Using abandoned cart

Monitor abandoned carts and start sending abandoned cart emails.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

If you're not using Magento or Shopify, which come with their own version of the feature, then you can use Dotdigital's abandoned cart module to help your track and recover potential revenue.


Magento, Magento 2, or Shopify users

Abandoned cart for Magento, Magento 2, and Shopify is configured and implemented differently. The information below is not valid. To learn more about abandoned cart for Magento and Shopify, check out the Dotdigital for Magento 2/Magento or Shopify connector articles.

Our abandoned cart module combines some of the platform's most powerful features — Web Behavior Tracking, the program builder, and Liquid personalisation — to help you convert your uncompleted orders and increase your sales.


Abandoned cart emails

You can send abandoned cart emails to customers and guests to remind them of any items left in a shopping cart without completing the purchase. The abandoned cart email is triggered to send a set amount of time after the customer abandoned the cart.

There could be lots of reasons why your customer didn't complete their purchase, such as:

  • Technical problems — your website crashed or timed out.

  • Running out of time to complete the checkout process, or getting distracted.

  • Hesitation at the price of the cart's contents.

When you send an abandoned cart email, it re-engages the customer. It can work as both a reminder and an incentive, especially if it includes a coupon code to encourage the completion of the purchase.


Benefits of abandoned cart emails

Research by marketing industry experts suggests that around 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts. That means roughly one in three carts is checked out the first time — that's a lot of potential sales to lose.

The research also suggests that sending abandoned cart emails sees average open rates go up by around 40%, whilst they increase purchase rates by almost 2000% when compared to that associated with standard promotion and marketing emails.

The consensus is that they're genuinely a force to be reckoned with in terms of sales conversion strategy.


The abandoned carts module

Our abandoned cart module makes innovative use of a combination of the platform's features:

  • Identifying a customer
    Web Behavior Tracking is an advanced module with the ability to collect identifiable contact data from browsing behaviour on your website. This can detect a customer and their cart.

  • Automating an abandoned cart campaign send
    The program builder is used to create a specially built program that executes if there is no purchase after 20 minutes of a cart being abandoned. It sends an automated campaign to the customer associated with the abandoned cart.

  • Personalising the campaign content
    The campaign itself uses Liquid scripting to create highly targeted and relevant content. This enables the campaign to include the contact's name, relevant other details and, most importantly, their abandoned cart's contents.


Send abandoned cart emails to guests

You can set up abandoned cart emails for guests in your web behavior tracking profile. Visitors that aren't recognised by Dotdigital are created as a contact, enrolled in the automation program, and sent abandoned cart emails.

When you use abandoned cart emails for guests:

  • It's your responsibility to make sure you clearly display the correct consent text on your site.

  • We strongly recommend leaving your Regulatory settings on Enforce double opt-in for signups from signup forms and some API methods only (default). If you have to enforce double opt-in for all signups, then we don't recommend using abandoned cart emails for guests as the process won't work correctly.


Set up abandoned carts

We provide a purchasable and mandatory onboarding service, whilst the functionality itself comes for free. You just need to build your own campaigns.

Our Client Services team work with you to ensure that your program is worked out and set up in the best way possible for you.


Get the abandoned carts module

Contact us to purchase the abandoned carts module.

To contact us, go to Contact support.

The abandoned carts module works with Web Behavior Tracking, this means:

  • If you already have Web Behavior Tracking, you only need to purchase onboarding for abandoned carts.

  • If you don't have Web Behavior Tracking, you need to purchase Web Behavior Tracking and onboarding.

  • Once you're onboarded, you get Liquid personalisation for free, where there is normally a monthly charge.

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