Three ways to recommend products with abandoned cart emails

There are many great things about abandoned cart emails. The main one, of course, is these emails get your customers to go back to your site and finish the purchase. 

More revenue is always good, right?

But another opportunity that an abandoned cart email offers is a way to feature more products. 

You don’t need to use these emails to highlight just what’s in the customer’s cart. You can also drive them to take action on related products, recommended products, and even upsells. 

All you have to do is let them know. 

Here are a few ways to do it.

Complete the look

This is a great one for retailers. 

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a high end menswear shop who sells a lot of dress options for work. So you’ve got a customer who has a nice dress shirt sitting in his cart. 

You can send your abandoned cart email, reminding him about the shirt. That’s pretty straightforward, and often works. Or, you can also take things a step further and in the same email feature other items that can help him complete the look. 

For instance, you could do something where you feature a series of ties that your ‘fashion insider’ has picked that match the dress shirt sitting in the cart perfectly. 

In a case like this, it might be a no-brainer for your customer to grab a tie or two he knows matches the shirt. That leaves his look on point, and he doesn’t have to worry about it getting dressed in the morning.

See what’s on sale

Everyone loves it when there’s a price drop, so when that happens, make sure you tell your customers. 

In an email like this one, you can see that the primary objective is to let customers know items in their cart are on sale. 

But something else that’s featured here are a bunch of related products that are also on sale. It’s a good way to entice the shopper to add more items to their cart, especially if you make it really easy to add those items to the cart.

So, if your customer loves that orange belt and sees they can get the blue one on sale too, that can grab their attention.

You can also highlight recommended or related products that are on sale in your email, too — even if the item in the cart isn’t.

Highlight social proof

If you ask most shoppers, the majority of them will tell you that they often do two things before buying anything, especially online.

First, they look up reviews of the product or service, and second, they ask around and see what their peers are saying about it. Social proof matters, and you can use your abandoned cart email to add in examples of it around recommended or related products. 

For example, if your electronics store sells a lot of video games, it’s a great idea to have your cart abandonment emails to have reviews as a big component. 

You can have a general star rating and then take it even further, and for related video games, include quotes from some of the most popular reviews. 

When a customer has a Nintendo Switch in their shopping cart and sees two or three games that people love as recommended products in the email, that can save them a ton of time and energy looking up reviews on their own, and make them more likely to click.

Don’t forget the data

Depending on the types of products you sell, any number of these practices could work and drive more clicks and conversions. 

But, you won’t know unless you give it a shot first. So as you formulate your abandoned cart strategy, try out one or a combination of these and see what works.

For your best bet, pull in data from your CRM, email service providers, and commerce platforms to really track your customer’s behavior, browsing history, and past purchases.

That way, you can create hyper-personalized abandoned cart emails that promote the products your customers want to see, versus just taking your best guess.

Once you run the campaigns, tweak based on the actions your customers take, you might find one type of product promotion or recommendation drives significantly more clicks.