that Rejoiner will attempt to catch the high-value abandoners first, and if the customer matched neither they would fall into the "Catch-all". 

If you want to be more specific with your targeting, you can set different audiences based on filters like 

• Purchase history 
• Email engagement 
• Demographics 
• Cart item quantity
• Cart item name
• Cart item categories
• customer abandon count
• Customer opt-in status
• Customer has purchased product with ID

Further reading: How to build highly targeted audiences 

Building Your Email Sequence

After building your audience, the next step is setting up your email marketing campaign. 

To do this, 

1. Click the journey node icon
2. Select "Send email"
3. Drag and drop it below the audience 

Then click on the three dots in the upper right hand corner to edit the "Send email" node. 

You will be brought to the email node settings page where you can:

• Choose the email content, subject line, preheader, and sender information. You can either use the Drag and Drop Editor with built-in product modules for your creative or code your own templates from scratch using our Advanced HTML/CSS Editor for custom templates. 
• Set custom or default attribution rules.
• Enable or disable link tracking.
• Set wait times (relative to the previous node's completion) or wait for specific events.
• Enable to bypass subscription preferences.

Wait time is how long Rejoiner will pause between sending each email in your abandoned cart sequence. 

For example, if you set the first email's wait time to 30 minutes and the second email's wait time to 24 hours, the second email will be sent 24 hours after the first email was sent.

For your first abandoned cart flow email, we recommend the following cadence:

• Email #1 triggers 30 minutes after the cart is abandoned.
• Email #2 triggers 24 hours later.
• Email #3 triggers 48 hours after that.

Launching and Monitoring

By now your abandoned cart flow should look something like this. 

When you’re ready to lunch, click on the "activate" button on the upper right hand corner to activate your recovery campaign. 

But, before hitting the "activate" button, we recommend running some quality assurance tests first on your flows using audiences that are limited to specific email addresses or email domains. This way you'll get a firsthand experience of how the journey feels before making it live for customers. 

To run QA tests inside Rejoiner is really simple. 

1. First, create a QA audience using the "Customer email address" filter, including only email addresses you control (e.g., your team's emails).

2. Next, place this QA audience at the highest priority (far left position) in your journey.

3. Finally, activate the journey and immediately pause the non-QA audience. This ensures the journey is live, but only your QA audience can enter, allowing you to test it first.

Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Abandoned Cart Flows

We've been helping e-commerce brands for more than 10 years build abandoned cart recovery systems that boost sales. Here are four common mistakes we see brands make when setting up these campaigns.

1. Not identifying and making the difference between guests, existing email subscribers and registered customers

Each of these segments represents different levels of engagement and familiarity with your brand, which demands distinct approach and  incentivization. 

What we found to work really well for our clients and that we always advise them to do early on as part of their checkout optimization strategy, is using pre-submit tracking. 

This helps identify anonymous users as soon as they enter an email address on your site, in real-time. 

So that when a user provides their email through early-funnel captures (triggered pop-up or opt-in), you can start tracking their subsequent browsing behavior and purchase intent signals, creating a more complete customer profile before they even reach the cart stage.

2. Aggressive timing 

Like mentioned earlier, cart abandonment is a buying behavior more common than you think. When you implement your abandoned cart flow too aggressively (sending emails within minutes of abandonment), you risk interrupting natural buying patterns. 

Some customers simply step away to compare prices or handle a quick interruption – they would have returned anyway. By sending recovery emails too quickly, you might actually create a negative brand interaction.

3. Sending generic emails

Think about it – when a customer abandons their cart, it's not just a failed transaction; it's a data point that tells you something specific about their buying behavior and your checkout process. Sending the same generic "Did you forget something?" message to everyone without any segmentation and personalization, ignores the wealth of customer intelligence at your disposal.

The sophistication of your abandoned cart flow should match the complexity of your customer base. For example, we know new customers might abandon due to trust concerns, while a returning customer might be comparing prices. Use that in your abandoned cart flow to address these specific concerns.

Generic messages signal to customers that you don't understand their specific needs or value their individual relationship with your brand.

Further reading: 7 Email Personalization Examples + Best Practices

4. Using an email marketing tool that doesn't support cross-device cart regeneration

Over 50% of abandoned cart emails are opened on a different device than where the original abandonment occurred. 

If your abandoned cart flow doesn't support cross-device cart regeneration, it's going to create a disjointed experience for your customers who will be less likely to go back and re-add items all over again.

You need to make sure the email marketing tool you're using supports cross-device cart regeneration even if there's no cookie from the customer's previous session on the desktop. 

For example, our tool excels at this. It integrates with your e-commerce platform to generate a unique URL for each cart. This URL contains a specific identifier which allows us to reconstruct the cart from any location whether they were cookies or not. Our system then automatically adds this unique ID link to the customer's email template, and when they click it, their cart instantly reloads with all their items.

Further reading: Session Regeneration: The One Feature eCommerce Companies Overlook (And How We Lifted Conversions From Email by 33.96%)

Top 5 Abandoned Cart Software to Consider

When choosing an abandoned cart software, make sure it supports features like: 

• Automation and Timing: You should be able to set automated email sequences, smart timing based on customer behavior and purchase patterns, and use specific triggers (e.g., time spent on checkout page, exit intent) to initiate reminders. ‍
• Personalization: The tool should allow you to only send email that customers would want to act upon. And this means being able to send personalized messages, build dynamic content, and suggest similar or complementary products to entice customers.‍
• A/B Testing: Any abandoned cart software should allow you to A/B test your cart recovery flow to see what works, what doesn't and how to engage better with your customers. ‍
• User identification: The tool should be able to track any user who's had any interactions with your site, even if it's just once, and associate a unique URL to that browsing session so you know in which customer category to put them when they come back. ‍
• Cross device cart regeneration: Regardless of where users open your abandoned cart email, the tool should be able to regenerate their carts and create a seamless experience across devices whether they were cookies or not. ‍
• Integration: This is obvious, the abandoned cart software of your choice should integrate with your ecommerce platform without having to contact support every time you want to pull information from the ecommerce platform. 

Top 5 Abandoned cart software 

Here are the top five abandoned cart software. 

1. Rejoiner 

We built Rejoiner to help ecommerce brands maximize lifetime revenue per customer with highly personalized cart abandonment email campaigns. 

Key Features:

1. Supported by a team of ecommerce experts with 10+ of experience 

• Direct access to experts and fast responses—no waiting. White glove service for anyone who signs up.
• Bi-weekly performance reviews with continuous adjustments by our team.
• If needed, we'll take care of the copywriting, design, and template development for you, making sure the email creative is designed to be maximally efficient in terms of conversion.

2. Early Abandonment Detection

• Full visibility into every customer action: see who's browsing products, leaving items in cart, or stopping mid-checkout.
• Tracks potential abandonments in real-time, before the final cart abandonment.
• Save every detail customers enter at checkout, even if they don't finish—nothing gets lost.

3. Automated Campaign Management

• Build recovery email flows within minutes of cart abandonment while customers are still thinking about the purchase
• Allows for customizable session expiration settings. Decide how long a customer's shopping cart should stay active before it's considered "abandoned."
• Enables creation of multi-stage recovery journeys

4. Advanced Personalization

• Create highly personalized dynamic content, reminding customers of exactly what caught their eye, making them more likely to come back and complete the purchase.
• Segment abandoned carts into different categories based on the cart value,  how far they got in the buying process, and what types of products they were interested in.

5. Cross-Platform Integration

• Restores shopping carts across different devices, making it easy for customers to pick up where they left off
• Ability to create more targeted and effective ads by sharing abandoned cart data with your ad platforms, including things like which products were abandoned, their value, and how far the customer got in the checkout process. 

6. Optimization Tools

• A/B test different versions of your abandoned cart journey to see what works best and what needs to be improved
• Beyond simple A/B testing - you can also test different timing of emails, different sequences of messages, different offers, or different ways of showing products.

Integration:

Rejoiner integrates with all major ecommerce platforms, including: 

• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• Magento 2
• WooCommerce
• Americommerce
• CommerceV3
• Neto
• Spree
• Volusion

Pricing: 

Rejoiner has a starter plan of $25/mo at up to 1,000 contacts and you only pay for the active ones with features such as: 

• Unlimited emails
• All platform features
• Email, chat and phone support

Schedule a demo

No long-term contracts

No hassle cancellation

2. Omnisend

Omnisend offers a multi-channel email, SMS, and social media marketing approach with dedicated eCommerce features, specifically focusing on sophisticated abandoned cart and abandoned checkout automation workflows.

Key features: 

• Separate Abandoned Cart and Abandoned Checkout automation workflows
• Multi-channel messaging (Email, SMS, Push notifications)
• Customizable trigger and exit conditions
• Personalized product reminders
• Advanced targeting and segmentation options
• A/B testing capabilities
• Customizable discount offers

Pricing: 

Omnisend has a free plan with up to 250 contacts and 500 emails/mo. Their standard plan starts at $16/mo and with that you get: 

• 500 contacts
• 6,000 emails / month
• Unlimited web push notifications
• 1,000 published reviews (Shopify)
• Success manager (from $400)
• 24/7 Priority support

Integration: 

Omnisend integrates with all major ecommerce platforms as well, including: 

• Shopify
• Shopify Plus 
• Woocommerce 
• BigCommerce 
• Wix
• WordPress
• EcWid
• ShopLazza

3.  Klaviyo 

Klaviyo offers a highly customizable and flexible abandoned cart automation solution with deep eCommerce platform integrations, allowing for more sophisticated targeting, personalization, and multi-channel messaging compared to default platform abandoned cart features.

Key features: 

• Pre-built and custom abandoned cart flow templates
• Dynamic product content blocks
• Multiple messaging channels (Email and SMS)
• Conditional splits and advanced targeting
• Cart rebuild links
• A/B testing capabilities
• Detailed analytics and performance tracking

Pricing: 

Klaviyo comes with a free plan for up to 500 monthly email sends and150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits. They have a starter plan for $45/mo, which includes: 

• Starting at 15,000 monthly email sends
• Mobile push notifications
• 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits
• 1,001 - 1,500 active profiles
• Includes applicable SMS carrier fees
• Email and chat support

Integration: 

Native integrations include:

• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• Magento 2
• Prestashop
• WooCommerce
• Amazon Buy with Prime (with specific setup requirements)

4. MailerLite

MailerLite offers a straightforward abandoned cart automation solution integrated directly with major e-commerce platforms, allowing online stores to easily recover potentially lost sales through targeted email workflows.

Key features:

• E-commerce automation triggers
• Customizable time delays for cart abandonment emails
• Drag & drop email designer
• Abandoned cart block for dynamic product insertion
• Workflow status tracking
• Order recovery monitoring
• Template gallery for email design
• Automatic suppression of emails if cart is recovered

Pricing: 

MailerLite has a free plan that comes with 12,000 emails/, one user seat, and 24/7 support for up to 30 days. Their growing business plan starts at $9/mo and includes: 

• Sell digital products
• Unlimited templates
• Dynamic emails
• Campaign auto-resend
• Multivariate testing
• Drag & drop editor
• Email automation builder
• Comparative reporting
• Signup forms & pop-ups

Integration: 

Supported ecommerce platforms:

• WooCommerce
• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• Squarespace
• PrestaShop

What do now 

Now it's time to go build your first high converting abandoned cart flow. Remember, start by understanding your abandoned carts – this is your foundation. If you get this wrong, the entire campaign won't be as effective. So, take the time to look at why customers leave, what they're buying, and when they drop off. 

That's going to inform your segmentation strategy and your segmentation strategy should tell you what offers might bring customers back. 

Our platform works particularly well for established and growing ecommerce brands looking to: 

• Recover lost sales from abandoned carts 

• Identify and categorize a large of pool of basically anyone who ever had any interactions with your brand 

• Build a feedback loop through abandoned cart emails

• Leverage expert support without hiring additional staff or paying agency fees

Book a demo with our team and see firsthand how Rejoiner can help scale your ecommerce business.

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