There are 3 ways to set up abandonment follow up:
- Automatic emails sent after a certain amount of time has elapsed
- High value notification alerts to your sales team to follow up in person those orders over a certain value
- Visual status of sales team follow ups recorded against each order with reason codes for abandonment*
*Requires a licence upgrade, contact sales.
1. Abandoned Carts Email Follow up
NB You must have an email task set up for abandoned cart emails to be sent!
This email task allows you to follow up abandoned carts after a set number of hours or days.
| Remember, a cart is classed as abandoned by the system after it has been idle or incomplete after the number of hours set in Site Settings > Ecommerce > Abandoned Carts which by default is 4 hours. |
The time you set in email tasks will then be in addition to that time.
You can also set up multiple tasks to chase it more than once if required. For example, the first task reminds them after 1 hour, the 2nd task could offer a discount / coupon to tempt them back after 1 day.
- Go to Email Tasks
- Add a task and select the event: Abandoned Order
- Enter subject and select the page: Email Abandoned Cart (this is a pre-existing system page you can edit) or select to use a template
- Select which groups this will go out to ('ungrouped' = retail customers)
- Enter the time delay in days / hours as required
- Tick "Replace" (this stops the emails going out if a new order is received before they are sent)
- Test it works by adding some products to your cart and ensuring the email turns up after the specified time.
You can change the Email Abandoned Cart page layout in Page Manager, simply select System Page > Email abandoned Cart and make the required changes; or via the template if that has been selected.
The following tags can be used in the page content to pull in specific data so it is personalised to the user.
Available Tags
{{ directory }} | This is your domain URL |
{{ user.first_name }} | This pulls in just the first name of the user |
{{ user.name }} | This pulls in the full name of the user |
{{ order.id }} | This pulls in the order reference which was generated for this cart |
{{ order.date }} | This pulls in the date when the user started to shop on the site on this occasion |
{{ order.re_url }} | This provides a url link which the user can click to re-instate the order on your website. You will need to ensure this is in the content. |
{{ order.details }} | This pulls in the product lines the user had previously added to the cart |
| {{ product.image }} | Product image |
| {{ product.name }} | Product name |
| {{ product.price }} | Product price |
| {{ product.special_price }} | Product special price |
| {{ product.link }} | Product link |
Adding Additional Abandonment Followups
Further to the default abandoned cart followup email, you can now set additional followups such as a day or week later as extra reminders to bring in sales.
Add this as an Email Task with the event of Abandoned Order Followup and set up the rest of the details and content as above. It's simplest if you copy the system page content to a new page, save it and then select this new page in the Page Content field; or set up a different template if using this.
2. High value abandoned cart notifications for admins (sales teams)
Receive an email alert when there is a high value cart that has been abandoned so you can contact the buyer to try to close the sale.
To enable this go to:
Site Settings > Ecommerce > Abandoned Carts > "Alert Admins when Abandoned Cart Value is over" [enter value]
3. Sales team follow ups recorded against each order
This supports proactive, outbound telephone/email follow ups from sales agents to customers who have abandoned.
It is easy to see the status of follow ups, record reasons for abandonment and comments.
Abandonment reasons can also be populated from abandonment survey forms telling sales agents why customers exited checkout so that their contact with the customer is tailored to the reason.
To set this up you first require a licence upgrade, and then:
- Go to > Abandoned Cart Followup Settings
- Setup the abandonment reason codes
These can also be collected through Form Builder survey forms which are linked to from abandoned email tasks.
In this case, make sure the field used to collect the abandonment reason has the following input type:
- Setup the statuses to indicate the sales action that has taken place and the outcome.
The colours you select will be used for the telephone icon displayed in Order Manager so you can quickly see the status of an abandoned follow up.
Example statuses below so you can tell what progress the sales team are making.
Using the followup system
In Order Manager go into the Abandoned tab and you can then view all abandoned orders and see their followup status.
Illustration: Extract from Order Manager showing abandonment follow up statuses
For rapid actioning, clicking on the phone icon then pops a window to allow you to quickly change the status / reasons and add comments:
Alternatively, add/view the details and comments when looking at an order in Order Manager to get extra information. This also shows what purchases have been made on other orders, which is helpful to see if they abandoned one order but started a new one shortly afterwards to make the purchase (in which case you don't need to follow them up necessarily)
And any comments added during followup are captured in the comments section of the order:
Looking up orders by followup status
Find orders by their abandonment followup state using the filter available in Quick Search in Order Manager