Need help with abandoned cart!

[fhmadyn]

Hi guys!

I am facing some problems with the build in abandoned cart notifactions of Shopify and the ones from MailChimp. 

The standard Shopify notification only sends one abandoned cart email after x hours. MailChimp sends a series of follow-ups after x hours but only to people who have subscribed to the mailing list while Shopify sends it to whomever. 

To sum up, MailChimp does not reach out to new potential customers and Shopify does not send enough follow-ups to make things interesting. 

Is there a good abandoned cart app that solves these problems? 

Thanks a lot!

[Luis_Morales2]

You can use something like MoonMail Recovery Checkouts, which will send emails to everyone who reached the chekout (since they would have input their emails at that point). It works well!

I'd also recommend implementing a Facebook Retargeting Strategy. Let me know if you want me to dive further on how to execute this. Reach me anytime at luis@luisemorales.com

[Doug26]

fhmadyn,

We developed PollCart (a Shopify plugin) to deal with abandoned shopping carts and product returns in a new and innovative way.  Instead of bother people with emails, you give them another chance to consider buying and asking their friends, turning those lost customers into your marketers.  Instead of an abandoned shopping cart, you get a visitor showing your store and products to their friends and family.

It is free and easy to install.  You can learn about it here (https://apps.shopify.com/pollcart-social-commerce) and here (http://pollcart.com/).

I hope this helps.  Let me know if there is anything further I can help with.

-Doug

[Van_Wilhelm]

Recart is interesting where they have technology that will grab the user's email address the first time that they add a product to the cart, or will grab it from any other form that they try to fill out like a newsletter subscription form.

[Denis5]

Hey!

Check out Convead if you want to control things manually or Convead AMI if you want to get all the stuff done automatically. There are great predefined templates for abandoned carts there and you can tune sending delays easily.

Take care!
Denis

[WOTIO]

This is a late reply, but we use both methods  - Shopify and Mailchimp - together. 

We turned on the Shopify single notification that will go to all people that provide an email address, triggered one hour after abandon. 

Then we set up the Mailchimp campaigns to trigger 6 hours after abandon only to those people that are subscribed.

It serves as a nice combination to make sure you can message everybody at least once, and then continue messaging those that have opted in for ongoing emails from our brand.

[Dale_Logan]

We usea popup thing via the privy app (free) and offer $5 off when they sign up now. Once the customer enters their name and email they are fed through to the Shopify customers database, and then MailChimp pulls them from there. Now, when they abandon their cart they get the full MailChimp series.

[Tien_Do]

Dale's method seems to work well in this situation, process is more streamlined so you only need to focus on MailChimp (or other mailing tools).

[Kevin_Simonson_]

So, cart abandonment is a no-brainer. Send a user a message with a reminder that they were just on your site and that they left some items in their cart. But there are some things a brand needs to ensure in order to send effective cart abandonment emails:

1. You can't send the emails unless you've got email addresses. Having a good signup process where users give you their email address so that you can send them email is essential -- and then, you need to actually send them promotional email and ideally drop a cookie on your site so that you can actually track when a user has abandoned a cart and you can send an email to them. I get a lot of questions from clients who say, "how can we send more of these high performing abandoned cart emails?" And what I'm talking about here is usually the answer.
    
2. Display the item in the email you send. This is something I've seen convert very well. However, there are considerations here -- if a user puts 10 items in their cart, you might not want to put all of those items in the email -- it's good to put some rules in place to determine which of the items show up. Could be the last couple of items they added, or the most expensive item, or some other thing that you ideally test and prove is the right way for you. However....
    
3. Don't show the items in the email if you don't also save their cart on your site. There may not be anything more frustrating than expecting to see one thing and getting something else. So if you don't save their cart, and you can't drive them directly to the cart, then you shouldn't show items from the cart in the email. This may not be a huge concern since one often necessitates the other, but it's definitely something to consider.
    
4. Timing is really important to test into. Usually when I start a program with a client, we send the initial email a couple hours after they abandon, then we might run some tests over the course of a couple of weeks to determine if that timing is right. One thing I typically advise against is sending the email too soon after abandonment -- some technology allows to send an email immediately. I've found that this can be too aggressive with users. Again, as with all email, you should be providing some value back to the customer, and being too aggressive can signal that you're pushing too hard for a sale from the customer. Plus, some people might be sensitive to the idea that sending an email immediately after abandonment might be a little creepy.
    
5. Send an additional email! A day or two or three (you should test this), send a gentle reminder that the user's cart is still available. This is the time to include a promotion. I rarely advise a brand to send a promotion with the first email -- many users will purchase without providing a discount, and you should let them do that. However, a later email that offers this discount can be a good tool to use to drive conversion. If you include an offer, you can also test this. Try to find the sweet spot that drives more conversions without cutting too far into your margins.

Hope that helps! We had a long debate on this last week on our blog.