Introducing New Features for the EDD MailChimp Abandoned Cart Plugin

Recovering abandoned carts can be quite lucrative for eCommerce businesses. Such customers normally are very close in their decision to complete the purchasing of a product. But this guarantees that those customers were interested and are in need of the product, which places them as prospective customers that can be recalled.

We now wish that more people would actually complete a purchase instead of leaving their carts behind. Is there anything we can do about eCommerce abandoned carts? Here we will introduce you to the EDD MailChimp Abandoned Cart Plugin for WordPress and its new features.

The EDD MailChimp Abandoned Cart Plugin

This plugin was created, specially designed to recover abandoned carts for Easy Digital Downloads(EDD) stores using MailChimp. As you already know, EDD is one of the leading software platforms to sell digital products online as well as MailChimp is the leading email marketing services provider.

EDD itself comes as a WordPress plugin and therefore, benefits from access to all other plugins from the WordPress ecosystem. With our EDD Mailchimp Abandoned Cart WordPress Plugin, you can now make use of Mailchimp‘s Abandoned Cart Automation process, to follow up on your abandoned carts with a Mailchimp Email or Email series. MailChimp Digital Download marketing solutions can therefore ideally support your EDD store.

Also, this plugin is especially useful for those who prefer using Mailchimp as an email marketing provider and who do not like to work with a different provider for recovering abandoned carts.

Plugin Key Features

The following are the key features of this WordPress Abandoned Cart plugin:

  • Easily and effectively recovers your abandoned carts
  • Systematically follow up on your abandoned carts
  • Uses MailChimp email automation
  • Automatically issues unique and time-limited discount codes
  • See statistics of your Abandoned Carts, Recovered Orders and relevant Key Performance Indicators

Here are some other highlights you should take note of:

  • EDD Plugin only sends emails to abandoned carts where cart value >0
  • Create automatic and unique time-limited discount codes per prospective customer in EDD. You can use it in your Mailchimp Digital Download Email campaign.
  • Clean up Function to Delete Expired Discount Codes

What’s New?

Below are the newest features of our plugin (Version 2.0.2.1) :

Performance Statistics of your Abandoned Cart Process

You can now check and track performance statistics and key performance indicators on your abandoned cart process. The following are the statistics you can see:

  • Abandoned carts: The recorded number of abandoned shopping carts
  • Discount codes issued: The number of discount codes issued by the abandoned cart process
  • Lost Sales: The sales value included in all abandoned shopping carts
  • Lost Order value: The average sales order value per abandoned shopping cart.
  • Recovered carts: The number of recovered shopping carts leading to a purchase (tracked by the use of the discount code)
  • Recovered Sales: The sales value of all recovered abandoned carts as tracked by the use of the discount code.
  • Recovered Order Value: The average order value per recovered order as tracked by the use of the discount codes
  • Recovery rate: Recovered carts / Abandoned carts
  • Share of Recovered Sales: Recovered Sales / Lost Sales
  • Recovery Value per Lost Order: Recovered Sales / Abandoned Carts

These statistics can give you a clearer picture of the status of your abandoned cart process and how abandoned carts recovery is working for you.

Detailed list of all abandoned carts, and their contents, available inside WordPress

Another improved feature of this plugin is that now you can see a full list of all your abandoned carts, along with the necessary details about each entry.

Also, you can now have a look at the abandoned cart contents to see what products your customers added on their abandoned carts.

Button to ensure your abandoned carts are properly synced to Mailchimp

Previously, your abandoned carts are automatically synced into your Mailchimp group. Now, this new feature allows you to force sync your abandoned carts in one click by pushing the “Sync with Mailchimp” button. You can either wait for it to get synced or force sync it with just one click.

Option to enable/disable Abandoned Cart workflow

Site admins have now the option to whether turn ON or OFF the abandoned cart workflow without even uninstalling the plugin. You can see this on the plugin settings page.

Spam Protection

A solution to protect your abandoned cart process away from bots and spammers is this new cool feature of this plugin. The way how this work is that your abandoned cart process will stop if the set limit of pending carts is reached. Also, take note that the pending carts are supposed to go away automatically as this is synced to MailChimp.

This protects you against somebody spamming the system by adding an unrealistic number of abandoned carts and avoids that emails are sent out by Mailchimp to potentially spammy addresses and keeps your abandoned cart emailing list clean.

Clean Abandoned Carts List in One Click

Be able to clean your Abandoned Carts List in a single click by pushing the “Clear List” button.

On the settings page, you can set a Clear List Action (Unsubscribe or Delete) when pressing the Clear List Button. When a purchase is completed, you can also choose in the settings whether to delete/unsubscribed the customer from your list or not, by changing the Order Completion settings to Yes/No.

Improved feature to cleanup issued discount codes

You can now also delete all inactive, expired or used discount codes with the same Prefix as stored in the discount codes on your system database. This saves you time in manually deleting these codes and saving more space for incoming codes to be generated by your abandoned cart process. 

To do this, go to the plugin settings page, discount settings and click on the “Delete Discount Codes” button.

Option to trigger abandoned cart emails for existing customers as well or not

Now, the plugin has the capacity to cover all customers, new or existing ones, in sending out the abandoned cart recovery emails. This is important if you have existing registered customers and also wanted them to receive the recovery emails as well.

Create your own merge field for the Discount Code

Site admins have now the capacity to create your own merge field for the Discount Codes is you haven’t created one yet. You can do this directly on the plugin settings page, by clicking on the hyperlinked text which will take you to another page to create your own merge field.

Improved Navigation

Lastly, the new plugin update gives us an improve navigation for us to easily locate the list of your abandoned carts, the plugin settings and link to Mailchimp to manage your stores. The new plugin menu can be seen right on the left bar of your WordPress dashboard.

Conclusion: Effectively recover your abandoned carts using the EDD MailChimp Abandoned Cart Plugin

eCommerce stores selling digital products which are using Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) can use EDD Mailchimp Abandoned Cart WordPress Plugin to recover abandoned carts and follow up efficiently, through targeted email series.

Due to many users use Mailchimp for their Email campaigns, we concluded what the simplest abandoned cart solution will be. It is if you can link your EDD website with your MailChimp account. As a result, all email addresses are collected and stored in MailChimp. Hence, significantly saving you the hassle of having to work with different email service providers as you send your email campaigns.

We are all aware that cart abandonment is an issue that can never be fully eliminated. But with some effort, along with the right abandoned cart plugin, we can at least recover a portion of our abandoned carts and to eventually turn those into actual orders.

Best Abandoned Cart Email Strategies for EDD

Are you spending loads of your hard-earned money on driving more visitors to your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress website using various eCommerce paid tools and or via Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, yet not seeing the revenue follow? For most eCommerce businesses, one of the biggest leaks in their sales and marketing funnel is shoppers who add products to their cart, but then abandon them at checkout.

Cart abandonment is a rising challenge for all retail marketers as well as the most common and most inevitable scenario. SalesCycle reported that approximately 75.6% of carts were abandoned in 2018 and unfortunately, this is a number that has slowly been increasing in recent years. That means that only 1 in every 4 customers actually finishes their purchase.

Source: https://blog.salecycle.com/stats/infographic-the-remarketing-report-q2-2016/

This is why marketers usually turn towards emails to help recover these abandoned sales. Good Abandoned Cart Emails are so important for eCommerce marketers. With a great eCommerce marketing automation strategy (including the timing and message), they can set it up and have it recover sales on autopilot. This type of eCommerce email is one of the most effective, revenue-generating emails that you can send to prospects.

But if you’ve never set up a cart abandonment email, or you’re not satisfied with your current results, you’re probably wondering what makes great cart abandonment emails. That’s what we’ll be looking at today.

What are Abandoned Cart Emails?

Abandoned Cart Emails are messages sent automatically whenever a customer comes to your webstore and adds an item to their cart, but doesn’t buy the item. These emails can also be triggered when the customer abandons the checkout flow.

In other words, this is a follow-up email sent to someone who has added items to their cart and gotten through a portion of the checkout and then left the site without purchasing. Abandoned cart emails work to remind customers of items they left in cart – enticing them to come back to purchase what they are already so close to buying.

Consider these abandoned cart statistics from Moosend:

Source: Moosend

There are different types of emails you can send to your customers. But with numbers like that, cart reminder emails give some of the highest returns on your investment.

Now it may not be possible to persuade all cart-abandoners to go through checkout and triple your sales. Some customers may have never had the intention to purchase in the first place. But it’s worth putting in the effort to resolve as many lingering hesitations as you can because a significant percentage of them are persuadable.

Why do customers abandon their carts?

We can’t eliminate shopping cart abandonment. But, we can try to understand its root cause so as we can properly plan ahead and deal with it. Here’s a survey Baymard Institute has conducted containing reasons for Abandonment during Checkout.

Source: Baymard survey of 2,854 consumers, 2019

Now we can rehab our webstores by taking into consideration the above cart abandonment reasons. Work your way on making your checkout process smooth and hassle-free. But again, shopping cart abandonment cannot be totally eliminated. Other reasons why they abandon their carts are: visitors are just browsing, found a better price elsewhere and maybe suddenly have decided against buying it.

Abandoned Cart Email Best Practices

Even though we can’t eliminate cart abandonment entirely, we can minimize the likelihood of it happening – by using abandoned cart emails. Good abandoned cart email is one of the most effective, revenue-generating emails that you can send to prospects.

And in this article, we will show you some outstanding cart recovery email strategies that will help you lower your cart abandonment rate and increase your bottom line.

In order to be successful, there are some important things you need to include in your cart abandonment emails. They are enumerated as follows:

  1. High converting subject lines
  2. Include abandoned product
  3. Keep email simple and personal
  4. Offer Discount Codes/Coupons
  5. Mail Frequency and Creating Urgency
  6. Add CTA buttons and Contact Details
  7. Trust and Credibility through Product Reviews / Social Proofs
  8. Display your other products

Let’s explain each of the above Abandoned Cart Email Best Practices.

Unique and Effective Subject Line

If you like the subject line, and if you trust the sender, you will open it. If not, the chances are high that you won’t open it. In fact, 35% of email recipients open an email based on subject line alone.

This means that a good and effective subject line for abandoned cart email can grab the attention of the customer and increase open and click rates.

When recipients read your subject lines, they should be reminded of what they left behind. A well-written subject line for abandoned cart email can go a long way toward piquing the interest of reluctant customers.

Include abandoned product

Showcase exactly what was left behind in your customer’s cart. Reminding the product what they have missed out is very important. Make sure to add the product along with the product image, description, benefits, and features, etc. It’s not enough anymore to just include the name of the product. The image is a must along with the product details.

People might not remember what products had them clicking the “add to cart” button. After all, they may not really remember what product they abandoned if they had a particularly busy looking and scrolling through different webstores.

Keep email simple and personal

Besides attractive images and contrasting CTA buttons, it’s important that you have a convincing and personalized text and content that’s ultimately pushing towards conversions. With 94% of businesses saying how critical email personalization is to their success, basic personalization such as including the customer’s first name in the salutation or subject line is proven effective and very important.

An excellent subject line may contain some important points such as:

  • Customize the message by including their names or product names.
  • Make use of some great offers to bribe them in opening the email.
  • Play the idea “Fear Of Missing Out” (FOMO) to your customers.
  • Make it short and simple but alluring enough for them to open the email.

Also, it’s important never to overload readers with information. Instead, focus on what’s necessary for the prospect to return to their cart and complete their order. Writing short emails is an effective way of ensuring that you hold the reader’s attention long enough to do this.

Offer Discount Codes/Coupons

Most customers abandon their carts because the final price is more than what they expected. And there’s a simple way to recover the customers who have been scared away by the final price: issue a discount.

Offering discounts for customers to complete their purchases can really work in your favor. But, be aware of the pitfalls. A common concern is training customers to abandon transactions on purpose to receive a discount.

If you were to offer a discount in your email, it could be the final push they need to complete their purchase. Save your discounts for the end. If you send a sequence of emails, save that coupon code for the very last one. This is your last shot at getting the customer to convert, after all.

Mail Frequency and Creating Urgency

Mail Frequency is a very essential element in your cart recovery process. When to send an abandoned cart email? Many stores prefer sending the cart recovery email right after the visitor abandoned the cart. Sending the email within an hour after the customer abandoned the cart, is the most preferred time because:

  • The email will arrive before the customer totally forgets about the cart;
  • The customer is still in their “buying” mood;
  • The email will arrive before the customer decides to purchase elsewhere.

Also, sending additional email reminders will greatly improve our chances of success. We can earn more revenue from abandoned carts and increase sales conversion by following up with a series of emails.

  • Email #2 must be sent after 24 hours, after the first one. Usually, the customers shop at the same time of the day. Also, we’ll remind them once again of their cart contents and of any discounts.
  • Email #3 must be sent after 72 hours, after the previous email. Use a persuasion technique of scarcity, by telling customers that the discount will expire soon. This is your last chance of converting the customer.

The most common way in creating a sense of urgency is by putting a limited time offers in the recovery emails we sent – usually free shipping or product discounts. This way, the customers will be more interested to take advantage of the discount and then continue with the purchase as soon as possible.

Add CTA buttons and Contact Details

Bold and attractive CTAs can really grab the attention of the shopper and push them towards an action you want them to take. Make it easy for the customer to finish buying the product. Let them know what they abandoned, show it (with a big image), then put the bold, easy-to-see, contrasting CTA right below that product image.

Another important thing to include in your contact information for people who want to reach out to ask further questions. There are many reasons why shoppers abandon carts. They may have extra questions and it’s a good idea to include your support contact info.

Trust and Credibility through Product Reviews / Social Proofs

Customers have become more careful especially first-time visitors on your website will need a little more convincing before opening up their wallets and proceed to purchase. This is where social proof can help you convert those first-time visitors or skeptical buyers.

The best way to do that is to use product ratings and reviews so that those prospects can see that other people (like themselves) have happily purchased from you before.

When 88% of consumers claim that ratings and reviews influenced their buying decision, this represents a big opportunity for you. Instead of just using this social proof on your website, you can use it in your abandoned cart reminder emails too.

Display your other products

People might have abandoned their shopping cart because they were unsure of their choice — maybe the item isn’t exactly what they had in mind. But, they might be sold on similar items they missed the first time.  Sometimes, offering alternatives to abandoned cart items can help return a missed sales opportunity.

With product recommendations, it’s easy to show off other stuff that your customers will love. (They might even like those options better.) Visitors might not have been completely sold on the items they added to their cart, but they might be interested in similar items they didn’t notice the first time on your site.

Conclusion: Start turning missed opportunities into recovered sales!

Too many eCommerce sites let potential revenue fly out the window because they don’t send people a friendly reminder that they left something behind. Improving your abandoned cart recovery is an incremental process that requires many smaller steps.

A good abandoned cart email contains many different elements which vary greatly from business to business. You might need to do a few testing to create an abandoned cart email that works for you and your audience. A great cart recovery campaign can make people remember you. 75% of shoppers plan on coming back to their abandoned cart. Quickly change their “plan” into “did” with abandoned cart emails that work. You see, abandoned cart emails are easy to set up, and really it should be something that everyone does give the high abandonment rates.

We are all aware that cart abandonment is an issue that can never be fully eliminated. But with some effort, we can at least recover a portion of our abandoned carts and to eventually turn those into actual orders. You can also read this article “How to effectively recover Abandoned Carts in eCommerce” to learn more. Don’t forget to apply the strategies above, and get started on recovering sales today.