Cart abandonement is probably one of the biggest challenges faced by eCommerces. In fact, carts are abandoned in over 88% of all online purchases, accounting to literally trillions of dollars in losses!

This happens to all eCommerce operations, and some just accept it as part of the business. But not you! With edrone, you can do something about it.

Here, you will learn how to set up your Recover Abandoned Carts scenario.

To begin, login to your Mission Control and go to ENGAGEMENTS > RECOVER ABANDONED CARTS.

The first page will be an overview of how the process works. Click on the NEXT: ADJUST button or select ADJUST from the progress bar at the top of the page.

In this section, you will choose your engagement parameters:

It's a good idea to think through and map out your message path based on your customer's decision-making process. For example, in the beauty industry, customers' decision-making time will be shorter than in the home appliance industry – after all, it takes us longer to think about buying a washing machine than hair shampoo, right?

If you know that your customers need a little more time to make a decision before buying, it's a good idea to remind them about abandoned products more than once. Try sending the first message after a few hours, the second after a few days, and maybe the third after a week or two!

But what if a customer abandons the shopping cart on your website, then comes back later, adds another item to the cart... and abandons it again? This action would start another instance of this scenario, which could mean this particular customer would get a large number of similar messages.

You want to avoid spamming your customers. That's why you have these options:

After setting up your parameters, click on the NEXT: LANGUAGE button or select LANGUAGE from the progress bar.

On the LANGUAGE section, you will see one the left side an overview of your customers (audience size, number of languages, and most popular language).

Based on this information, you can choose whether you want to send your messages in only one language (Single language), or more than one (Multi language). You can choose as many languages as you want.

Click on the NEXT: SENDER button, or choose SENDER from the progress bar.

Here, you will set up who is sending the SMS and email messages.

When sending emails, you will be able to determine Name, Email, and Reply-to Email. You can input new data, or choose from a predefined sender (for example, the same sender you have previously used in for other newsletters).

When sending SMS messages, the sender information will be pulled from your SMSAPI integration. Click here to learn more about the SMSAPI integration.

To continue, click on the NEXT: DESIGN button, or choose DESIGN on the progress bar.

Time to craft your messages! Depending on which settings you chose on the ADJUST section, you will see our Drag 'n' Drop Editor (for emails)...

...or a simple text box (for SMS).

You can choose between different languages, message types and communication channels on each tab on the top of the screen.

You might want to add discount coupons to your emails. To do that, use the *|COUPON|* merge tag when creating them. Click here to learn more about coupons.

However, this won't work for SMS messages. The only way to add a discount coupon to an SMS message is to write the coupon in the message. Bear in mind that it will be same coupon for each customer – effectively working the same way as a static coupon (see below).

You can choose between Static (same coupon for all customers) and Dynamic (each customer gets a unique coupon). We recommend using Dynamic coupons whenever possible.

Regardless of your choice, you will need to upload a CSV file with your coupons. If you need help with creating them, there are several free online coupon generators.

Once your files are ready, click on UPLOAD (CSV). Select which column contains the coupons, check the box if you wish to ignore the first line of your file (column titles, for example). If everything is OK, click on CONFIRM COLUMN. A green confirmation message should appear in the top right corner of your screen.

When you're ready, click on the NEXT: REVIEW button or select REVIEW from the progress bar.

In the REVIEW section, you can send a test message to see if everything is OK. Please note that, for SMS, your test messages will also use your SMSAPI points.

If everything is working the way you want, click on the RESUME button, and you're done! Enjoy your Cart Recovery automation.

To view your Cart Recovery performance, go to the REPORTS section on the progress bar. Here you will find the main metrics such as Engagement revenue, Sent, Opened, Clicked, Orders, Orders with Coupon, Unsubscribed, and CTR. Please note it is possible to filter the results by date, message, and channel type.

When you import a contact database into edrone, you can choose to add the "phone number" field into it. Click here to learn how to import a contact database.

You can also collect phone numbers using pop-ups with a "phone" field. Click here to learn how to set up your pop-ups.

If you choose to send only SMS messages, but there is no phone number provided, the SMS message will not be sent. In the same case, if you choose both Email and SMS messages, only an email message will be sent.

There could be two reasons for a paused scenario:

The subscription status is the same for SMS and email communication. If the customer is signed up for email communications, he or she will also be subscribed to SMS communications. To ensure that everything is in order, it is important to check that the customer has agreed to this type of communication. Likewise, when a customer unbsubscribes, this goes for both channels.

Each customer should only have one phone number assigned to one email address. In the event of an attempt to use the same phone number with another email address, the number will be assigned only to the new email address.

Yes, you can place any link in your SMS messages. However, since there's a limit to how many characters you can use in one SMS message, we suggest using a URL shortener such as bitly.

Need more help?

If you have any further questions about the Recover Abandoned Carts scenario, please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@edrone.me