Increase Sales with Abandoned Cart Emails

You may be losing half of your potential revenue right now, if you’re like every other e-commerce business in Australia.

The culprit: abandoned carts.

Imagine a potential customer visiting your site for the first time. They see something they like and add it to their cart. But on the way to checkout, they change their mind or get distracted or simply lose interest, and they just leave your website altogether.

A closer look at abandoned carts

This kind of behaviour is not unique to the Australian experience; it’s a phenomenon that’s all too common in the world of online selling. Whereas in Australia, 57% of shoppers in 2018 said they abandoned their carts at least some of the time, globally, the average website encountered a whopping 69.57% abandonment rate.

Why do customers do this? About 60% of shoppers said they ditched their carts because they found shipping costs too high. Around half of the group revealed that they use the shopping cart feature to do comparison shopping (46%), while the rest dropped off because the product they wished to buy later turn out to be unavailable.

If you’ve lost customers to the dreaded abandoned cart, here are four steps you can take to recover and guide them back on the path to conversion.

How to recover abandoned carts in 4 steps

Step 1. Check your abandonment data.

Look at your analytics and see what’s behind the abandoned carts. How many of your customers in the last few months started a purchase but then dropped off? What items did they add to their cart and end up discarding? Did they get stuck while trying to navigate your site? Did they spend too much time in a particular step? At what point did they just decide to give up?

Knowing exactly where the friction points are is halfway to a possible solution.

Step 2. Segment your list of abandoners.

No two abandoned carts tell the same story. Was it a first-time visitor who was just having a play? A serial abandoner who keeps coming back but never ends up buying anything? Or might it have been one of your best customers who lost their way along your new checkout process? Whatever the profile of your almost-lost customers will dictate your next action.

Step 3. Now that you know who they are, reach out with a personalised message.

A new visitor may not know your brand all that well. Go ahead and introduce yourself, to start the relationship! If no sale ensues even after a couple of emails, try offering a once-off discount coupon to kick things off.

If it’s a case of repeat abandonment, it could be a symptom of a persistent problem! Maybe they want to pay through a facility that’s not yet offered on your site. Or perhaps, they needed help at odd hours, but you don’t offer 24/7 customer support.

For existing customers, all it might take is a quick email. Why not throw in an exclusive deal - just because!

However you decide to communicate, do it fast! Most would-be customers turn cold almost as soon as they leave your site and so, that first email is crucial. Wait no longer than one hour to remind them what they left in their cart, while your brand is still fresh on their minds.

Step 4. Don’t stop with one email. Keep trying!

To recover that cart and seal the deal you are about to lose, you can’t give up after just one email. If the first message was a reminder, your second email should create a sense of urgency. Prompt them to go back to your site and pick up where they left off. If that still doesn’t work, send a third or even a fourth email.

At some point, you might be tempted to offer some kind of special discount. A word of caution, however: A discount doesn’t have to be an automatic part of your follow-up sequence. The last thing you want to do is to condition your customers to expect an offer whenever they leave a cart behind. Test a few sequences and see what works best for your business.


If you’ve listed your classes and workshops on WeTeachMe, get excited because we just introduced a new feature to help you recover your abandoned carts! Now, you can automatically get those lost customers back on track to conversion and increase your bottom line - at no additional cost.

Results so far have been promising. Since we launched this feature back in April, we’ve recovered more than $100,000 in class bookings, and usually after only 1 or 2 emails. Read more about it here.

Got questions about abandoned cart emails? Our Customer Support Team(support@weteachme.com) are always happy to help.