How To Automate Abandoned Cart Recovery On Your WooCommerce Store?

You’ve put in the work to get shoppers to add items to their carts, but many abandon them before checking out. Ever wondered why that happens? As an eCommerce store owner, you know that recovering abandoned carts can greatly impact sales. The problem is manually reaching out to shoppers who bail at checkout isn’t scalable.

The solution? Automate your abandoned cart recovery. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up automated emails through WooCommerce that trigger when shoppers abandon their carts. You’ll learn how to design emails that actually get people to come back and complete their purchases and how to schedule them so you’re not bombarding your customers.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have an automated abandoned cart recovery process set up on your WooCommerce store and start seeing sales from carts you would have otherwise lost. Sounds good? Let’s dive in.

What Is Cart Abandonment In eCommerce?

Cart abandonment visual

So what exactly is cart abandonment? Simply put, it refers to visitors adding items to their cart but leaving your store before completing the purchase. This happens for many reasons, but the good news is you can win back many of these lost customers through targeted automation and personalization.

Cart abandonment is a huge problem in eCommerce, with an average of over 70% of visitors abandoning their carts. That means lots of lost revenue if you don’t take action. The key is setting up automated emails to re-engage visitors and encourage them to complete their purchases.

You’ll want to start by sending an automated email within a few hours of them abandoning their cart. This first email should express a friendly reminder of the items left behind, with a message like “We noticed you didn’t complete your recent order. We’re holding onto your cart in case you’d still like to purchase.” Include images of the products and a link for them to easily checkout.

A day or two later, send a follow-up email with a special offer or discount on their cart items. For example, “Your cart is waiting for you! If you complete your order within the next 24 hours, you will receive a 10% discount.” Scarcity and urgency are persuasive.

Finally, about a week after abandonment, send one last email with a final discounted offer. Mention the items will be released back to inventory soon. With progressively better offers, this multi-email drip campaign is very effective for recovering abandoned carts and lost customers. You can turn cart abandonment into sales recovery with the right tools and strategy.

The Main Reasons Behind Cart Abandonment In eCommerce

Abandoned carts are the bane of every eCommerce store owner’s existence. But why exactly do customers abandon their carts in the first place? There are a few major reasons you need to know.

The biggest reason is unexpected costs like high shipping fees or taxes added at checkout. No one likes surprise charges when they’re about to pay. Make sure your shipping and tax costs are clear upfront.
Some shoppers get distracted and forget to come back to checkout. Send an abandoned cart email reminder within a day or two to jog their memory. Studies show over 49% of shoppers will click and open your abandoned cart email if you send one.
The checkout process itself may be too complicated or time-consuming. Keep your checkout form short, only ask for necessary info, and allow shoppers to checkout as a guest. The easier you make it, the more likely people will complete their order.
Security concerns also deter customers. Ensure your site has an SSL certificate and security badges from services like Norton or McAfee. This verifies you take privacy and security seriously.
Product availability or long delivery times lead to abandoned carts too. Be upfront about inventory levels and delivery estimates. If something is back-ordered, give the customer an option to be notified when it’s back in stock.

In truth, you’ll recover more abandoned carts by optimizing your checkout, sending abandoned cart reminders, addressing security concerns, and being transparent about product availability.

The Impact Of Abandoned Carts On Sales And Revenue Of eCommerce Businesses

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Abandoned carts are a huge problem for eCommerce businesses. Studies show that 69.23% of shopping carts are abandoned, resulting in lost revenue and missed sales opportunities.

For WooCommerce stores, automating abandoned cart recovery is key to recapturing revenue and boosting your bottom line. When customers abandon their carts, it often means they get distracted or forget to complete the checkout process. By automatically sending reminders, you give them another chance to follow through with their purchase.

According to research, cart abandonment emails have an average open rate of about 50% and result in 15-20% of recipients going on to complete their purchases. For a small to mid-size WooCommerce store with 1,000 abandoned carts per month, that could mean recapturing 75-100 sales that would have otherwise been lost, resulting in thousands of dollars of recovered revenue each month.

The impact of abandoned carts on revenue and sales is significant. You can rest easy by implementing an automated abandoned cart recovery campaign on your WooCommerce store!

The Importance Of Automating Abandoned Cart Recovery

Automating abandoned cart recovery is a highly effective strategy for maximizing sales and revenue in your WooCommerce store. The investment of time to set up these campaigns is minimal compared to the huge impact they can have on your business.

Recover More Lost Sales

You can capture many of those lost sales by setting up an automated abandoned cart campaign. Email automation allows you to send targeted emails to shoppers who left items in their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. These emails remind them about the items left behind and encourage them to checkout. For many stores, abandoned cart campaigns generate 15-20% of revenue.

Automation also means these emails go out promptly while the shopper still remembers what’s in their cart. The sooner you reach out, the more likely you are to recover the sale. Waiting even a day or two can reduce your recovery rate by up to 50%!

Save Time and Effort

Manually sending abandoned cart emails is extremely time-consuming and not scalable as your store grows. Automation handles this process for you, freeing up your time to focus on other important tasks.

Provide a Great Customer Experience

Quickly following up with shoppers who abandon their cart shows them you value their business. This kind of personalized communication helps build loyalty and trust in your brand. Shoppers appreciate when stores reach out to assist them in completing their purchases.

Optimize Your Campaign

Once you have an automated email campaign setup, you can start optimizing it to improve performance. Test different email content, layouts, subject lines, and schedules to see what resonates most with your customers. Make data-driven decisions based on open, click-through, and recovery rates.

In summary, automating your abandoned cart recovery and optimizing the campaign over time is one of the most effective ways to boost sales and create a great customer experience on your WooCommerce store.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of cart abandonment let’s look at how to automate the recovery process.

Automating Abandoned Cart Recovery On WooCommerce

If you want to automate WooCommerce’s abandoned cart recovery process, the ELEX WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery with Dynamic Coupons plugin should be your go-to choice. With its robust capabilities, you can quickly set up automatic emails and discounts that will be sent out when a consumer abandons their shopping cart without making a purchase.

The plugin offers tons of functionality, such as:

See the complete graph-based report to understand better the total amount recovered, total amount abandoned, total conversion rate, and total bonus recoveries.
Create rules that consider various factors, including user roles, the overall sum, the number of items, and the product ID.
In the abandoned cart email, include dynamically generated discount coupons.
Select the order statuses that determine when an abandoned cart is recovered.
To avoid email spam, you may specify a timeframe after which the plugin automatically erases abandoned cart lists.
Allow registered users and guest users (unregistered) to recover their abandoned carts.
Use shortcodes to ensure the accuracy of customer and cart information.

As you can see, the plugin is packed with features! Now let us go ahead and customize the plugin’s settings.

Once the plugin is active, go to WooCommerce > ELEX Abandoned Carts > Settings in the admin area of your website to configure your abandoned cart settings. We will go through each of the tabs and understand them in detail.

Step 1: Configure the General Settings

To mark an order as complete, choose the WooCommerce order statuses that represent successful cart recovery, turn on the Enable Abandoned Cart feature, and modify the order status under General Settings to reflect a successful order.

You can also choose a point at which the recovery emails are stopped, and the cart is considered expired.

Enable the Capture Abandoned Cart for Guest User feature if you want to track abandoned carts for unregistered customers.

You can customize the content of the recovery email and notify the admin when a cart is recovered by turning on the Notification Settings option to Email Notification to Shop Owner on Cart Recovery.

Enter a message informing customers that your WooCommerce store is GDPR compliant under the GDPR Message Configuration parameters and the page on which it should be displayed.

Moving on to the Email Settings tab.

Step 2: Configure the Email Settings

You can adjust the rules for sending recovery emails, their templates, and the addition of the generated discount coupons by using the three sub-tabs found under Email Settings.

To create a new rule, click Add New Rule, enter a Rule Name, and choose the AND/OR Rule Type. Once you are done modifying the rules, click Add Filter.

You may create, modify, and delete email templates in this section. This section is crucial if you wish to personalize the email and add dynamically generated coupon codes to it.

If you choose Add New Template, a new email template will be generated.

On the Edit Email Template tab, you may decide whether to upload a brand-new template or edit an existing one. Now, go ahead and add a template name, email subject line, and enter a coupon code.

Select the type of discount, the discount amount, and whether the coupon is valid just once or can be used multiple times. Finally, enter the promo code’s prefix. For example, SALE25, WINTER50, etc.

The discount code may also be linked to the products left in the customer’s abandoned cart or email address.

You may alter the email text and add default values like [customer_firstname], [customer_lastname], [cart_products], [cart_link], and [cart_unsubscribe] by using the provided shortcodes.

Once you’ve finished making changes to the template, send yourself a test email to see how it looks.

Under this sub-tab of the email settings, you can modify the recovery email’s triggers. You may turn triggers on and off or delete them completely. These triggers can be modified based on your specific requirements.

Finally, navigate to the Cart Details tab

Step 3: View the Abandoned Cart Details

The Abandoned Cart Details tab allows you to view all information concerning abandoned and recovered cart data.

There you go! Within three simple steps, we’ve automated the entire abandoned cart recovery process on your WooCommerce store.

Best Practices For Efficient Abandoned Cart Recovery

Once your abandoned cart recovery workflow is set up in WooCommerce, it’s time to optimize it. Following some best practices can help increase your conversion rates and recover more lost sales.

Personalize the Experience

Use your customer’s name in the email subject line and message. Mention the items they left in their cart to jog their memory. This personal touch can go a long way in re-engaging them. For example, “Hey [Name], the [Product] you added to your cart is waiting for you. Want to complete your purchase?”

Send the First Email Quickly

Time is of the essence. Most shoppers will have moved on within a few hours of abandoning their cart. Send the initial email within 30 minutes to an hour of them leaving to have the best chance of recovering the sale.

Offer an Incentive

Give customers a reason to come back and complete their purchase. Offer a coupon code for 10-15% off their order or free shipping. Limited time scarcity can also motivate them to act quickly. For example, “The [Product] is only available for a limited time! Complete your order within the next 24 hours to get 25% off.”

Make it Easy to Buy

Include a prominent CTA, such as a “Complete Your Purchase” button that links directly to their abandoned cart. The fewer steps and clicks it takes to checkout, the more likely you’ll recover the sale.

Follow Up Appropriately

If you don’t get a response to your first email, send 1 or 2 follow-up emails over the period of a week. But don’t pester customers with too many messages. Gage their interest level and if they remain unresponsive, accept the lost sale and remove them from the abandoned cart campaign. You can always market to them again in the future.

With some fine-tuning, an efficient abandoned cart recovery strategy can significantly impact your bottom line. Focus on a great customer experience, optimized timing, incentives, and follow-up to turn more shoppers into buyers.

The more you know about combating cart abandonment, the better! The Learnwoo and ELEXtensions repositories are brimming with related content and resources. We have selected two additional articles to assist you with your cart abandonment problem. Check out 13 Best Free WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery Plugins for a list of excellent abandoned cart recovery plugins and Abandoned Cart Coupons – Do’s and Don’ts for crucial advice on dealing with the problem.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the perfect guide on automating abandoned cart recovery on your WooCommerce store. With the right plugins and workflows in place, you can turn those lost sales into revenue again.

Set it and forget it – these tools will work in the background to re-engage customers and prompt them to come back and complete their purchase. Before you know it, you’ll see your abandoned cart rate start to drop, and your sales start to climb.

Automation is an eCommerce boon; use it to your advantage! Your customers will appreciate the reminder, and your bottom line will thank you.

We hope this post has helped you automate the abandoned cart recovery process on your WooCommerce store!

Keep reading the article at WP Mayor. The article was originally written by The Editorial Team on 2023-08-10 07:00:00.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.