No matter how good your sales funnel is, or how much you’ve optimized your checkout process – you’re losing revenue due to people leaving before they complete their purchase.
Every day, shoppers browse items in your store, add them to their cart, perhaps even start filling out their details and almost finalize the order…
But unfortunately, we’ve seen between 70% to 85% of those shoppers end up abandoning their cart.
In other words, without a way to handle these abandonments, you’re losing up to 85% of your sales!
That’s why your abandoned cart flow is one of the most important sales tools in your eCommerce store.
Watch the video TLDR here:
But, there’s more… it turns out that to salvage those potential customers, you need not just one abandoned cart flow, but actually two!
Most stores don’t know this and lose tons of sales, each and every month. And even if they have two abandoned cart flows, they’re usually not optimized and still losing a lot of sales, up to 50%. The goal of this article is to change that.
Let’s start by looking at a typical purchase funnel: your potential customer adds some items to their cart, then starts checkout, then completes the purchase.
The problem is, funnels are rarely perfect. A lot of things can happen between the shopper choosing items, starting their checkout, pulling out their credit card and actually pressing the button to complete the purchase.
If you want to maximize the purchases on your site and the number of order completions, you must have two types of abandonment flows, to cover both of these funnel steps until purchase completion:
– Abandoned Add To Cart Flow
– Abandoned Checkout Flow (default in Klaviyo)
This might sound confusing, especially since Klaviyo calls them both “abandoned carts”. This might explain why numerous eComm stores make the mistake of having only one of these flows. As a result, they miss out on a large number of sales.
The Abandoned Checkout Flow
Let’s start with the default, the Abandoned checkout flow – that’s what most people set up.
The flow gets triggered (activated) when a shopper has finished adding items to their cart and started the checkout process.
The buying intent here is obviously strong, yet the shopper hasn’t completed their purchase for a few hours, thus signaling to us that the purchase is in danger. So we’d want to make sure they finish what they’ve started.
Here’s an example of the typical numbers you see in abandoned checkout flows that are able to effectively salvage those purchases:
The first email is usually the strongest in terms of opens, clicks and purchases. In this example, 42% open rate, 16% click through rate, and 6.5% sales conversion rate. This has generated $1,000 over the course of that month.
However, you should not stop at one email! As you can see, the second email had an even higher conversion rate, 13.2% sales, and an additional $2,000 of revenue added that month. The third, fourth and fifth emails continued to convert more people into buyers.
Considering this adds up month over month, each and every email in this flow is extremely valuable. Over the course of the year, this single flow alone is worth around $50,000 of salvaged sales.
The Abandoned Cart Flow
The name of this flow might cause some confusion, but this isn’t the default flow you see when stores usually set up their initial flows.
This flow targets one step up the funnel, when a shopper did not abandon the checkout page, but rather the cart itself. The shopper added some products to their cart, then exited the site without moving forward to checkout.
This is still strong buying intent, but you’d be losing this sale has you relied only on the standard Abandoned Checkout flow.
Note, however, that we only send one of the flows, never both – it’s either the abandoned cart or the abandoned checkout, depending on what’s the last funnel step that the visitor had accomplished.
To get emails from this flow, the person must already be in your list, because they did not have a chance to input their email address on the checkout page. They are being identified by Klaviyo’s cookie instead.
Therefore, this flow works with people who might have never bought from you, but registered through the popup, and also with your past customers who came back to buy from you. In any case, they didn’t get as far as checking out, but you’d still want to recover their purchase.
How to create abandonment flows
Now that we’ve established why it’s so critical to your sales and bottom line, to have these two flows active and optimized – it’s time to roll our sleeves and make it happen.
This requires a whole lesson in itself and for that, we’ve created a step-by-step masterclass. In this masterclass we cover things like:
- How many emails in each flow
- If and when to provide a discount
- What to include or change in your flows to maximize sales
- Common mistakes and how to avoid them
- And more...
This masterclass is still available for free! Just register here to gain instant access.
Hope you found this post and our full masterclass useful.
If your eCommerce brand is scaling or ready to scale, click the button below to book a call with us – we’d love to help you seriously grow with email marketing!
