7 Ways to Avoid Customer Annoyance With Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails are an excellent way of recovering lost sales and a must-have tactic in every e-commerce owner’s marketing arsenal. But, have you ever wondered how your customers feel about actually receiving them?

After all, it’s easy to go overboard with the number of emails you send. It’s also easy to send them too frequently. Make those two mistakes, and your customers are more than likely to be annoyed.

If you’ve ever entertained the question of what your customers think and how they feel about abandoned cart emails and whether or not they truly make a difference, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll share statistics about the way customers feel about abandoned cart emails and offer tips on how to avoid annoying them.

How Do Customers Feel About Abandoned Cart Emails?

The question whether customers find abandoned cart emails annoying or helpful prompted a survey by MarketingSherpa in 2015 that asked a simple question: “Do customers like getting abandoned shopping cart emails?”

According to that survey, half of the online shoppers that abandoned a shopping cart consider reminder emails helpful, but more than a third find them annoying. The survey included 2,057 Americans out of which 1,762 had abandoned an online cart before.

Here’s the breakdown of the key points from the survey:

• 51% thought cart abandonment emails were helpful
• 38% were annoyed with the reminder
• 16% considered the reminders so annoying and wished companies would stop sending them
• 12% have never received a cart abandonment email at all

However, there is good news too, which is why sending cart abandonment emails pay off, after all.

The same survey shows that:

• 6% of the surveyed shoppers that abandoned an online cart considered the reminder emails helpful and resulted in them going back and completing the purchase.
• 7% not only considers them helpful but always completes the purchase if the email includes a promotion or discount code.
• Finally, 69% said the cart abandonment emails have either been helpful or influenced their purchase decision somehow, even if the emails did annoy them..

Considering the data above, it’s clear that abandoned cart emails play a large role in influencing the purchase decision but can cause annoyance if the sequence is not carefully planned.

7 Ways to Avoid Customer Annoyance With Abandoned Cart Emails

We’ve mentioned earlier that personalizing your emails and optimizing them for mobile devices is a good way to ensure your customers return to the cart. The following tips will further help you avoid customer annoyance when they receive an abandoned cart email.

1. Use statistics

Use your stats and data to your advantage to find out where exactly your customer abandoned the cart. You will be able to get valuable insight and clues that will help you take the next steps.

You can tailor the emails to offer a more personalized incentive for a customer to come back as well as improve the checkout experience to minimize friction, especially if you discover that a lot of shoppers abandon their carts at the same point during the checkout process.

2. Offer help

Aside from reminding your customers about the items left in the cart, they should also provide help. With the data above, you can offer to help them by giving them direct access to your customer support, pointing them to your knowledge base or offering to solve the problem for them.

You can also ask them for feedback, especially if you can’t figure out why they left the cart, then use that information to improve your store. A simple question such as “How can we help?” is bound to generate a response, especially if you send the email using a real person’s name and include their photo in the footer.

3. Allow for one-click opt-out

Giving your customers an easy way to opt out of your email is a common practice when it comes to regular newsletter emails so there is no reason to avoid it here. Not giving them a one-click opt-out is liable to annoy them further and even mark your emails as spam. Include a link that, once clicked, will immediately remove them from the sequence that sends out abandoned cart emails and avoid sending them a confirmation opt-out message for the same reason of causing more annoyance.

4. Set the frequency cap

We’ve talked about timing your abandoned cart emails in our previous article but this point cannot be stressed enough. If you set your emails to go out too frequently, you’ll annoy your customers even more. While it’s important to send that first email within the first couple of hours, make sure your second and third email is sent out at least 24 hours later. You can even wait 48 hours between the second and third email, and some recommend waiting even longer.

5. Use humor

Humor can almost always diffuse a bad situation and let’s face it: an abandoned cart is a bad situation. A fun, light-hearted email can help ease the situation and make customers feel better about spending money. Not to mention, it gets rid of the annoyance. It also allows you to add your personality to the email which helps build a better relationship with your customers.

6. Set suppression windows

You’ll also want to set suppression windows so you can prevent cart abandonment emails from instantly going out for a set period of time. For example, let’s say a customer abandoned their cart when they reached the shipping fees page and received an email within the first couple of hours with an incentive for free shipping.

Then, they completed their purchase but also abandoned another cart after initial checkout. Ensure they don’t receive another abandoned cart immediately not only to prevent annoyance but also to prevent customers trying to take advantage of the system and wait for the perk offer before checking out.

7. Include an easy way to reach you

Our last tip is to make sure each abandoned cart email you send out has your contact information included. It’s not uncommon for shoppers to abandon carts because they had questions about items or about your shipping and return policy but couldn’t find answers.

In those cases, you want to provide them with the link to your support channel that will give answers immediately. Avoid linking to your contact form page and consider instead including your support phone number or sending them straight to your live chat or a monitored social media channel.

Keep Your Customers Happy With These Tips

Keeping your customers happy is crucial for the health of your e-commerce business, your revenue, and your cart abandonment rate. Use the tips above to avoid annoying them with your abandoned cart emails while still getting them to return and complete the purchase.