The primary goal of the Abandoned Cart emails is to encourage online store visitors to complete the order. Once a customer leaves a cart with products and does not complete a purchase, Omnisend sends a reminder with the products your customers have abandoned and a link to the checkout page.

Identifying why your contacts leave their carts before completing the purchase is crucial, and Omnisend can help you with that. It lets you add different Splits to target your messages for specific audiences, A/B test your subject lines, delays, discounts, use different channels, and more.

This article will walk you through the main settings in the Abandoned Cart flow and give you some insights into the advanced features that will help you bring your contacts back.

Before you start
Set-up process
Content of the message — adding personalized data
Advanced settings of the Abandoned Cart workflow
Improving performance with A/B testing
Testing your Abandoned Cart
Native Abandoned Cart Workflow

FAQ

Before working on Abandoned Cart automation, you should add and verify your sender's email address. If you still need to do this, proceed to the Store Settings -> Settings -> Channel settings, and choose to add and verify your email address.

💬 Find detailed instructions on the sender's email address verification.

The process of the Abandoned Cart set up in Omnisend is straightforward. If you are creating the abandoned Cart flow for the first time, we suggest starting from one of our presets. They already have all the settings adjusted and even added the Abandoned Products and recovery link to the email message content.

To create the Abandoned Cart workflow, proceed to the Automations tab -> click on the Create workflow button and pick it from the list.

Automation trigger settings

Abandoned Cart automation is triggered when the customer adds products to the Cart and leaves your store before completing the purchase. To fulfill both conditions, Omnisend sets the Trigger and Exit Conditions:

Another requirement is to recognize your customer or track the email address or phone number.

All recognized contacts will enter your workflow as soon as they leave a cart in your store but will exit if the exit condition is satisfied. Therefore, the customer who completes the order will exit the sequence on whichever step they have landed.

Note! For all the native E-commerce integrations (Shopify, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce), we sync the phone number only after the order is placed. That's why if a new customer provides contact info on the checkout and abandons the Cart, we'll only be able to send an email. If the customer places an order, the phone number will be synced, and the next time the same customer abandons the Cart, we'll be able to send an SMS.

💬Learn more about the methods Omnisend is using to track contacts abandoning their carts.

With the default settings, your Abandoned Cart sequence will be sent to all contacts, but you may also add some trigger and audience filters to target your emails to specific groups. Jump to the Advanced settings section of the article for more information.

In the Abandoned Cart sequence, you can add all types of messages — Email, SMS, and Push Notification.

To add any of these blocks to the Automation sequence, you must drag and drop them into the workflow.

Note! In the SMS, you can add the abandoned cart URL link to direct customers to the checkout page with the products that they've abandoned.

Once a block is added, you will need to provide all of the details, including your sender's email address, sender's name, subject line, and preheader. If some data is still missing, you will see a warning message informing you about that, ex: 'Missing email information' or 'Missing SMS information.'

You might need more than just sending a simple reminder for your contacts to change their decision. To help capture your contacts' attention, Omnisend pulls over the products your customers abandoned and the CTA button leading to the checkout page.

With these content blocks, you can offer a game-changing discount and show off the products they've picked. While the link can be added to all messages, the Products can only be displayed in the email message.

The default Abandoned Cart automation has an Abandoned Products content block that will bring the products your customers were browsing to the content of the email message. If you went with the Abandoned Cart preset or changed the automation trigger to Abandoned Cart, you will see this block in your Email message content or be able to add it from the content blocks pool.

Once your email is sent, it will be populated with the abandoned products' images, descriptions, titles, and links. The Shop Now button within the Abandoned Products block already has a link set to the page of the product your customer was browsing.

💬 Learn more about the Abandoned Products content block.

Apart from the Abandoned Products block, you will also find a button with the link leading to the store checkout page. Use a regular button block where the abandoned cart link can be added in personalization. This button is added to abandoned cart automation emails by default.

In other words, you can either use the default button or add that abandoned cart link to the text or any other button.

You can also add that link to some other blocks' settings. For example, to the Shop Now button on the Discount Content block. Note this link should only be added to the Button Link field in the content block settings.

💬 Learn more about the Discount content block and its settings on different ecommerce platforms.

Note that if you send a test email, the Abandoned Cart content block and the Complete your order button won't be populated with the products and the link to your store. The best way to test the flow is to trigger the sequence in your store. Jump to this section for more information.

In your Abandoned Cart series, you can send a series of different emails, with a single reminder in the first, a discount offer in the second, and a final reminder in the third.

If your customer doesn't respond to the Email message, you can send an SMS message with a link to the Cart that your customer abandoned.

💬 Check the recommendations on Abandoned Cart sequence settings and content in our Blog articles:
- 6 Ways to Nail Your Abandoned Cart Emails in 2020
- Top 7 Cart Abandonment Reasons–and What You Can Do About It
- Read more about SMS in automation here.

We've already set up the automation and triggered it for all contacts. However, what makes your automation powerful is the ability to target it to specific groups of contacts.

The automation workflow lets you target your contacts based on the following:

You can add trigger and Audience filters to both Trigger and Split Condition settings. The primary difference is that contacts not satisfying the rule in the Trigger setting won't enter the sequence at all, while the Split Condition can be verified with the delay.

💬 Check the dedicated instruction for more information on each of these blocks settings:

- Trigger and trigger filter;
- Audience filter and Exit conditions;
- Conditional Split and A/B testing.

One of the examples of the Trigger filter applications is splitting your sequence based on the Cart value. You may want to offer a percentage discount to clients abandoning low-value products, but this discount won't be the best solution for the high-value ones. Thus, by splitting your sequence based on the cart sum, you can send different discounts or even more messages to customers looking at more expensive products.

To split your sequence based on the cart sum, drag and drop the Split block -> select Trigger events -> Cart sum and set the value.

The same filter can be added to the Trigger settings; however, it won't let you send different messages to those that didn't satisfy this condition.

It is natural to send different emails based on the products your customers are browsing. You can only pick the specific products your customer had abandoned or cancel the workflow when other products were left.

In the screenshot presented below, instead of adding products to the workflow trigger, we add them to the Exit Condition. Every workflow can have up to 5 Exit Coditions, with five filters per each.

Another popular Abandoned Cart automation scenario is splitting your workflow based on the customer's location. With this data, you can send messages in different languages or offer a Free Shipping discount to your local customers only.

To add this filter, we will set the Split Condition to Contact properties -> Country -> set the country value.

If you send the discount in the Abandoned Cart message, it may eventually train your clients to wait for it instead of finishing the purchase and paying the total price. To ensure it doesn't happen, you can Segment your contacts based on their purchase behavior and offer the discount only if they haven't placed any orders yet.

The solution to this problem will consist of creating a segment and setting it as a filter in the Split condition settings.

Step 1: Creating a Segment

Step 2: Using Segment in the Split condition settings

After you turn on the automation, we also need to measure its performance. The best way to identify how your contacts respond to every variation in your sequence content is to A/B test them.

After selecting the A/B test variable, we will need to choose the metric this variable can impact. For example, the delay setting or the Subject line can affect the open rate for the Abandoned Cart email. If you wish to determine the best delay for the Abandoned Cart email, only this parameter should be changed.

As you can see from the screenshot presented below, we send identical emails but with different delays.

If your open rate is high, but the conversion rate is low, you should reconsider the content of your messages, use personalization, and offer some incentives.

If you only want to check the message's layout, you can use the send test option in the email message builder. However, since you didn't abandon anything in your store, the email won't show the products or contain the checkout link.

Instead, you can test the Abandoned Cart workflow by leaving the Cart in your store. To speed up the process, we recommend changing the delay. You can add an Audience filter to the automation trigger settings to ensure the workflow doesn't get triggered for your contacts.

💬 Learn how to restrict the workflow to be triggered for contacts that belong to your test Segment only.

Remember that due to the Frequency setting restriction, each contact can trigger only one Abandonment workflow within 24 hours. This restriction prevents the workflow from being triggered multiple times within the same browsing session. Therefore, you can either disable this setting or use different email addresses while testing.

We also recommend starting a new session every time you test the workflow. The best way to achieve this is to open your store using the Incognito window of your browser.

Using abandoned cart reminders on Omnisend and your store platform (applicable for Shopify and Bigcommerce) is not recommended. When these two features overlap, they will overwhelm your customers. Before enabling the Abandoned Cart on Omnisend, ensure your cart abandonment workflow is disabled on the store platform.

Note enabling it on Omnisend does not automatically disable the one on Shopify.

Reach out to the Support team if you have any questions!

Will the Abandoned Cart sequence be sent to non-subscribed contacts? Yes, but you can add an exit condition to the workflow to cancel the flow for non-subscribed customers.

Is it possible to not show the selected product in the Abandoned Cart sequence? Unfortunately, choosing which products can or cannot be shown in the Abandoned Products content block is impossible. You may only decide not to trigger the workflow for specific products.