From warm welcome emails to repeat gentle drip marketing campaigns to reengagement, you want to make sure your store has a smart plan to stay top of mind. All the while, being careful to not turn anyone off.
Based on our experience with hundreds of top Shopify brands, many stores invest real money in their campaigns but still miss a key component – abandonment flows. These fully automated flows are key to rounding out a store’s marketing strategy.
In this article we’re going to get into the fundamental abandonment flows, and why you should have an automation set for each of these flows.
What are the most critical abandonment flows?
It’s a shame when shoppers abandon your store without buying. After clicking on one of your expensive ads and browsing your store, and perhaps even adding items to cart, they’ve expressed real interest in your brand.
When shoppers leave without buying there really is no consistent and inexpensive way for you to follow up, especially for shoppers that remain anonymous to you because they didn’t login to your store and haven’t shared their email before leaving. Anonymity is on the riser per Forbes, and most stores have yet to develop a plan.
Thankfully, with the advent of new technology that integrates with Klaviyo and Shopify, there are now easy ways to capture this entire segment of anonymous window shoppers and reach out to them on an automated basis.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the key abandonment flows you should be thinking about adding to your automation strategy, as well as the technology necessary to squeeze the most revenue out of these flows. These abandonment flows include:
- Cart Abandonment
- Browse Abandonment
- Category Abandonment
- Product Abandonment
Ecommerce stores leveraging Shopify and Shopify Plus face cart, browse, category, and product abandonment each and every day.
Targeting shoppers in these categories is critically important because it can lead to more sales and lower advertisement spend – the key to success.
Email marketing automation flows are an effective way to recapture these shoppers and turn them into loyal customers.
When cart, browse, category, or product abandonment occurs, an email marketing automation flow should ideally be triggered to send a high converting message to abandoned shoppers.
This message can include, for example, a discount code or other incentive to encourage shoppers to come back and complete their purchases.
According to recent research conducted by Forrester, abandoned shopping carts cost ecommerce businesses approximately eighteen billion dollars ($18B) each year worldwide. Given that almost seventy percent (70%) of all potential customers abandon their carts before check out, recovering even a relatively small number of these shoppers on an automated basis can help drive significant additional revenue for eCommerce businesses.
Abandoned cart emails drive almost thirty percent (30%) of all ecommerce revenue. According to a recent report published by Klaviyo, with a forty one percent (41%) open rate and around ten percent (10%) click rate, abandoned cart emails can help ecommerce businesses recover as much as fifteen percent (15%) of otherwise lost revenue.
If you haven’t already, consider setting up email marketing automation flows for cart, browse, category, and product abandonment. It could be just what you’ve been looking for to increase sales and improve your business in 2023.
Let’s dig into each of these flows and the technology necessary to enable them.
Cart abandonment
Cart abandonment flows are used to re-engage high-intent shoppers by sending them images of products they left in their cart so as to draw them back to your store.
As mentioned above, according to a recent report published by Klaviyo, with a forty one (41%) open rate and around ten percent (10%) click rate, abandoned cart emails can help ecommerce businesses recover as much as fifteen percent (15%) of otherwise lost revenue.
Shoppers abandon their carts for a number of different reasons. Some very innocently get preoccupied with other things, and simply don’t get around to buying – think baby crying. Others fill their cart but ultimately leave because they have some hesitation, e.g., regarding pricing or shipping, etc. Yet others are actively hopping around bargain hunting.
This represents real lost sales and revenue for businesses, which is why capturing these shoppers is so important.
Browse abandonment
Browse abandonment is when a shopper views products on your site, and then leaves your store without having added any products to cart. This can happen for a host of reasons. For example, the shopper could have gotten distracted mid-shopping or may not have found what he or she was looking for.
For every 100 people who view products on your site, roughly 87 will leave without adding anything to their cart. Needless to say, browse abandonment is a major issue for ecommerce stores. Capturing this cohort of shoppers is critical to success.
Category abandonment
Category abandonment is when shoppers view items in a particular category on your store site but do not add any product to cart. Similar to browse abandonment, this can happen for a number of reasons, such as the shopper not finding what they are looking for or getting distracted.
Category abandonment is a big problem for ecommerce businesses because it can lead to lost sales and revenue. Approximately 80% of your visitors that show interest enough to navigate to a product category will still abandon your store without buying.
Capturing this even higher intent cohort is critical!
Product abandonment
Product abandonment is when one of your visitors views a product on your store but does not add it to cart. As mentioned above, this can happen for a number of reasons, such as the shopper getting distracted or simply not being interested in the product viewed.
Product abandonment is a real problem for your store and ecommerce businesses in general. If your store is similar to other ecommerce stores, for every 100 people who view a product on your site, about 95 will leave without adding it to their cart.
This is significant. Capturing at least some of these otherwise lost shoppers should be a priority.
Effective strategies to deal with abandonment
Thankfully, there are many wonderful email and SMS marketing automation tools out there for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores that can be used to create abandonment flows for cart, browse, category and product abandoners.
By way of example, Klaviyo is a great all-around email and SMS platform.
With that said, and while Klaviyo is a great tool, it wasn’t designed with the specific focus of optimizing your abandonment flow campaigns. So to seriously up your abandonment game, you’ll need to complement Klaviyo with identification and prioritization functionality.
Identity resolution will allow you to deanonymize your site visitors to dramatically increase the number of abandonment emails you can send. You may not be aware, but ~98% of your web traffic is anonymous and can’t currently be retargeted through your Klaviyo abandoned cart and browse emails.
As a result, you’re at the mercy of Facebook and Google for retargeting the vast majority of shoppers who aren’t on your email list. Some of the reasons stores are seeing this shift are detailed in the Forbes article referenced above.
The AI Identity Pixel can identify up to 70% of your anonymous web traffic, automatically pass fully permissioned emails directly into your Klaviyo account, and trigger your existing cart or browse abandonment flows.
Make up for the loss of third-party cookies and ad data by unlocking First-Party owned audiences at unprecedented scale as a new performance channel.
The AI Identity Pixel’s abandonment flow prioritization functionality will enable you to ensure that your abandonment emails are sent based on the highest conversion opportunity. For example, cart abandonment flows are typically higher converting than browse abandonment flows.
The AI Identity Pixel is able to prioritize the right abandonment flow. It’s also designed with a number of checks to ensure that you maintain your email deliverability and don’t over email your shoppers.
Conclusion
With the cost of advertising rising and iOS 14.5 changes impacting the efficacy of traditional ad retargeting, savvy ecommerce brands understand the importance of owned marketing channels such as email and SMS.
These channels, when leveraged to guide shoppers along the journey from faint prospects to loyal, repeat customers, can yield both a short term immediate boost to revenue and a mid to longer term boost to revenue.
Using identity resolution to identify more visitors and, thereby, send more abandonment emails enables the immediate short term impact on revenue – simply turn on the switch! Adding these net new contacts to your owned lists can also increase your regular email marketing revenue over the mid to longer term, so the benefits of the approach detailed in this article only increase over time!
Even before you have a healthy first-party database of email and SMS contacts, you should be marketing to your visitors via identity resolution using automated tools that can trigger emails to cart, browse, category and product abandoners.
This will immediately boost revenue and, importantly, help you grow your list. And your growing list will ultimately help you boost your revenue further by enabling marketing to your list via your owned channels.
Used correctly by direct-to-customer brands, identity resolution supported abandonment automation tools paired strategically with the above detailed key foundational marketing flow strategies will prove to be the easiest and fastest revenue boost you could ever imagine.
