Do you know your numbers when it comes to how many of your site visitors end up abandoning the cart and not completing their purchase?
One thing I can tell you right now is, most of them scurry off before pulling out their credit card and it’s hurting your bottom line.
Research conducted by the Baymard Institute suggests that up to 81.4% of site visitors abandon their shopping carts, which is costing online sellers a small fortune.
Ecommerce platform giants like Shopify have measures in place to send out automated cart abandonment emails, but there aren’t any glaringly obvious native features available for users that run their online business with ClickFunnels & ActiveCampaign.
Lucky for you, we’ve worked out a relatively simple way to follow up those heartless cart abandoners!
You only need to set it up once and then it’ll be fully automated for as long as you’re selling the product in question.
Before we dive into the tutorial, however, let’s just bring you up to speed on the whole concept of abandoned cart email sequences.
Table of Contents
What Is An Abandoned Cart Email?
If you’ve ever bought anything online then there’s a good chance that you’ve almost bought a lot of things too, but life got in the way before you managed to finish your purchase.
This means you’ve abandoned the cart. We won’t judge you, but you’re going to get follow-up emails until the end of time or at least until you finish your purchase! 🙂
Online candle retailer Evil Queen has a simple yet effective email that goes out to customers who failed to finish their purchase. They even have a little discount code which is a nice tactic.
Now that you know what a cart abandonment email is, there’s bound to be one last question…
Why Do People Abandon Their Cart?
Well, they have no soul, of course. Kidding, or am I?
Sure, it hurts when you spend all that time and money driving traffic to your site only to discover that most people don’t end up purchasing, but there is always a reason. We need to look at what the data is telling us, and how we can improve the customer experience.
We won’t go too deep into conversion rate optimization strategies, but there’s a high chance that something on your site is scaring them off.
Here are the top 5 reasons why customers abandon their carts, according to SaleCycle.com:
- Extra Costs Too High: This could be shipping, taxes, or other charges. Try to avoid hitting your customers with unexpected costs at the checkout.
- Forced To Create An Account: Not everyone wants to join your club! If you want people to create accounts, make sure it’s optional. You can always hit them up at a later date if you really want them to create an official account.
- Long Or Complex Process: Everyone is distracted and time-poor. Your checkout process should be easy and straight-forward.
- Can’t See Total Cost: More than ever, customers want transparency. Just give them all the info they need up-front and you’re sales will look healthier.
- Didn’t Trust The Site:Â The internet is rife with scams so the more trustworthy your site looks, the better your bank account will look.
Ok, now you’ve had a crash course on abandoned cart email marketing, let’s get into the meat and potatoes!
How To Send Abandoned Cart Emails With ActiveCampaign & ClickFunnels
Firstly, you’ll need to take note of the following important requirements to make this work.
- This tutorial assumes that you know your way around the ClickFunnels dashboard and your ActiveCampaign account and both are already integrated. If not, here’s a quick tutorial on how to integrate ActiveCampaign with Clickfunnels.
- You can only do this with a two-step order form in ClickFunnels (we think these are the best kind of order form anyway)
- You should also already have your sales funnel setup before attempting this tutorial, or at least ready to launch with products added.
- It’s up to you to hone your email marketing skills and test different email strategies – we aren’t going into detail in this tutorial but we do have other great articles that will help you.
Step 1: Setup Your List & Tags Inside ActiveCampaign
We’re only going to set up one list for this, but we will be tagging customer contacts with a “non-buyer” and “buyer” tag so they are segmented accordingly.
Now we just need to set up two tags inside ActiveCampaign. For the purpose of this example, we’re assuming that we are selling vitamins. Make sure your tags are relevant to the product you are selling so they can be easily identified in your ActiveCampaign account.
Step 2: Integrate Your ActiveCampaign List With Your ClickFunnels Order Form
Make sure you’re inside the funnel editor page for the actual order form step in ClickFunnels, then navigate to Integrations from the Settings menu.
Because you’ve already integrated your ActiveCampaign account, you should be able to choose it from the dropdown boxes. You’ll want to then set the action as “Add To List With Tag”, select your list and choose the “vitamin_abandon” tag that we created in the previous step.
Step 3: Add Buyer Tag Inside ClickFunnels
So now we have the abandoned tags setup, we need to make sure ActiveCampaign knows who the buyers are so we don’t start hounding them to come back and finish their purchase!
You’ll need to exit out of the funnel editor page, ensure that the order form funnel step is selected, and choose “Products” from the tabs along the top.
Choose the product (which you should have already set up) and navigate through to “Follow-Up Actions”. Select your ActiveCampaign integration and scroll down.
Now you just need to select “Add To List With Tag” and choose the List and Tag that you set up previously. Remember, this tag is the buyer tag.
Your “Summary” step should look like this 👇
Step 4: Setting Up The ActiveCampaign Automations
You’re going to need two automations for this exercise. One for the buyers and one for the abandons.
First, we’ll set up the abandoned cart email automation. Choose “Start from Scratch” for this one, it’s pretty straightforward.
Now we need to name our automation and set up the steps. Firstly, the “trigger” will be “tag is added” and we will be selecting the vitamin_abandon tag.
From there, you will want to choose how long you want to wait before your abandoned cart email sequence starts. I usually launch the first email off after one hour, then 10 hours later, and then every day.
There is no exact science to this, but don’t be afraid to email at least once a day. You want to get them back to finish the purchase so you can earn your hard-earned bucks!
Now it’s time to set up our buyer automation so ActiveCampaign knows to stop emailing them about their abandoned cart.
So what we’ve done here is created a trigger for “vitamin_buyer” and then the first step in this automation is to “Exit Another Automation”, where we’ve chosen the abandoned cart automation that we set up in the previous step.
Make sure you also add a step to “Remove A Tag”, removing the “vitamin_abandon” tag. Seeing as they’ve finished their purchase and entered your good books, the customer shouldn’t have to carry the burden of that abandoned tag anymore!
It’s also a nice touch to add an order confirmation email here if you haven’t already put measures in place for this.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, now you’re a fully-fledged tech pro with a brand new abandoned cart sequence for your sales funnel!
Your next task is to start testing different email sending intervals, different copy, and other email marketing strategies for your abandoned cart sequences.
Even if you implement abandoned cart emails to the most basic level, you will definitely see a boost in revenue almost instantly.
If you’ve used email strategies like this before for your e-commerce business please let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear your story.
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