Cart Abandonment Flow

Abandoned Cart = Missed Revenue

Does this sound familiar? You're happily shopping online, your cart full of great items, and then—life happens. Your kids start fighting, you lose track of time, or you're just about to hit "checkout," but you can't find your card or phone with the payment app.

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Or maybe you're shopping on your phone, and a WhatsApp message from your best friend pops up, pulling you away. Bottom line, things often get in the way of completing an online purchase.

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Lost Revenue

The good (and also bad) news? You’re certainly not the only one who experiences this. On average, about 70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts. That’s a huge percentage, and as an online shop owner, this probably raises your eyebrows. This means you're potentially missing out on a significant amount of revenue. Abandoned carts = lost money.

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The Golden Solution

Just because customers leave their carts doesn’t mean they've lost interest in your products. As you’ve read, interruptions happen all the time, and your customers might simply forget they were ready to check out. All you need to do is remind them that they still have items in their cart. This is where a cart abandonment flow comes in.

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What is a Cart Abandonment Flow?

A cart abandonment flow is a series of emails that a webshop sends to customers who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. These customers are already interested in your products—they’ve selected items and might even have started the checkout process. They just need a little nudge to finish the purchase.

That’s exactly the goal of a cart abandonment flow: to encourage customers to complete their checkout. This way, they get their desired items, and you receive your revenue.

Who Benefits from a Cart Abandonment Flow?

The great thing about a cart abandonment flow is that it works for a wide range of brands. At Polaris Growth, we’ve built these flows for many types of online stores—whether fashion, beauty, lifestyle, or health brands. Whatever items you sell, a cart abandonment flow can help turn more potential customers into paying customers. Curious to see the brands we’ve helped with these flows? Check out our clients here.

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Shopify vs. Klaviyo

The fact that a cart abandonment flow helps boost revenue across various brands is fantastic. But how do you actually set up such a flow? Let us walk you through it!
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First, you may already have a built-in cart abandonment flow running without even knowing it. If you’re using Shopify, for instance, there’s a good chance you already have a Shopify cart abandonment flow in place. However, the default Shopify cart abandonment flow is quite limited and doesn’t offer much in terms of personalization. When using the standard cart abandonment emails, they may look very similar to those of your competitors.
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To stand out from the competition, creating a personalized cart abandonment flow is a great place to start. A platform like Klaviyo offers far more options to customize your cart abandonment flow. You can tailor the content of your emails to suit your brand, adjust the number of emails in the series, and control the timing between them. By utilizing the customization options in Klaviyo, you can create a cart abandonment flow that aligns perfectly with your brand’s style and the preferences of your target audience.

If you choose to take advantage of Klaviyo's benefits, it's important to disable the standard Shopify cart abandonment emails to avoid sending duplicate messages to your customers.

Setting Up a Cart Abandonment Flow in Klaviyo

Before you can start setting up your cart abandonment flow, you first need to integrate your Klaviyo account with your e-commerce platform. If you haven’t done this yet, that’s the first step to complete. Once the integration is complete, several flows will automatically appear in your account, including the cart abandonment flow.

After the integration, you’ll have a standard Klaviyo cart abandonment flow ready in your account. The next important step is to understand which customers will enter this flow and why. In the default cart abandonment flow from Klaviyo, a customer enters the flow when they begin the checkout process. The trigger for this flow is “when someone started checkout.”

It’s essential to only send cart abandonment emails to customers who have not completed their purchase. You can ensure this by adding the flow filter “placed order zero times since starting this flow.” Here's how it looks:

Incentive vs. No Incentive

Once you have your triggers and flow filters correctly set, it’s time to focus on the content of your emails. Here, you face various options, including whether or not to offer an incentive. An incentive is something that motivates or encourages the customer to complete their purchase. It doesn’t always have to be a discount; you can also offer free shipping, a small gift (like a whitepaper, donation to a charity, gift wrapping, etc.).
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When deciding whether to include an incentive, carefully consider your customers, your brand, and what image you want to project. But also be realistic: do your customers need that extra push? If customers haven’t acted after receiving two cart abandonment emails, offering an incentive can be an effective strategy. You can test what works best for your audience by trying different incentives and reviewing which one delivers the highest conversion.
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If you determine that offering incentives doesn’t align with your brand and customers, you can skip it. For example, our client SOPHIA MAE, a high-end brand, wanted to “stay as far away from discounts as possible.” That’s perfectly fine— a cart abandonment flow can still perform well without incentives. The key is ensuring your emails have strong content. Well-written text, beautiful design, and showcasing the right product left in the customer’s cart are essential. For SOPHIA MAE, we created the following cart abandonment email without an incentive, and despite not offering any discounts or gifts, this flow still generates 14% of their revenue.

Flowchart Examples

Each brand and customer is unique, which is why there are various ways to structure a cart abandonment flow. For instance, you could include 4 emails in your cart abandonment flow.

Here’s an example structure:

1. Email 1: Send a reminder about the abandoned cart, highlighting the products left behind.
2. Email 2: Boost the customer’s motivation by sharing your brand's Unique Selling Points (USPs), such as quality, sustainability, or customer service.
3. Email 3: If the customer still hasn’t completed their purchase, offer an incentive in this email, such as a discount, free shipping, or a small gift.
4. Email 4: Remind the customer about the incentive you offered, reinforcing the value of completing the purchase.

By structuring your flow in this way, you can gently nudge your customers towards completing their purchase, progressively increasing the motivation to act.

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Do you want to communicate less with customers about their abandoned shopping cart? Then you can opt to set up a cart abandonment flow with just 1 or 2 emails. In these emails, you might not offer any incentive, but simply remind the customer of the products still in their cart. This is a subtle way to engage with customers without being too pushy.

Do you want to know more about the cart abandonment flow? Then check out this source.