Using cart abandonment tool

Following up on abandoned carts can make a difference between a customer who decided to bounce from the checkout to loyal, long-standing customer. Having this tool in place will help you find out what is it the customer actually needs, will help you tailor a specific offering for this particular customer and is essential to success of any subbox business.

Why do I need cart abandonment?

Getting people to give up on your product and bounce off of the checkout can drive your conversion rates very low. Nobody wants to keep the money on the table and lose up on potential customers when they've already set one foot through the door.

Having a cart abandonment sequence properly in place and retargeting the abandoned carts via email is the #1 thing you should be doing in situations like this according to Neil Patel.

To make things easier to understand for you, just take a look at how proper usage of cart abandonment translates in the terms of money for some of the Subbly users:

Now, what do you think of that?

Is cart abandonment free on all plans?

Yes, it is!

However, there are certain usage limits on how many cart abandonment sequences can you have active during the month depending on the pricing plan you are subscribed to.

You can double-check the plans we currently offer HERE. For more information on how much usage you have left on your plan, you can double-check the My Plans section of your admin.

When is the cart considered abandoned?

Please note that the number of the active sequences you'll get on the abandoned cart chain of emails will not be the same as the number of abandoned carts you will be seeing on your Analytics app. Why? Because not every abandoned cart is immediately added to the sequence. This is when the cart is considered abandoned :

The system will check every few hours for checkout processes (carts), and if they were not updated for 24 hours, the cart will be considered abandoned.
If customers didn't use the same email address to checkout again. (If there is an existing sequence of the same email, we ignore it)
If Marketing consent is required and is not given on the checkout, we will not include the email in the cart abandonment sequence. Otherwise, email will be added to the sequence (if consent was given).

Please note that, in case where you don't explicitly require consent for marketing activities on the checkout, emails are by default added to the cart abandonment sequence.

How this works?

Simple!

You can access your cart abandonment panel here.

Here's where you can see the overview of how much money you recovered through your cart abandonment activity post-checkout.

But first things first, you'll need to customize the email templates which will be added to your Emails section upon activation of this feature, and you can also set up and use a Zapier trigger for cart abandons which is optional, but also useful if you want to use your cart abandon events for something more than just following up with emails.

You can log in to your Zapier account and set up the zap that is triggered by the Cart Abandonment event on your Subbly account.

For additional reference about the Zapier integration, please click here.

Editing email templates

You might want to customize 3 new email templates associated with the cart abandonment facility.

In order to do that you can simply click on the appropriate button on your Cart Abandonment section of your Subbly admin.

You will be taken to the Emails section where you'll find 3 new email templates at the bottom of the page (set to inactive by default).

Feel free to change the content of these emails accordingly in order for them to align with your abandonment strategy by clicking here.

When you are done with customizing the email template, you can send a test email to you and see how it would be presented for your customers, so that you can change it further if necessary.

When the sequence starts we immediately send them the first email in the sequence.
3 days after the cart was abandoned the second email is sent, and 5 days after the cart was abandoned we send the 3rd email.
There is a special link for unsubscribing which must be included in the email templates, this link will remove the email from the sequence and no more marketing emails will be sent to them (if they're an existing customer).
If the Zapier trigger is set up then when an abandonment sequence starts (as per above) we send the event data to Zapier, including the email of the customer/lead.
If the merchant plans on just using the Zapier trigger then he/she can disable the email triggers we have so they can use their own tools.

These sequential emails are sent exactly on the 1st, the 3rd, and the 5th day from the day the cart was initially abandoned. We are not able to change this setup on a standalone basis. However, you can decide if you would like to turn on all 3 sequential emails to be sent.

Setting up Automations trigger (Optional)

Before we proceed with further explanation here please note that setting this one is optional! One most common use case for this one would be to set the zap which will automatically fetch customers' emails (for the abandoned carts) to an external endpoint (as these are not automatically being populated inside your Subbly admin).

In order to set a webhook for the cart abandons, you will need to go to the Settings tab on your Cart Abandonment section on your admin, and simply click on the link as in the picture:

From here you will be taken to the Automations app where you can set the automation accordingly.

For additional information on how you can handle the Automations, please see here.

Tracking & restoring the cart

There is a special link variable that should be included on the email templates (it is by default) and is also passed in the Zapier hook or through automation. The link sets a cookie and also restores the cart, minus secure info like card details and shipping address for the customer. If they are an existing customer they will need to log in.

If the customer clicks on the link from the email and finishes the checkout, they will be counted as converted.

If the customer completes the checkout, the subscription/order is recorded and attributed to the cart abandonment tool. All future orders of the subscription will also be attributed.

The total amount of money recovered from the tool is calculated from this and displayed on the cart abandonment dashboard. It also shows the number of active sequences for that store.

You would be also able to see how many Cart Abandonment emails have been sent to the customers who didn't finish the checkout and opted out.

From the Cart Abandonment panel, you are able to see the emails which are already included in the sequence. You would be able to use them and manipulate them further from here.