Cart abandonment is a significant issue for online store owners. According to the Baymard Institute, customers abandon 69.99% of their online shopping carts.
That’s why it’s crucial to identify the primary reasons customers abandon their carts in your WooCommerce store, then design an abandoned cart recovery plan to recover these lost sales.
However, users can abandon their carts for many reasons, including additional shipping fees, a lengthy checkout process, or even taxes. The good news is that abandoned cart recovery emails can help you fight cart abandonment no matter the reason.
This guide will walk you through how to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails using a free plugin. We’ll then share some other options that are worth looking at.
But first, let’s look at why abandoned cart emails are important.
Why Are Abandoned Cart Emails Important?
As mentioned, customers abandon almost 70% of their online shopping carts. That’s a huge number, representing significant revenue loss for any online retailer.
But the good news is that around 75% of such customers usually intend to return and complete their purchase. And this presents a huge opportunity to offer them gentle reminders while they’re still in the buying mindset.
Sending a series of automated abandoned cart emails capitalizes on this interest and recovers those would-be-lost sales. In fact, abandoned cart emails have an 8.38% conversion rate and open rates of over 49%. It also goes without saying that the cart system you use on the website you’ve built must be capable of keeping the items in the cart for each user that abandons it so they can easily go back to it at a later time.
How to Send WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails
Before sending your abandoned cart (and other) emails, you need to install an email marketing plugin. A plugin like Sender can help you create abandoned cart email conditions, then configure the email to be sent automatically once a customer triggers those conditions.
On top of creating abandoned cart emails, here are some key features for Sender:
- Drag-and-drop design-builder to help you create beautiful emails;
- Beautiful popups and forms to attract leads;
- Library of templates to help you create newsletters and popups quickly;
- SMS marketing automation, offering your customers an omnichannel experience;
- Detailed reports and analytics to help you improve your campaign performance.
Sender has four-tier pricing:
- Free Forever: $0 per month;
- Standard: $8 per month;
- Professional: $29 per month;
- Enterprise: Custom Price.
With that in mind, let’s look at how to set up the plugin and recover abandoned carts:
Step 1: Install and Activate the Plugin
Download the plugin from WordPress, then install and activate the plugin. Once you’ve activated Sender’s plugin for WooCommerce, it’ll appear on the left side of your WordPress Dashboard.
Next, log in to your account at app.sender.net and copy the API token.
Navigate to the Sender.net section on your WordPress Dashboard to open the integration settings, then paste the token to activate the Sender.net email marketing plugin.
Note: Ensure you’ve installed the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website before you begin the installation process.
Step 2: Enable the ‘Enable Tracking’ Feature
Enabling the “Enable tracking” feature allows you to use the product purchased and abandoned cart automation triggers. Once the feature is active, the triggers will work automatically when a customer meets the conditions.
The feature also helps you transfer your customers’ emails to the Sender platform. As a result, you’ll be able to:
- Save Customers who made a purchase and automatically add them to the selected subscriber list.
- Save New registrations and add them to the selected subscriber list.
Other WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery Plugins To Create Abandoned Cart Emails
Apart from Sender, there are other plugins you can use to recover abandoned carts in your WooCommerce store.
Here are five options to consider:
1. WooCommerce Abandoned Cart — Lite
You can use the Abandoned Cart Lite plugin for WooCommerce if you’ve just launched your WooCommerce store and aren’t ready to invest in a premium cart abandonment plugin.
The free plugin tracks abandoned shopping carts and sends messages to users about their abandoned products. You only need to define how you want to contact and follow up with your customers, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
Key Features:
- Send a reminder email within a few minutes after a user abandons their cart;
- Abandoned cart templates for quick setup;
- Create templates using a text editor;
- Reports on how many times a product was recovered or abandoned.
Pricing: Free
2. Retainful
Retainful is one of the best abandoned cart recovery plugins for WooCommerce to automate your emails, boost sales, and grow your online store.
The plugin helps you generate coupons you can send to customers who abandon their carts to encourage them to return to your store and complete their purchases.
Key Features:
- Drag-and-drop email editor and email campaign builder to design and customize emails easily;
- Add-to-cart popup to help you capture email address on the checkout page;
- Exit-intent popup to stop browse abandonment with an offer;
- Dynamically-generated coupon codes in your cart recovery emails to increase conversion rates.
Pricing:
- Free: $0 per month
- Starter: $19 per month
- Growth: $49 per month
- Professional: $199 per month
3. YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is an effective plugin that helps ecommerce stores recover their abandoned shopping carts.
The abandoned cart recovery plugin lets you specify user roles and define triggers based on the number of items, total cart value, or the user’s IP address.
The WooCommerce abandoned cart plugin has two default emails: update orders and recover abandoned carts. It also helps you attach discount coupons to incentivize users to complete their purchases.
Key Features:
- Choose whether to recover all users’ carts and orders or only those assigned a specific role;
- Select the time interval after which the cart recovery email will be sent automatically;
- Use the available templates to send emails and recover carts with a single click;
- Track the recovered carts and orders from an integrated dashboard;
- Add a discount coupon to emails to encourage customers to complete their purchases.
Pricing:
$79.99 per year for the first year, then the subscription renews at the regular price of $94.99 per year.
Especially, this plugin can combine with one of the most powerful email customizer plugins YayMail to customize stunning email templates to optimize your abandoned cart recovery strategies. Refer to this addon here: YayMail Addon for YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
4. ELEX WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery
ELEX WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery is an intuitive abandoned cart plugin for WooCommerce stores. It lets you configure and send emails automatically to users who abandon their carts by defining triggers based on:
- Total cart value;
- User roles;
- Number of products in the shopping cart;
- Product ID.
It also provides detailed reports to help you understand the cart abandonment rate and identify which items customers leave more often. You can then set up triggered emails and improve the elements and content to increase the chances of recovering lost sales.
Key Features:
- Get data on how many carts have been abandoned and recovered;
- Set up specific triggers and rules to send cart abandonment emails automatically;
- Send cart abandonment emails with discount coupons to remind customers to complete their purchases;
- Allow guest users to recover their abandoned carts without creating an account;
- Get notified every time a user retrieves their cart;
- Use the default email template or design unique templates with a coupon code to recover abandoned carts.
Pricing:
The cost is usually $79 per year.
5. ShopMagic Abandoned Carts
ShopMagic Abandoned Carts is an excellent WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery plugin that helps you streamline your workflows and customize the emails you send to customers.
The abandoned cart recovery plugin provides a text editor to help you seamlessly and quickly adjust and test emails such as:
- After-purchase cross-sell or upsell emails;
- Transactional emails;
- Customer discount offers;
- Follow-up emails;
- Review requests.
It also offers free abandoned cart email templates you can use with your cart recovery automation, email marketing campaigns, and newsletters.
Key Features:
- Abandoned cart timeout to set a time limit when shopping carts can be considered abandoned;
- Use pre-submit data to capture and save customers’ emails when they enter them in WooCommerce checkout;
- Exit-intent popup for collecting emails of users who want to leave your online store without adding an item to their cart;
- Filter carts by product categories, item count, or even created date;
- Send personalized emails to users to get higher conversions.
Pricing:
- Personal: $69 per year (supports one website)
- Professional: $99 per year (supports 25 websites)
- Lifetime: $299 (Lifetime support for one website)
Conclusion: How To Create Abandoned Cart Email in WooCommerce
Shopping cart abandonment is a significant issue for WooCommerce store owners. However, the plugins mentioned above can help you send effective abandoned cart emails, reduce cart abandonment rates, and recover lost sales.
