Setting up an abandoned shopping cart campaign

Want to know what the most shocking number in e-commerce is?

68%

According to the Baymard Institute, that’s the percentage of online shopping carts which are abandoned before the customer completes a sale.

That means that for every 100 customers who add products to their shopping cart, two-thirds will abandon their cart before checking out – and only 32 end up making a purchase.

Or – in other words – you lose two-thirds of your potential sales.

Now, it may not be possible to persuade all of those customers to return to your shop – but you can try!

And one of the most obvious ways is to set up an email marketing campaign to users with abandoned shopping carts.

Here’s how!

Since these types of emails need to have their content rendered for each recipient – because they have unique shopping cart contents – we suggest you create and configure separate top folder for abandoned cart emails.

To do so:

• Go to your Marketing area
• Right-click on the Email Marketing node and click Create new top folder
• Name the folder – e.g. Abandoned Cart Campaign
• Check the Render content for each recipient checkbox
• Select the Abandoned cart recipients recipient provider, and configure it:
  • Set Mark abandoned after to e.g. 2 hours
  • Set Ignore carts older than to e.g. 3 hours
  • Check Require customer was logged in/accepted sales terms/logged in OR accepted sales terms as appropriate

Your setup should look like (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Top folder settings ffor an abandoned cart email campaign

In Dynamicweb, emails are actually pages which are wrapped in en email template and sent to your recipients.

Your abandoned cart email can contain whatever you like – but in order to display the actual abandoned cart to the users, you must use the context order renderer module (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Configuring the Context Order Renderer module

To use the context order renderer module:

• Create a new page somewhere in your content tree – e.g. within a dedicated emails folder
• Add a new paragraph to the page and attach the Context Order Renderer module to it
• Select or create an appropriate template for rendering the contents of the abandoned cart
• Save and close

To render a Go to Cart button which will send the email recipient to the abandoned cart without relying on a cookie use the loadorder cart command along with a LoadingOrderSecret retrieved from the context:

Once the abandoned cart email-page is to your liking, go to Marketing > Email Marketing and create a new email in your Abandoned Cart Emails top folder.

Set it up in the standard manner.

When ready to schedule the campaign, click the Scheduled send button.

Figure 4.1 Scheduled send

This opens the scheduling window (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Scheduling the campaign

You must:

• Select a start date and time and an end date and time. If you want to let the campaign run for an unlimited time, select never as the end year.
• Select a time zone and a repeat interval suited to your setup – here, 1 hour seems appropriate
• Click schedule

And that’s it! Every hour the task will run, finding recipients with an abandoned cart between 2 and 3 hours old, and send them a personalized email rendering their abandoned cart.

Many companies send out abandoned cart emails more than once to ensure a higher conversion rate - to do this you should setup multiple emails like the one describe above, but with different abandoned cart recipient provider settings, e.g.:

• 1st mail
  • Mark as abandoned: 2 hours
  • Ignore carts older than: 3 hours
  • Repeat every: 1 hour
• 2nd mail
  • Mark as abandoned: 1 day
  • Ignore carts older than: 2 days
  • Repeat every: 1 hour
• Etc.

If you want to set up follow-up emails, please use a separate top folder configured for the new mark abandoned/ignore settings – or override the top folder settings by using the local recipient provider setting on the 2nd and 3rd emails. If not, the follow-up emails will inherit the top folder settings from above.