Whenever I’m talking on this topic I always make the joke that shopping cart abandonment sounds like a serious social issue. I mean the word “abandonment” just conjures up so many images!
The point is, even though I make light of it, it actually IS a serious issue for online retailers since without conversion there are no sales.
Today I’m going to have a look at the most popular type of customer re engagement and give you some tools to use in your own online stores to help bring customers back to the shopping cart to finalise their purchases.
I have had a couple of different abandoned cart plug ins over the years and even though my new email provider Active Campaign offers this, it’s still not as simple as the option I already have. Eventually I’ll move it over to Active Campaign to reduce the number of plug ins I have on the site but for now, let’s take a look at Automate Woo.
The setting for this plug in sit in the Woocommerce Tab on the dashboard under the subheading “WORKFLOWS”
This is where you start to build out your automation library with Automate Woo which includes adding cross sell options to customers after a specific time period has passed (awesome feature)
Anyway, as I was saying you select the trigger (abandoned cart) and the duration (2 hours after) in the “User’s” option select “All”
The first half of your shopping cart abandonment follow up had been created. In less than 1 minute (seriously, how bloody amazing is technology?)
Next up comes the copywriting and formatting the email (the fun part)
Include some copy and a visual reminder of the EXACT product that the customer added to their cart. Don’t forget to include a LINK back to your site (or a big shop/buy button)
Now before you start thinking that these emails need to be overly salesy and sleazy think again. Yes, there are retailers out there who literally just send you a follow up email with the shopping cart contents and make no attempt to hide the fact the are following up. There are other, better ways to go about following up on abandoned shopping carts and I’m going to show you how. Infact I’m even going to show you how I have set up my abandoned shopping cart sequence so you can see that it can actually be pretty relaxed/normal and even a little bit cheeky.