Last updated - October 17, 2022
Abandoned carts have become a menace to eCommerce stores. They can cause more damage to your sales if you don’t have an optimized cart recovery campaign
There are many ways to ‘reduce Cart abandonment’ but only a few ways to ‘recover Abandoned carts’
One such effective way is by sending Cart recovery emails and requesting customers to recover their cart.
But not everything goes as planned, many stores make mistakes during their Cart recovery campaign. This article will show you the 5 Common mistakes that stores make in their cart recovery emails.
What are Abandoned Carts?
Customer will visit an eCommerce store to purchase a product, he/she will add products to their cart, but during the checkout process, they’ll abandon it, leaving you with an Abandoned cart.
You cannot predict Cart abandonment, but you can try to minimize it by using Exit-Intent popups or you can recover your abandoned carts through an optimized cart recovery campaign.
But for now, let’s talk about the reasons that lead to cart abandonment in eCommerce stores.
What are the reasons for Cart Abandonment?
In order for stores to invest efforts to curb the rate of Cart abandonment, they must initially identify why did they abandon their cart. Only then you can optimize your cart recovery emails
Through our experience and intensive research, we identified some of the main reasons that lead to Abandoned carts.
- Surprising checkout Costs like delivery costs, Shipping etc.
- Mandatory registrations, no options for guest checkout.
- Customers might be just browsing without any intent to buy.
- The payment gateway might look fishy.
- Long and tiring checkout process.
- Customers were looking for discounts and coupons
- Free shipping is not available.
- Some internal issues on your website.
- Your store has a bad return policy,
- Limited payment options.
Once you figured it out you can optimize your cart recovery emails to recover them but avoid making these common mistakes discussed below.
What is an abandoned cart recovery email?
Once the cart has been abandoned by a customer, you should send an email reminding about the product he has left in his cart. Then you send a series of emails until he returns to your store and recovers his cart.
These emails are called Cart recovery emails, you can send them to your customer using a cart recovery plugin.
These plugins are automated so they’ll do the work for you by recovering your carts while you can concentrate on your business.
But before you start to optimize your cart recovery emails, there are a few common mistakes that stores have done in the past. Our article will brief you on those mistakes so you can avoid them in your campaign.
Mistakes you should avoid while sending cart recovery emails?
Not acting quickly to send cart recovery emails
Cart Abandonment is an instantaneous process, so the best-abandoned cart email practices is to send cart recovery emails instantly.
But most store owners are oblivious to this fact, they don’t bother much about their Abandoned carts. Once their sales start to feel the impact, then they turn their attention to cart recovery emails.
By the time they turn their attention, the customer will be long gone. Thus they’ll lose both sales and customers due to their ignorance.
Avoid making this mistake, timing is essential as far as abandoned carts are concerned. The quicker you send it, the higher the chance of your cart being recovered.
You must optimize your cart recovery emails before you start sending them.
So, what time is the best to send a cart recovery email?
Cart recovery emails sent after 24 hours after cart abandonment have a recovery rate of 12.2% whereas emails sent 1 hour after cart abandonment averages at 20% conversion rate.
So, the recommended sequence would be,
- Send 1 hour after cart abandonment
- Or, send 1 day after cart abandonment
- Send 3 days after cart abandonment.
You can follow this sequence and optimize your cart recovery emails and send them to achieve the maximum conversion rate.
Not sending enough mails
Another major mistake that most of the store owners do is that they get frustrated after sending a couple of messages. They quit their cart recovery campaign before they achieve conversion.
The reason for this frustration is they expect customers to return and recover their cart as soon as they send their first message.
Well, the cart recovery campaign doesn’t work that way, you need to have patience if your wish to convert lost sales into revenue.
A study conducted by Unific shows that of 70+ retailers 10% of them sent only one cart recovery email and 4% sent zero emails to recover their cart.
So, don’t settle with one email, you can see the conversion rates in the above example, you can achieve these conversions only when you act quickly and send the right amount of emails.
Not segmenting the customers to send emails
You cannot blame store owners for this mistake because most of them are unaware of customer segmentation before sending an email.
Customer segmentation is necessary, using your store’s customer data you should create buyer personas for customers only then you’ll know which email should be sent to whom.
For some customers, this might their first cart abandonment but there are a lot of customers who’ll try to take advantage of your Abandoned cart discount.
So, only through data-based segmentation, you can identify which customer needs a discount. If you want to have an optimized cart recovery campaign then you must segment your customers.
Avoiding the importance of email frequency
As mentioned earlier, three cart recovery emails is one of the best-abandoned cart email practices. But you’ve to set a frequency cap for those emails to achieve an optimized cart recovery campaign.
See, most retailers aren’t aware of it and they make this mistake costing them a cart and a valuable customer.
Customers get easily frustrated when their mailbox is stormed by transactional, cart recovery, and other emails. These activities might impact your conversion rates.
That’s why it is crucial for you to send cart recovery emails at the recommended frequency so you don’t annoy your customers.
Cart recovery emails should be treated as reminders, remind customers to recover their cart don’t push them or you’ll lose them.
Ignoring to A/B test your Cart recovery emails
A/B test or split testing is an activity where you create two sets of emails, A & B, and send these emails to customers.
Then you chose the email set which returns with the highest number of conversion rates. Testing your emails like these will result is a well-optimized cart recovery campaign.
Why should I perform A/B testing for my emails?
Most owners don’t do it because they are unaware of the data it can bring you. You see, the success of your abandoned cart recovery emails depends on these,
- Email timing
- Subject line
- CTA
- Personalization
- Copy
How will you find out which of these things works well on your customers?
The answer is, through A/B testing. So, understand the necessity of this testing and perform it to avoid causing a failure in your cart recovery campaign.
Wrapping up
Avoiding these mistakes will help you build an optimized cart recovery campaign and also to optimize your cart recovery emails. Testing your emails is an underrated abandoned cart email best practices so perform it and boost your conversion rates.
