An abandoned cart is an event that’s triggered when:
Subscribers who click through from a Dotdigital email campaign add items to their cart and then leave the store without completing an order.
Visitors submit their email address or mobile number, add items to their cart, and then leave the store without completing an order.
Logged-in customers or new account creators add items to their cart and then leave the store without completing an order.
Tracking these occurrences allows you to send follow-up messaging to these contacts reminding them that they have items waiting to be purchased. In some cases visitors may have gotten distracted, and a gentle reminder is all they need to check out.
If you want to, you can also include incentives in these messages — such as a discount code or offer of free shipping — to help you to recover what would otherwise be lost revenue.
How it works
Our abandoned cart feature makes innovative use of a combination of different functions:
Identifying a customer
Through the Dotdigital Tag, collect identifiable contact data from browsing behaviour on your website. This can detect a customer and their cart.
Automating an abandoned cart campaign send
The program builder is used to create a specially built program that executes if there is no purchase after a set amount of time of a cart being abandoned. It sends an automated campaign to the customer associated with the abandoned cart.
Personalising the campaign content
An abandoned cart campaign uses Liquid scripting to create highly targeted and relevant content. This enables the campaign to include the contact's name, relevant other details and, most importantly, their abandoned cart's contents.
For emails, you can use the pre-built abandoned cart block to include all the necessary details. For SMS or MMS, we provide you with example script to use in your messages.
Implement the script on your store
The method to implement abandoned cart tracking for your store differs depending on the ecommerce system you use.
For the following ecommerce platforms, our integrations automatically install the necessary scripts when you set up the connection:
For stores built on other platforms, or bespoke sites, your developers can enable abandoned cart tracking, among other features, through the Dotdigital Tag.
Learn more
Abandoned cart messages
You can send abandoned cart emails and SMS or MMS to customers and guests to remind them of any items left in their shopping cart.
You can use an automated program to configure the amount of time between the customer abandoning the cart and the abandoned cart message being sent, as well as setting up any further follow-up messages you want to send if the customer still doesn’t complete their purchase.
Learn more
Abandoned cart messages for guests
You can enable abandoned carts for guests in your Dotdigital Tag profile. Visitors that aren't recognised by Dotdigital are created as a contact, and enrolled in your selected automated program.
When you enable guest carts:
It's your responsibility to make sure you clearly display the correct consent text on your site.
We strongly recommend leaving your Regulatory settings on Enforce double opt-in for signups from signup forms and some API methods only (default). If you have to enforce double opt-in for all signups, then we don't recommend using abandoned cart emails for guests as the process won't work correctly.