In “Optimizing Checkout Flow in WooCommerce,” my previous article, I offered tips on reducing abandoned carts by streamlining the checkout process. To be clear, however, you could spend years optimizing your checkout process and not eliminate abandoned carts.
There are options to bring shoppers back to your store once they’ve moved on to other things. One of the best ways is to send emails to shoppers about the products they’ve left in their carts.
Abandoned Cart Emails
The first thing you need when sending abandoned cart emails is an email address. That means getting returning clients to sign in, and then detecting when they’ve added items to their cart.
For first time shoppers and returning customers that aren’t signed in, that means capturing their email address at some point in the process.
A developer could write JavaScript to detect when a user fills in his email address in the checkout process — and then capture it for later use. The user doesn’t need to submit the form. JavaScript can detect when he has filled in the email field.
Other options do not require a developer. Virtually all email-marketing providers offer some form of abandoned cart recovery. Most of them offer built-in integration with leading shopping cart platforms, as well as API access for custom integrations.
There are also many third-party abandoned-cart services. Two of them, Jilt and Abandoned Cart Lite, focus mainly on WooCommerce.
Jilt
Jilt can help merchants recover abandoned cart. Its pricing is based on how many abandoned shoppers it engages.
Jilt is available for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Shopify. Jilt is priced on how many shoppers you engage via email. The company has a handy calculator on its pricing page to help determine how many shoppers you’ll engage.
For example, if you’re processing 200 completed orders a month, Jilt estimates that you’ll connect monthly with 120 abandoned shoppers, which translates to a Jilt fee of $79 a month. There’s no additional charge to email a shopper multiple times.
Jilt stores shoppers’ data on its servers and sends the cart recovery emails on your behalf. This is helpful because you’ll likely store roughly three-times your existing customer records. Plus sending abandoned cart emails could result in spam complaints, which, if sent from your server, could affect the deliverability of transactional emails, among other issues.
Jilt can also send (a) dynamic coupon codes to your abandoned shoppers to entice them to complete their purchase and (b) multiple emails over a period you define.
Abandoned Cart Lite
Abandoned Cart Lite is a free plugin for WooCommerce.
Abandoned Cart Lite is a free plugin for WooCommerce that provides many of the same features as Jilt. The biggest drawback is that you must store the abandoned-shopper data and then send the emails from your site’s server.
For smaller stores, this won’t likely be a problem. But, again, for larger stores, sending abandoned cart emails could result in spam complaints, which could affect other aspects of your operations.
Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce allows you to create unlimited email templates to send at any interval. You could, for example, send a reminder email one hour after the abandonment, and then a few days later if necessary.
The Pro version costs $119. It offers a popup that will attempt to engage a shopper who appears to be leaving your site. You could use this popup to offer a free download, build your email list, or capture the shopper’s email address.
The Pro version also allows you to add coupons to your emails. You could, say, follow up at full price within one hour of abandonment, and again in a week with a coupon.
Cost Effective
With so many shoppers abandoning their carts, merchants can greatly increase revenue by engaging them via email.
In my experience, investing in abandoned cart recovery can be much more cost-effective than marketing to new clients, who aren’t aware of your products and services.