How to Set Up Abandoned Cart Emails With Klaviyo
If you’re already retargeting your customers and segmenting your emails to them…congratulations! Now, for everyone else, read on and you can thank me later.
What is cart abandonment? Why is it a problem for online retailers?
If you’re running an e-commerce store, I can guarantee you that you’ll be losing money to abandoned carts. How much you’re losing varies by industry, how terrible your website is for your customers and the price of your items.
As a rule of thumb you’re probably looking at around 70% of people who visit your online store adding stuff to their basket only to vanish when the time comes to hand over their money.
Crazy isn’t it…can you imagine doing that in a real store?
A few years ago, this caught my attention when I was building a website for a client. They were losing 70% of their checkouts in WooCommerce and the client asked if that was high.
I had no idea but thought I’d investigate
Cart abandonment is a massive problem for online retailers…but nobody seems to notice
You can’t be upset about losing money that you never had in the first place and I think that this is why cart abandonment — and sending automated emails to recover those sales — isn’t at the forefront of the minds of people running online stores.
They aren’t bothered about losing £50,000 in monthly sales because their store is making £25,000 in monthly profits.
The thing is though, running an online store is tough and any little edge you can get like this is massive. It allows you to reinvest and to grow the store but also to make the buying experience less shitty for your customers.
What is Klaviyo and how does it help reduce cart abandonment?
Klaviyo is a paid-for tool that integrates with your e-commerce store and allows you to send automated cart abandonment emails.
You know the ones you’ve probably received yourself…
They basically say “hey…you were shopping for this stuff…do you still want it?”
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Occasionally you might see them offered with a discount code. Money Saving Expert here in the UK actually curates a list of retailers that typically offer discounts if you abandon your cart.
I recommend that you use Klaviyo because it strikes a great balance between being powerful and easy to use.
It’s powerful in the sense that you can show the customer exactly what was in their basket when they left your store, you can customise the emails and drop the user into a sequence to send emails over a defined period of time e.g. when the abandon their cart, 12 hours later and the next day.
Shopify brought in this functionality a while ago to allow you to send a simple cart abandonment email through but it’s not especially sophisitcated.
In addition to being powerful, Klaviyo is also easy-to-use.You can create an account in about 2 minutes and integrate it with all major e-commerce platforms in about a further 2 minutes.
How to Setup Abandoned Cart Emails With Klaviyo
So…how exactly do you set up a cart abandonment email sequence with Klaviyo?
Well, once you’ve connected your store to the platform they’ll actually prompt you to set up a couple of sample automations e.g. cart abandonment, customer win-back, review follow up etc.
These are all superb ideas but there is a tonne of money to be made by focusing on your cart abandonment emails.
As a starting point, just work your way through the Klaviyo wizard and see what your results look like after 30 days.
Where can I get cart abandonment email templates?
I created a three-part template pack for several clients a few years ago and I’d be happy to share it with you.
If you’d like my cart abandonment email template pack please either:
- Comment on this article letting me know
- Tweet John Peden and ask for it
- Connect with me on LinkedIn and ask for it
It’s a three-part email sequence that you can load into Klaviyo and basically just ‘fill in the blanks’ for your own store.
