Send Abandoned Cart Emails

Recover more revenue by following up with customers who abandon their cart.

Abandoned Cart Emails automatically follow up with contacts who leave items in their cart without completing their purchase. Almost 70% of carts get abandoned for one reason or another, so activating an Abandoned Cart email series is one of the most valuable tools for any e-commerce business! Our merchants typically recover between 10% and 20% of their abandoned carts.

Don’t leave money on the table — read the below step-by-step instructions to get your Abandoned Cart Email series up and running.

To use our Abandoned Cart Emails, your account must be integrated with BigCommerce, Shopify, Shopify Plus, Weebly, or Wix.

Create a new Abandoned Cart Series

• Navigate to Automations and click the New Automation button.

• Select the Abandoned Cart Email option. This action opens Privy’s series editor.

Name your series

At the top of your series editor, you’ll be able to edit and update the name of your series — this is internal only and for you to keep yourself organized.

Add/Remove emails

• To add more emails to your series, click on any of the ‘plus’ signs between the emails.

• To remove an email from your series, click on the trash icon at the bottom of the email you’d like to delete.

The minimum amount of emails needed is 1. The maximum amount of emails allowed in a series is 10.

Edit your settings

When creating your Abandoned Cart Series, you have a number of trigger settings that you can configure: your time delay, a minimum/maximum order value, specific products/collections targeting, and your coupon.

To edit your settings, scroll to find your Edit settings button at the bottom of the left side bar.

Time Delay

Configure your time delay to determine how long your first email triggers after the cart is abandoned, and how much of a delay there is between each subsequent email triggers. You can customize each email’s time delay by number of minutes, hours, or days.

Minimum/Maximum Cart Value

This setting is optional. It allows you to restrict this series from triggering unless the customers’ cart meets a certain minimum or maximum subtotal in their cart. By default, this is set to a minimum cart value of $1 with no maximum cart value, which means that carts with any and all value will receive this series once they are abandoned by an eligible contact.

Products/Collections

This setting is optional. It allows you to restrict this series from triggering unless the customers’ cart contains your selected products or collections. By default, this setting is disabled, which means that an abandoned cart will trigger this series regardless of which products are in the cart.

Coupon

Attach a coupon code to your series. By default, none of the emails in the default series templates include a coupon code. However, if you want to attach a coupon code, you can follow these instructions to insert a code into your templates as you customize them!

Only 1 coupon can be attached per email series.

Customize your templates

To edit the appearance of each of your emails, click the Edit icon to access the email editor:

Click Templates and select Choose a Template from the dropdown menu to start with one of Privy’s templates, or choose one of your own Saved Templates. If you need help using our drag and drop email editor, check out this guide.

To edit the email’s Subject Line and Preview Text, click to edit the bar at the top of the email editor. Click done to close the bar after making your changes:

By default, your templates will include a Cart Summary, which will reveal each product in your customer’s cart, as well as Call-To-Actions leading directly to your customer’s cart URL.

Click Preview to see a mobile and desktop preview of your content, or click Send test email to send a test email to yourself and/or other users on your Privy account.

Once you’ve made all your edits, click Save. Click Back to series to exit the editor and head back to your Welcome Series.

Activate your series

Once you’ve customized your templates and edited your settings, you’re ready to launch your Abandoned Cart Series! Click the Activate button in the upper right corner of your series.

After your series is activated, you will not be able to add/remove emails from your series. To accomplish this, you will need to duplicate or start a new series.

Once your series is live, you can review its performance at any time.

Disable other providers’ abandoned cart emails

Before you activate your abandoned cart emails in Privy, make sure that you’ve disabled all other abandoned cart emails from other providers to avoid customers receiving multiple different series. You can find platform-specific instructions on how to disable external abandoned cart emails in this guide.

Who gets Abandoned Cart Emails?

A contact must meet the following criteria to receive your Abandoned Cart Emails:

They are a known and reachable contact.

The shopper must be known and eligible to receive email marketing from your business. A known contact has a profile in your Privy account, and an eligible contact has a ‘mailable’ status in Privy.

Additionally, the contact must also be “cookied” by Privy so that their actions are tied to a specific email address. A tracking cookie is placed in their browser when they submit a Privy display or provide their email address and agree to receive marketing communications through the checkout flow for Shopify, Shopify Plus, and Weebly storefronts.

They have the appropriate cart value.

If you have a connected BigCommerce, Shopify, or Wix store, Privy can detect the amount of value in a shopper’s cart during their visit. If the value in their cart is greater than or equal to the minimum value and does not exceed any set maximum threshold, the shopper will remain eligible to receive the abandoned cart email. 

They have the appropriate products in their cart.

If you have a connected Shopify store, Privy can detect products in a shopper’s cart via your store’s product IDs. If you’ve set up any product/collection restrictions, the shopper’s cart must contain at least one of the products identified.

Enough time has passed since their visit.

When a shopper visits your site, their activity is recorded within Privy. If their last visit occurred after the time you have set in the “last seen” setting, then they remain eligible to receive the abandoned cart email. 

They have not purchased during the series.

Once a shopper completes a purchase, they will no longer receive any additional abandoned cart emails within a series. If you had a series configured to send 2 hours, 24 hours, and 72 hours after a visit, a shopper who purchased at hour three would not receive the second and third emails. The shopper would need to return to your site and start a new qualifying cart for a series to begin again. 

Note: To receive an email, a shopper must meet the criteria of each email in a series at the time that each email is scheduled to be sent. Additionally, a shopper cannot qualify for the same abandoned cart series more than once within a 48-hour period.