Free Cart Abandon Email Template

If you’re in online retail or ecommerce, then there’s a significant opportunity to regain lost dollars by reaching out to shoppers who abandon their carts. But cart abandon emails can be tricky to build and include the right message and even more challenging to be persuasive without being too pushy.

A subtle reminder for your shoppers to complete their purchase can go a long way. So, we’ve built the cart abandon email template as an easy way to create a tried and tested follow up email strategy without too much heavy lifting on your part.

And contrary to common assumption, cart abandon emails are useful for folks outside of retail. Even B2B companies can have a cart and therefore face issues with abandoned carts. No matter what you sell, if there’s a chance you could lose out on purchases because of cart abandonment, snag this email template!

Rather than just setting up a single automated email to your shoppers, we recommend a cart abandonment email “sandwich” strategy.

This process involves a 3-tier approach, where you send a cascade of emails that build upon each other in urgency for the shopper to return to cart.

Email 1: within a few hours

Send a subtle “reminder” email that invites users back to their cart. Here we recommend being cool and casual. Something along the lines of: “you left some items behind in your cart!”

Email 2: 24 hours later

The second email can be a little more of a sell. Use messaging such as “don’t forget your items” or “you still have time to complete your purchase for extra savings!”

Email 3: 48 hours later

The third follow up cart abandon email is a direct invitation: “complete your purchase now!”. This could be an opportunity to offer a discount or promo code to get the audience over the line. “Still thinking about it? Here’s a promo code to make it easier!”

Cart abandonment emails are an excellent opportunity to engage with your customers based upon what they’re shopping for. If you sell home goods, for example, and someone leaves cleaning supplies in their shopping cart, maybe that could trigger the email that says “mop up these clean deals before they’re gone!”. The more curtailed to the shopper the better.

Special offers are frequently used to bring shoppers back to their cart and can be done effectively to finalize a purchase. We typically recommend waiting until the later follow up emails to add a promo code to see if subtle messaging is convincing enough to move people to purchase. But as all shoppers and products vary, it’s also a great opportunity to experiment to see where promo codes offer their biggest bang for their buck in your cart abandon email program.

We always recommend using an email template to streamline your process for creating all your cart abandon emails. The great news for you? All of our email templates can be reused so that you can save time. Once you create a cart abandon email template that works best for you, duplicate your template and adjust messaging and design to suit the given situation. You can reuse the template based on the timing of the email follow up so you have a go-to template for each stage. Doing this makes it easier to reach out and create that human connection, without the high lift of creating a brand new email each time. (Can you tell we really love email templates?)

In a word: yes. If we had a cart that you could abandon, rest assured we’d use this email template! Ready to seamlessly incorporate well-tested cart abandon email templates into your email workflows? Get started here.