Cart abandonment email examples and best practices

Include essential information

Shoppers, especially those who have never purchased your brand before, might not understand why you’re emailing them about their abandoned carts. Include as much detail as you can, especially in your first message in a multi-email abandonment journey, to remind them about the products they left behind and encourage them to come back and check out.
Include these points in your email—or in the first email of a multi-email series:

• Product names of the abandoned items
• Product images
• Product information, such as price, size, and color
• A clear call to action
• Contact email or phone number for help

The more informative you are in your email, the more likely you’ll give your customers reasons to return.

Send an abandoned cart email series

Sending one cart reminder is better than sending none. But sending more than one reminder is even better. Many brands have developed a three-email abandoned-cart email series because it gives you more opportunities to reclaim more lost customers:

Email 1: (One hour after abandonment) Kick off the process with a gentle reminder to return and complete checkout.
Email 2: (24 hours after email one). Answer questions, explain brand values, recommend product alternatives, or share customer reviews or social media comments.
Email 3: (Up to seven days after email two) Offer an incentive or another tactic to bring the customer back.

Choose a tone of voice for your emails

Before you get down to tactics like subject lines and calls to action, think about what you want to convey with your abandonment emails. Should they imply “Get back here and check out!” Or would you get better results with a helpful approach that says, “We’re here to solve problems and help you achieve your objective?”

All of the elements in your abandonment email or series should align with that tone of voice, from the subject line to the call to action, the message to the information points you include in the copy.

To discover which approach is more effective, build at least two versions – such as one that focuses on helpfulness or solving problems and another that uses FOMO. Be sure all elements of your message align with that voice, from the subject line to the CTA.

Start off with a strong email subject line

Remember that you’re sending an unexpected message into a customer’s crowded inbox where it will need to stand out against emails they want, emails they don’t want, and—if they subscribe to your promotional messages—emails from your own brand.

Regular ecommerce buyers probably expect to see your abandonment or recovery email, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. You could short-circuit your efforts with a subject line that’s too vague or cutesy or too far out of line with what customers expect from your brand.

Here are some subject lines we pulled from our collection of abandoned cart email examples. Which would you want to open, and which could turn you off or fade into the background?

Hey Bestie, forget to check out?
Psst! Your order is waiting for you!
Your cart is about to expire
Make me yours before someone else does
Your order status
Did you forget about this, Ashley?

Don’t assume the subject line styles in your promotional emails will also motivate customers to act on triggered messages. Test several styles to learn what works best.

Create a meaningful call to action

No matter what wording you use in your CTA, it should align with your message voice and also tell your customers what you want them to do. It’s tempting to say “Complete checkout” but is that going to resonate with time-pressed customers?

Look beyond just sending lost customers back to their carts. Instead, tell them what great things will happen when they finally get their hands on their purchases. “Finish Your Project” is a great CTA from Snapfish. Another testable concept—putting an incentive in the CTA as well as the message copy.

Here’s another collection of CTAs from our abandonment email collection. What do you think?

Return to bag
Shop Now to Redeem
Complete My Order
Shop Now
Resume My Order
Ready When You Are
Let’s Keep Shopping
Get Your Gear

Be strategic about incentive

Have we trained customers to wait for the abandonment cart email with a juicy incentive? We can debate that point, but in the meantime, be cautious about scattering coupon codes too soon or too often in your abandonment series.

As we noted previously, discounts cut into your profits. Bargain-hunting customers will wait out your email sequence until your incentive arrives. And not everyone is motivated by money. Do your best customers need that pricey incentive if they regularly pay full price? Some shoppers need more information or want to compare prices from other brands. Others get interrupted, run into technical difficulties or use carts like wish lists, parking items until they’re ready to buy.

A generally accepted best practice is to hold off on a coupon code or other incentive until the last email in a multi-email series. If you send only a single recovery email, you can add an incentive, but don’t focus the email around it.

Timing is just the start. Should that incentive be a price discount? Dollars off? Free shipping? Free returns or exchanges? Test several incentives to see which ones deliver the most purchases at the lowest cost.

Reduce purchase uncertainty

Many shoppers need to be sure they’re buying the right thing or know they can exchange a product or get their money back if they bought the wrong thing.

Your abandoned-cart emails should reinforce all of the fail-safe measures you list on your website to be sure customers are satisfied and confident about what they’re buying. Highlight these reassurances in your messages with copy (not just little icons at the bottom of the message):

• Your return/exchange policy
• Customer-support contacts
• Buyer’s guides or FAQs
• Free shipping and returns if you offer them

Assure shoppers that you’ll help them buy the right product or fix mistakes. You’ll have happier customers (meaning fewer post-purchase call-center contacts and fewer returns).

Update email templates as needed

Create a template for each kind of abandonment email you send. Besides the email examples on this page, MailCharts gives subscribers plenty of resources for email inspiration for designing or updating an abandonment journey. Here are three:

• Our curated list of email examples pulled from active abandonment journeys
• A searchable database of journeys that show you all the emails in a specific brand’s abandonment series and the messaging schedule for multi-email campaigns
• A searchable database of brands and all the journey messages we have received from each brand over the years, including welcome, abandoned-cart, abandoned-browse and purchase journeys

After you create and test your templates, your rules will send emails according to the schedule you set up. But no automated message is “set it and forget it!”

Check all of your automations regularly to make sure they’re sending and delivering the results you expect. Are they hitting the inbox or going to spam? Are customers opening and clicking on them? What percentage convert from your email? How many of them use your incentive? What links do they click besides your “return to cart” link?

Templates make it easy for you to add to your messages, take out what’s not working and update to stay current with your brand messaging, imagery and other elements. You can also clone your template to create temporary versions, such as a holiday-season cart template with holiday imagery and special messaging like shipping deadlines and any holiday benefits.

Invest in your abandonment message copy

In the old days, technical problems and unreliable internet connections crashed computers and platforms. Today, it’s more likely that real life intervenes, they’re comparing prices among brands or they use their carts like wish lists.

Your abandonment email still carries the heavy burden of persuading your customers to come back and finish their transactions. Even shoppers with the best intentions of returning get distracted, forget or wander off to another brand.

That’s why your abandonment email needs compelling copy, not just a flashy incentive. It’s not enough to ask customers to complete their transactions. Your message copy must show them why they should do it.

In the section on writing a call to action, we mentioned that your CTA should go beyond the immediate action (completing checkout) and focus on what great things will happen when your customers buy. Your copy should do likewise. Will they be more stylish? Save time? Avoid a dreaded household chore? Make someone else happy? Talk about that, not just moving someone back to the cart.

All of the tactics we’ve listed here (and more in this blog post, How to create an abandoned cart sequence that converts) will help you create attention-getting and action-driving copy.

Create urgency

This is a classic conversion tactic. Nobody wants to miss out on a good deal or a must-have product. And your bottom line needs more customers to complete their transactions as quickly as possible.

You have many ways to invoke urgency. We’ve talked about FOMO (fear of missing out) and COMO (cost of missing out). You also can add an expiration date to an offer or a cart, send a low-inventory notice or warn about a price increase.

But use urgency sparingly. If you overdo it, or without making the pain of not acting too obvious, it can lose its ability to prod customers into action.

Include social proof to boost shopper confidence

Social proof is another time-tested conversion tactic and includes customer or third-party ratings, reviews or comments. It works because we are more likely to believe what people like ourselves say about a product. Plus, we rely on other people’s experiences if we don’t know enough about a product to tell a good one from one that’s going to fail.

Several of the email examples on this page weave in customer reviews and ratings with the email copy. You can make this work in several ways. The easiest is just to add copy to your message template and update it as needed. You also can add a dynamic content module that rotates copy at random from a database of reviews or pulls it automatically from a review site.

Besides customer content, use influencer comments or third-party services such as media reviews and ratings.

Pair your email strategy with SMS

SMS has proved its value as an ecommerce channel for awareness and engagement leading to conversions. So it’s time to take the next step and give customers the option to receive triggered messages via text along with or instead of in email.

The rules for creating effective abandonment messages in SMS are similar to email. If you’re just starting out, you can follow email best practices for structuring a multi-message series: timing, message tone, copy, call to action. As you learn more about your customers and how they interact with your text reminders, you can add or subtract components to fine-tune your series.

Test your emails and series to learn more about your customers

As a part of your abandoned cart email strategy, testing is essential because it links directly to revenue. Adopt a holistic approach in which you align all of your message components with a specific strategy, such as using urgency to persuade customers to convert, and then test it against a default (no specific strategy) or another strategic approach, such as cost savings.

Individual elements to test:

• Subject line
• CTA
• Message tone
• Images
• Copy
• Incentive (with or without, or different incentives)
• One email or a series
• Timing and cadence

Testing delivers short-term and long-term benefits. In the short run, it tells you what’s more likely to get you the results you want: opens, clicks, and conversion. But in the long run you can learn much more about your customers: what email elements provoke action, what incentives they respond to, and whether certain segments of customers ignore your cart reminders and which ones go back to check out.

Avoid triggering abandoned-cart reminders

The best abandoned-cart email is the one you don’t have to send. Your web team is in charge of taking friction out of the buying process, but your email team should be looped in. Knowing the big pain points can help you fine-tune your messages and make them more relevant and compelling.

These tips can help:

• Streamline the online shopping experience.
• Offer common payment options, including Buy Now Pay Later, Venmo/PayPal and other credit card alternatives.
• Ask for only the personal information you need to start the customer journey. You can always go back later using progressive profiling.
• Highlight shipping costs and other fees
• Link to a FAQ section in your footer and on your checkout page
• Add a chatbot that can elevate to a live agent
• Don’t force customers to create accounts or opt them in to promotion emails as a condition of buying. Instead, give them reasons why they should hand over their data.

Abandoned carts will always be a fact of ecommerce life. But an effective abandoned cart email strategy and messages based on the best abandoned cart email examples like those you’ll find in MailCharts can turn that negative into some big positives: more sales, more revenue and stronger relationships with your customers.