If you are using WooCommerce as your eCommerce online store, you are obviously familiar about Abandoned Cart. Abandoned cart emails can reduce your store’s abandonment rate and get you more sales. Since, there’s no built-in tool to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, most of the entrepreneur are looking for the solution.

In this article we’ll show how to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails using a free plugin.

Let’s dig…

What is an Abandoned Cart?

Let’s start with the definition of cart abandonment. Cart abandonment is, when online shoppers add items to their shopping cart and then leave your site before completing the purchase. The term “abandonment” used in eCommerce, which include:

• Booking Abandonment: When a customer starts booking accommodation or a flight and then backs out at the last moment without confirmation.
• Browse Abandonment: Similar to cart abandonment, exceptional in this case is, the customer doesn’t add any items to their virtual cart. They simply browse the website and then leave.
• Form Abandonment: When a customer fails to finalize a quote, subscription, or product purchase because they’re required to complete a long complicated form.

Each type of abandonment issue contributes to lost earnings and that is why it’s important to identify and correct them as soon as possible. Otherwise, your company will loose a significant amount of revenue.

Why Cart Abandonment Matters

If your online store has a high cart abandonment rate, that means your customers started their purchasing journey but had second thoughts on other sites to purchase.

It’s possible that the customer’s decision to abandon their purchase was influenced by some other factors which is outside your control. Perhaps they were conducting price research or decided they want to buy the product.

Cart abandonment rates vary depending on the industry. Finance, travel, and nonprofit industry have the highest cart abandonment rates, whereas, gaming and fashion are consistently low average.

Even within the same business industry, cart abandonment rates can vary depending on the sub-industry.

The most important thing to remember is that your cart abandonment rates can be reduced by locating any contributing factors and working on it to correct them. Even a minor reduction in cart abandonment rates can significantly increase your sales and thus profit margin.

Current eCommerce Cart Abandonment Averages

So, till now we’ve covered the basics of cart abandonment rate, how cart abandonment rate really matters on eCommerce. Now, let’s see the current eCommerce cart abandonment averages.

According to the research by Baymard Institute, the average eCommerce cart abandonment rate is 69 percent.

According to a reports by Barilliance, the average global cart abandonment rate rose from 77.24% in 2016 to 78.65% the following year. With more than 75% of online customers abandoning online purchases, it’s easy to see exactly how much cart abandonment can hamper on your company’s earning potential.

Cart abandonment rates are slightly higher on mobile devices. According to Barillance’s data, the cart abandonment rate on desktop is 73 percent, on tablets 80.7 percent and on mobile phones 85.6 percent.

But, why the mobile devices account for the majority of cart abandonment rates when more than half of all eCommerce traffic comes from the smartphones and tablets?

According to a report by Addressey, most mobile users abandoned their shopping carts when their shopping experience felt inconvenient and face difficulties.

• 39% of mobile users abandoned their carts after they had issues entering their personal and credential information
• 35% abandoned their cart because their screen is too small to adjust with the button
• 27% abandoned their cart due to problems entering their order properly

According to the report by Statista, the global cart abandonment average grew by nearly 16% over an 11-year period.

Don’t worry, it’s not a totally lost cause. Baymard reckons that optimizing the checkout process can help your sites boost conversions by 35 percent. In fact, as a whole, eCommerce retailers could recover up to $260 billion in revenue with just a few improvements.

What does an Effective Abandoned Cart Recovery Email Sequence Look Like?

Let’s see some abandoned cart recovery email sequence. It is very difficult to recommend any sequence, since every audience is different and will respond differently to receiving cart recovery emails.

Here are the best case studies on Abandoned Cart Recovery Email Sequences.

1. Shopify recommended 6 email sequence.
2. Backtocart recommend a 4 email sequence.
3. BigCommerce recommend a 3 email sequence.

Recommended Abandoned Cart Recovery Email Sequence for Beginners

If you’re beginner, here is our recommended starter email sequence:

Cart Recovery Email Option 1: 45 minutes after cart abandonment

According to research carts effectively go ‘cold’ after 1 hour. But at the same time you have to keep in mind that you don’t need to annoy people too quickly. 45 minutes is the sweet spot. Don’t include any offer like discount/coupon codes in this first email. The tone should very much just be a gentle nudge to remind the visitor that they have an unfinished checkout. The tone should also not be regretful. You are just helping the customer remember! Ensure you show a clear call to action button and large images of the products in their shopping cart.

Cart Recovery Email Option 2: 24 hours after cart abandonment

Many of the case studies usually recommend sending your second email 24 hours later. The reason is that most people are creatures of habit, and if they were in a distracting environment the day before a 7 p.m, it’s likely they’ll be in the same distracting environment at 7 p.m the next day. So try sending your second email a few hours earlier or later like test 20, 22, 24 and 26 hours!

Again, no discounts or coupons in this second email also. You don’t need to destroy value too quickly.

Cart Recovery Email Option 3: 48 days after cart abandonment

Here you can bring out the big discount guns. Start with testing a 5% and 10% discount and see what impact on the conversion. Remember, to use your abandoned cart email sequence to build your relationship with your customer. Make sure to include reviews, links to videos from influencers and any returns or money back guarantees you offer.

Continue Testing

For each email you’ll need to track:

• Open rate – how many visitor open the email
• Click through rate – how many visitor click on links in the email (and which links have highest click through rate)
• Conversion rate – what percent of people who got the email proceeded to order from it
• Revenue recovered – how much revenue does this email add to your balance.

If you can achieve a conversion rate between 8-10% for your Cart Recovery Email option 1 you’ll be doing very well. For option 2, 5-6% would be considered a great conversion rate. Conversion rates tend to drop off significantly for Option 3 and beyond.

How to send WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails with Abandoned Cart Lite

For a free way to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, we recommend Abandoned Cart Lite.

Here’s why:

• It’s well-updated
• Over 10,000 people actively installed it
• It’s easy to upgrade to the pro version if you want more functionality

In the free version of this plugin, you can create unlimited email templates and send them at intervals that you specify. Intervals start one hour after a buyer abandons their cart. You can also customize your emails with personalized details like first name and stop sending emails if a user completes their purchase.

Here’s how you can use this plugin to boost your sales:

Step 1: Install and Activate

Since, it’s free, you can install Abandoned Cart Lite directly from your WordPress dashboard. We assumed that you already installed WordPress and WooCommerce.

Step 2: Define what you consider an “abandoned” cart

Once you activate the plugin, you’ll get a new Abandoned Carts link in your WooCommerce dashboard sidebar. The first step to use Abandoned Cart Lite is to define what you actually consider to be an abandoned cart.

This is important because you don’t want to annoy customers who haven’t actually forgotten about their shopping cart.

To configure it, go to the Settings tab:

The default is 10 minutes as like the above screenshot, but depending on how frequently you want to send your emails, you can either increase or decrease this number. Please note that – this is NOT the interval before your emails send. You’ll choose another number later which determines when to send. This number only determines when to mark a shopping cart as abandoned.

You should also configure some basic email settings by going to the Email Sending Settings tab:

On the Email Sending Settings page, you need to enter the name and address you want your WooCommerce abandoned cart emails to be sent from:

And that’s it for configuring the basics of this plugin! Now, you have to create a template for the WooCommerce abandoned cart emails that you want to send.

Step 3: Create your WooCommerce abandoned cart emails

To create emails, go to the Email Templates tab of the Abandoned Carts area and click Add New Template:

First, give your cart abandoned email a Template Name and Subject. The Template Name is purely internal and your buyers will not see it. The Subject will be the subject of your email and is thus going to be public.

Next, type the body of your email. It allows you to automatically insert a customer’s first name, last name, cart content, cart link, and many more. The shortcode builder is where you’ll actually add the customizable options of your email:

Here’s a quick example of what your email body look like if you’re properly using the shortcodes:

Next, you need to choose whether or not to Use WooCommerce Template Style. We recommend checking this box. Because this is what the WooCommerce template style should looks like:

And this is what your email will look like if you leave the box as unchecked:

So unless you want to add custom style to your email, you should probably check the box.

Finally, you have to choose when to send your abandoned cart email, as well as whether or not to activate it.

According to the data by salecycle, you should send cart abandoned email as quickly as possible. The conversion rate on emails sent 24 hours later is ~50% lower effective than emails sent within an hour of an abandoned cart.

So we recommend setting the Send this email field to be 1 Hour, which is the minimum time allowed by the plugin:

You can also send yourself a test email to make sure that everything is working properly. Here’s what the test email looks like:

Other features of WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Lite

In addition to helping you send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, this plugin also provides some helpful analytics functionality. There are three different tabs, you can view:

• Abandoned orders – view individual customer abandoned orders.
• Recovered orders – view how much money you’ve earned by sending abandoned cart emails.
• Product report – see which products get abandoned by user most often.

Cost of Premium plugins

If you’re looking for some other solutions, two good premium plugins are:

• WooCommerce Follow Ups – Cost $99 – an official email marketing extension developed by WooCommerce.
• WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart – Cost $49 – the best-selling abandoned cart plugin at CodeCanyon.

And of course you have the option to upgrade Abandoned Cart Lite to get more features. The pro version costs at $119. It lets you add conversion-boosting coupons, gives you custom-made templates, and offers a lots of other features.

Wrapping things up

Deploying an effective cart recovery process is becoming increasingly important for success in eCommerce store. We introduced you some of the best research on how to optimize the recovery of abandoned carts. But you’ve be lost all without a reliable platform to ensure your email sequence arrives on time to the right people – which is where Abandoned Cart Lite comes in.