Re-engage cart abandoners with personalized email campaigns

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If you are in the eCommerce industry, then shopping cart abandonment is probably your #1 challenge. And you’re not alone: the average documented shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers is 69%, according to the Baymard Institute. What’s more shocking is, cart abandoners account for $4 trillion in lost revenue annually. Online purchase journeys aren’t straightforward. Sometimes, shoppers need a little push on their path to purchase. Email Campaigns targeting cart abandoners are proven as an effective way to increase purchase conversion rate to drive sales.  In this recipe, you’ll learn how to use Segment and an email provider like Braze, to send timely and relevant emails to users who’ve expressed interest (e.g viewed product, add to cart) but haven’t made a purchase.

In order to find and engage cart abandoners, the first step is to implement analytics on your site. This will help you understand — “who” your customers are and “what” they are doing on your site. Don’t worry if this sounds like a lot of work. It’s not. This Recipe will teach you how to instrument Segment on your site and implement relevant events (analytics) to identify cart abandoners. After that, Segment pipes the data you collect to all of your third-party tools, in this case, Marketing Automation platforms like Braze allowing you to run targeted email campaigns and more. 

Step 1: Set up data tracking

So, first step, is to sign-up or login to the Segment App. Next, create a Source for your eCommerce site. A Source is where events such as Product Viewed and Checkout Started are collected and sent to Segment. We recommend you begin with a Javascript source and install the Segment snippet on your website. Check out these docs to learn more about setting up your source. 

After you set up your Source, you’ll begin to implement events. Events are essentially actions such as page views or button clicks performed by your users on your website. You can implement events by writing code or using Visual Tagger.

We recommend you to track below events to understand what actions users are performing on your site. In addition to the track events, we also recommend you send an identify call each time a user registers, logs in or updates their info.

Please see these detailed docs if you need help in implementing events.

Step 2: Connect your Braze account with Segment

Once you have an active Source that’s collecting eCommerce events, the next step is to connect your Source with the Braze destination. From your Segment UI’s Destinations page click on “Add Destination” and then search for “Braze” within the Destinations Catalog and confirm the Source you’d like to connect to.

After that, you will be asked to enter the API Key and a few more details associated with your Braze account to enable the Destination. Please see these detailed instructions if you need help. Once you input and save these details, you turn on the toggle button and enable the Destination. You can also verify if your data is making into Braze by viewing the “Event Delivery” tab.

Step 3: Create an Email Campaign with Braze

Once you’ve successfully implemented eCommerce events via Segment and enabled the Braze destination, it’s time to log in to the Braze App and create an email campaign. If you don’t have access to Braze, you can request a demo here.  After you log in to the Braze App, go to the “Campaigns” page, click on the “Create Campaign” button, and select the “Email” option. 

After creating an Email Campaign, you need to compose your email. Either select an existing email template or create a new one from scratch. Check out these docs for more help composing your email. 

Step 4: Choose Your Target Segment (Cart Abandoners)

Once you have composed your email, the next step is to identify and target cart abandoners. Since you’ve enabled the Braze Destination on your Source, Segment automatically sends your events like Product Added, Checkout Started, Order Completed, etc. to Braze.

You can select the Action-Based Delivery method to email customers who’ve added a product to their cart (i.e., performed Checkout Started event) but haven’t made the purchase within 24 hours. 

Braze also lets you segment your customers and run A/B tests to experiment with your email campaigns. To keep things simple, we can select “All Users” and skip additional experimentation.

Finally, select a conversion metric to measure the success of your email campaign. In our case we want customers to make a purchase within 3 days of receiving the email. 

Step 5: Review and Deploy

Now you’ll see a summary of the campaign. Review all the details, and when you’re satisfied, click the “Start Campaign” to launch.

Results

Braze will show you the number of emails sent, opened, clicked through, sent to spam, and bounced for each campaign you deploy. Additionally, Braze’s email analytics tool shows how your users’ clicks are divided across the links in an email campaign. Clicking on each variation expands/collapses information on what percentage of users clicked on which link in an email campaign.

Wrapping up

Here’s what we’ve done in this growth recipe:

• Created a Source for your eCommerce site to track events

• Connected your Source with Braze to build automated marketing campaigns

• Identified cart abandoners and created an automated email campaign 

• Ran the email campaign to improve eCommerce store conversation rates and revenues.