How to set up an abandoned cart automation

Overview

Recover potentially lost sales with Sendlane's abandoned cart automation trigger!

Read on to learn about the triggers commonly associated with abandoned cart automations, and guidance on setting up your abandoned cart flow.

Background on triggers

Customers generally see much higher revenue from abandoned checkout automations than abandoned cart automations. We recommend setting up an abandoned checkout automation in addition to an abandoned cart automation. 

Let’s investigate why, starting with the following table describing each trigger associated with “abandoned cart” automations:

The abandoned checkout trigger doesn’t fire until the contact starts the checkout process on your website (and the amount of time you select for “consider abandoned after” has passed), which means it has the context of your contact’s entire cart. This data is sent to Sendlane from Shopify and does not require the contact to be tracked via Beacon.

Abandoned product email blocks in automations using the abandoned checkout trigger will populate with information on all the products in a contact’s cart when they begin checkout, meaning contacts will be reminded of each item in their cart when they receive the email.

Unlike the abandoned checkout trigger, the added to cart and abandoned cart triggers do not capture or store data for the other products your contact may have added to their cart.

These two triggers use site tracking data from Beacon to tell Sendlane that an identified contact clicked "add to cart." This means that when you add an abandoned product block to an email, only the first product the contact added to their cart will appear in the email they receive.

Step One: Create an abandoned cart automation

Start your abandoned cart automation setup by creating an automation and selecting the Abandoned Cart trigger:

1. Click the Automations icon

2. Click New Automation

3. Click Start From Scratch

4. Enter a name for your abandoned cart automation

5. Click Start

6. Click Add Trigger

7. In the lefthand sidebar, click the Shopify or BigCommerce tab

8. Click Abandoned Cart

Step Two: Abandoned cart trigger settings

When you select the Abandoned Cart trigger, you’ll see its settings in the left-hand sidebar.

These settings are the criteria contacts need to meet to be sent through the automation.

• Store - Select the store you’re creating an abandoned cart automation for

• Limit Per Contact - Not in the last, Once per day, or Do not trigger when already in automation are recommended for abandoned cart automations.

• Consider abandoned after - Select a time period of at least one hour. The 5 minute and 30 minute settings are intended for internal testing and may inundate contacts with messages if used in a live automation.

You can specify individual products that should trigger the automation by searching for and selecting products in the For Products section of the trigger settings. If you do not select any specific products, all products will trigger the automation.

Shopify, BigCommerce, and custom store users can apply a product tag of sl-exclude to any product that should not trigger the automation. This process removes the product from Sendlane entirely. Read more about excluding products here.

Step Three: Prevent contacts from being sent through multiple pre-purchase automations

The first node of your abandoned cart automation should be an update automation node that ends your abandoned browse automation when contacts trigger the abandoned cart automation. Since adding items to the cart is further in the purchasing process than browsing, you don’t want contacts to receive both browse and cart abandon content.

To add an update automation node:

1. Click the + icon below the Abandoned Cart trigger

2. Click Update Automation

3. Click End Other

4. From the Automation dropdown, select your browse abandon automation

5. Select a time period wait before allowing contacts to re-enter the browse abandon automation once they've completed the abandoned cart automation

6. Click Done

Step Four: Filter out contacts who purchased after triggering the automation

Use end automation settings to pull contacts out of the abandoned checkout automation if they make a purchase.

End automation settings are accessed through the trigger and appear below the trigger's settings.

These settings will check for orders placed by the contact at any point after they've triggered the automation:

• Condition - Select Shopify or BigCommerce

• Store - Select the store you’re creating an abandoned cart automation for

• Resource - Order

• Order Status - Unfulfilled

• Filter - Order Date

• Operator - In the last

• Relative date range - The total length of time of your automation, determined by wait nodes (for example, if your automation includes an email node, a three day wait node, and another email node, your automation is three days long)

Learn more about end automation settings in 📄 How to configure end automation settings.

Step Five: Abandoned cart automation content

Now that the logic for your abandoned cart automation is in place, you can add nodes for emails and SMS messages. For more information on optimizing your email and SMS nodes, check out our guide to automation nodes.

We highly recommend placing a wait node between messages to prevent contacts from receiving too many messages too quickly.

Step Six: Test and activate your automation

You can test your abandoned cart automation with an email address that is opted in to your account. To test your abandoned cart automation:

1. In your trigger's settings, set the "consider abandoned after" setting to 5 minutes

2. Activate your email nodes

3. Activate your automation

4. Log out of your Shopify store in all tabs

5. Visit your website

6. Add a product to your cart

7. Wait at least five minutes

8. Check your inbox to ensure you received the first email in your abandoned cart automation

If you successfully completed your automation, you're all set! If you didn't receive messages you expected to receive, or otherwise didn't experience your automation the way you want your contacts to, deactivate your automation while you troubleshoot.

Troubleshooting