Recovering abandoned carts has become a very common practice for online business owners in order to increase their total business revenue. For this, they have realised a need to introduce abandoned cart reminder emails in their marketing strategy. Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce plugin provides a basic but yet an effective solution for cart abandonment.
The abandoned cart reminder emails have to be designed accurately and provide persuasive content to encourage lost shoppers to return to the cart and complete their transaction.
What are Merge Codes?
Merge codes are user specific information which is used in email templates to insert personalised information when sending an email. Each merge code represents a piece of information that will be retrieved from your database and merge into the template when you send cart reminder emails. A typical merge code for Customer Full Name would look like {{customer.fullname}} etc. which when added in the reminder email would fetch the full name of the customer and replace it in place of the merge code.
How are Merge Codes used?
We discussed the details of default email template in our earlier post where we saw the usage of merge codes. There are 7 merge codes available in this free version whereas our pro version provides 22 merge codes to play with.
These merge codes are available as a part of email body content options. These are listed under AC button dropdown and displayed on the right end of all the options as shown below:
Merge codes displayed
The above is a list of mergecodes that can be used for specific items.
1. Customer First Name {{customer.firstname}} – This will replace the customer’s first name in place of the merge code.
2. Customer Last Name {{customer.lastname}} – Similarly this will replace customer’s last name in place of the merge code.
3. Customer Full Name {{customer.fullname}} – This will display customer’s full name in place of the merge code.
4. Product Information/Cart Content {{products.cart}} – This merge code will fetch all the product or cart details from the database and display that.
Example: This is how cart details will be displayed in place of this merge code.
5. Cart Link {{cart.link}} – This will display link to the respective cart that was abandoned by the customer.
6. Date when Cart was abandoned {{cart.abandoned_date}} – The place where this merge code is used will display the abandoned cart date and time fetched from the database.
7. Unsubscribe Link {{cart.unsubscribe}} – This is a link which allows the customer to stop receiving abandoned cart reminder emails, when he clicks on it.
Example of usage
Let us understand the usage of merge codes via an example.
A customer named John Carter purchased product Spectre worth $150 with a total cart amount of $300 as he took 2 of these, but never purchased the items. Hence the cart got abandoned on March 28th 2018 at 12.53 am. Now this cart got saved as an abandoned cart and hence the recovery mechanism is applied on it.
The abandoned cart reminder email is composed using email template as shown below:
Email body content
The merge code details are retrieved from the database and merged in the template. The email sent to the customer displayed as below:
Email sent to the customer
Thus, wherever the merge codes were used, actual customer information as well as cart details were replaced. Such personalised emails with compelling content can make lost customers return to the cart and complete their purchase.
