If you sell things online, you know that shopping cart abandonment is a common occurrence—a potential customer fills up their virtual shopping cart and navigates away from your store without completing the purchase. Research has shown that 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes a sale. But, just because someone leaves their cart behind doesn’t mean that they’ve lost interest in buying your products. They might just need a gentle nudge in the right direction, and MailChimp can help.
Earlier this year, we introduced abandoned cart emails for Shopify, Magento, and custom API 3.0 store connections. This week, we’ve rolled out abandoned cart features for our WooCommerce integration, too. And, since we’ve recently added a brand new abandoned cart series Automation workflow, it’s a great time to take another look at how our abandoned cart features work, and how they can benefit your business.
Abandoned cart messaging is a quick, easy, and effective addition to your online store. When you follow up with potential customers to keep your products—and your business—fresh in their minds, there’s a greater chance they’ll return to complete their purchase. It can pay pretty big dividends, too. The typical user experiences a 2% increase in total store orders just by sending abandoned cart messages. In fact, we’ve found that the average MailChimp user is earning about $12.50 per day—that’s $375 a month—from recaptured sales generated by their abandoned cart emails. For most folks, that’s enough to cover the entirety of their MailChimp account costs and still have some money left over for a rainy day.
How does abandoned cart messaging work?
MailChimp’s robust Automation features include an abandoned cart email and abandoned cart series option. And they’re a great opportunity to remind those potential customers about the items they’ve left behind, not to mention give them a reason to return to your store to complete their purchase.
- The abandoned cart email is a single notification message, sent 1, 6, or 24 hours after customers abandon their shopping carts. Unlike the regular marketing emails you’d send to mailing list subscribers, the Abandoned Cart Email is transactional. It can be sent to all customers who leave items in their carts, even if they haven’t opted into your MailChimp list. And, if someone completes their purchase before your email is sent, we’ll automatically remove them from the queue.
- The abandoned cart series, by default, contains 3 separate emails—We saved your cart for you, You still have an item in your cart, and Are you still interested in purchasing?—but can be customized to fit the needs of your business. The first email in the abandoned cart series is transactional and can be sent to all customers who leave items behind. In order to receive all of the emails, however, the customer must be a member of your MailChimp list.
Getting started
Once you’ve connected your store with MailChimp, abandoned cart workflows can be set up in a few quick steps. For a full walkthrough, visit our Knowledge Base.
Later this week, we’ll take a look at the ways MailChimp user Topo Designs uses abandoned cart messaging to test discount strategies and sell more stuff.
