Abandoned Cart Best Practices: How to Send Emails that Reduce Cart Abandonment

In a digital landscape where customer acquisition and digital marketing costs are rising amidst strong competition, retailers need to ensure they’re making the most of their existing traffic. A crucial aspect of this involves retargeting the shoppers you’ve lost along the way due to cart abandonment.

Abandoned cart emails can be a go-to solution for nurturing a shopper’s initial high intent to purchase and motivating them to revisit your site.

Brands should consider how they can optimise these automated emails to drive action and recover all important sales.  

The abandoned cart email opportunity

Salesfire’s research found that almost 12% of users who click a link in an abandoned order email go on to make a purchase, meaning they’re effective in recovering a significant proportion of sales that otherwise may have been lost to a competitor. 

If a shopper shows high purchase intent, these sequences are crucial for creating new opportunities and targeting users with personalised content. 

Not only does this work to recover lost revenue, but it also helps encourage users to build bigger baskets. Our study found that order values from abandoned cart emails are on average 18% higher. 

Including engaging content and creating compelling sequences maximises each sales opportunity and nurtures shoppers into repeat customers. Identifying the optimum combination of subject lines, incentives and content will drive results in the form of increased orders and boosted AOV.  

Getting the most out of abandoned cart emails

Like with any email, you need to consider the best ways to craft your abandoned email sequences for optimal conversions. 

You must address features like: 

• The types of subject lines that are going to get the highest open rates 
• The best time to send your abandoned cart emails to encourage sales 
• Which incentives will engage shoppers and motivate them to return to your site. 

We’ve analysed data from retailers across the Salesfire network, identifying how retailers have used abandoned cart emails to increase the value of their traffic. From this, we’ve mapped out the best practices to help you improve the performance of your email sends.