Abandoned Cart automation is a series of emails sent to customers who added an item to their shopping cart but did not complete the purchase.

Using Abandoned Cart emails is an effective sales recovery strategy that has the potential to recover the revenue that was lost. With the right abandoned cart email strategy, you can get many customers who have abandoned their shopping carts to complete their purchases without additional work beyond the simple setup.

Abandoned Checkout emails are also sent out automatically to site visitors who started the checkout process but did not complete it. This is an effective way to reach your customers and recover lost revenue. Unlike Abandoned Cart automation, Abandoned Checkout will only trigger for people who started the checkout process but abandoned it.

This article will show you the main settings in the Abandoned Cart and Abandoned Checkout automations and explain the advanced features that will help you get your contacts back.

Setting up the Abandoned Cart in Omnisend is a pretty simple process. If this is your first time making an Abandoned Cart flow, you might want to start with one of our presets. All settings are already set for you, and after some email customizations, your emails are ready to go.

To create the Abandoned Cart workflow, proceed to the Automation → click Create workflow → You will see a list of pre-built workflows.

Check a box next to Cart Abandonment → Pick Abandoned Cart preset → Customize workflow.

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:

Please note that another requirement is to recognize your customer or track the email address or phone number, so your client has to be identified.

All recognized contacts will enter your workflow as soon as they leave an unattended cart in your store but will exit if the exit condition is satisfied (if they place an order or proceed to checkout). Therefore, the customer who completes the order will exit the sequence on whichever step they have landed in automation.

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

To create the Abandoned Checkout workflow, proceed to the Automations → click Create workflow → You will see a list of pre-built workflows.

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

Under trigger filters, you will be able to limit the automation to trigger only for specific customers who match the trigger filter selected.

All of the trigger filter events are synced from your ecommerce store data, so you will be able to limit the trigger based on accurate order data. For example, imagine you'd like to send Abandoned Checkout automation only to people with more than two products in their cart - easy! You select the Product Quantity trigger filter → select the operator "more than", and type in the number of products you need. This automation will only get triggered for customers with more than two products abandoned in their cart.

You can use multiple trigger filters and even combine them in a single automation. Just don't forget to change the operator between rules. If you want your customers to match several rules to trigger this automation, use the "AND" operator and the "OR" operator if you'd like this automation to be triggered for customers who match either of the rules.

The trigger inactivity time option works as a delay for your automation to trigger. For example, you don't want to overwhelm your customers with emails, so you pick 1 hour as the Trigger inactivity time. This way, the automation will only trigger after 1 hour since your customer has abandoned the cart. For the Abandoned Checkout, this will mean that a customer has abandoned the checkout page for 1 hour as well. You can change this period to any that suits you more.

The Abandoned Checkout Value Split preset helps you re-engage customers who started checkout but didn’t complete their purchase. It automatically comes with a split based on the order value, so you can tailor messages to different customer groups.

Navigate to the Automations → New Workflow → type: Cart Abandonment → Select the Abandoned Checkout Engagement Split preset → Customize Workflow.

The automation is triggered for customers who have initiated the checkout process but did not place an order. The exit condition for this automation is when the customer places an order. The main difference from the general Abandoned Checkout preset is the split condition for sending tailored messages.

In the split settings, you can customize the rule of the split. The default rule is based on the order total, so you can either choose to edit the order value or change it to a different split rule.

After the split, messages are tailored according to the rule: customers with a higher order value receive emails that include a discount, while others receive emails without one. The preset contains three emails, spaced out with delays, but you can adjust both the timing and the content as needed.

In the Abandoned sequences, you can add all types of messages — Email, SMS, and Push notifications. To add any of these blocks to the Automation sequence, you must drag and drop them into the workflow.

You can personalize the subject lines for your emails, SMS, and SMS text using custom properties that will be synced from your store in a few clicks. The data will be populated based on each client's information collected in the cart/checkout.

The SMS will have the link populated once customers trigger the automation.

Sending a simple reminder might not be sufficient for your contacts to change their decision.

To edit the content of your email, click on the email block you created or preset one and click Edit content:

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 show customers the products they've picked. While the link can be added to all messages (Email, SMS, and Push), the Products can only be displayed in email messages.

The Abandoned Products Item 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 Items pool.

Once your email is sent, it will get 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.

Apart from the Abandoned Products block, you can add a button with the link to the store checkout page. The link can be added in personalization, as shown in the screenshot below. This button will lead each customer to their personalized checkout page with the products they have abandoned. This button is added to abandoned cart automation email presets by default.

You can also add this link to some other blocks' settings. For example, to the Redeem Discout button on the Discount Content block. 

You can further tailor your automation by targeting your messages to specific contacts. There are two ways to do that: using the audience filters in the trigger block or a separate split block.

Audience filters are checked at the same time the contact triggers your automation. If you want to filter out contacts at the first stage, this is the best option. You can filter contacts based on their personal data, including tags, segments, and more.

Please note that if contacts do not meet the audience filters at the time the automation is triggered, they will not enter the automation. If you’d like to filter contacts at later stages—for example, after a message is sent or once contacts enter a segment—it is better to use a split block instead, since you can delay when the filter is checked.

The split condition can be verified with a delay at any stage of automation. You may want to use a split after an email is already sent to everyone who entered the automation. With the help of split, you can divide customers who match the selected rule and those who don't into different paths and have different journeys.

To add a split, drag and drop it into the automation sequence:

With the help of splits, the automation workflow lets you target your contacts based on the following:

After you turn on the automation, we also suggest measuring its performance. A/B testing is the best way to identify how your contacts respond to every variation in your sequence content.

Adding the A/B test option, you should decide what you’d like to test. For example, if you want to find the subject line that generates the most sales, you can send two different emails with different subject lines to see which one drives more revenue.​

In the following example, we are testing the best time to send the email by sending the same message with two different delays.

If you only want to check the message's layout in the email editor, you can preview your email with a test contact. 

If you'd like to check the email in your inbox, please note that you need to trigger a real email. Test emails do not populate the abandoned cart block as they're sent to a test contact with no event data.

To test with a real email, you need to go to your store → add products to your cart if you want to trigger the Abandoned Cart flow or proceed to checkout if you want to trigger the Abandoned Checkout flow. To speed up the process, we recommend changing the trigger inactivity time. You can add an Audience Filter to the automation trigger settings to ensure the workflow doesn't get triggered for your contacts.

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 in 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 flow in Omnisend, ensure your cart abandonment workflow is disabled on the store platform.

Will the Abandoned Cart sequence be sent to non-subscribed contacts?

Yes, but you can manage contact statuses under the workflow channel settings, where you decide who can enter your automation: subscribers, non-subscribers, and/or unsubscribers.

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.