Abandoned Cart Automation

Overview

Abandoned Cart Automation is a method of triggering a contact attempt after a customer leaves their online cart with items. This is a highly flexible configuration. This article will go through one basic setup of Abandoned Cart Automation.

There are some prerequisites required for the configuration of Abandoned Cart Automation. It is beneficial to have knowledge of data sources, Campaigns, and Audiences.

Table of Contents

Process

Requirements

Configuring Abandoned Cart Automation

Audience

Template

Campaign

Process

Requirements

Abandoned Cart Automation is not configured solely within Accelerator. Abandoned Cart Automation requires some way for Accelerator to know that a customer has abandoned an item in their shopping cart. While there are multiple ways to accomplish this, the three most common setups are listed here:

1. A record enters an “abandoned_cart” table any time that a customer leaves with items in their cart. This table contains an identifying value for the customer, what items were in the cart, and a timestamp (or similar value). A Marketing Campaign, running on a frequent schedule, processes these records and contacts customers with a reminder.
2. When a customer abandons items within their shopping cart, a flag is updated within the main customer information table along with a timestamp. An Audience is set to only pull records that are marked as abandoned. A Marketing Campaign is scheduled to run every hour and contact records from this Audience. This method avoids the use of multiple tables.
3. When a customer abandons their cart, an API call is triggered. This API call causes a Transactional Campaign to contact the customer. This requires the setup of a Transactional Campaign, but does not require an Audience.

This example will continue following the first example. A Marketing Campaign setup to run daily.

Configuring Abandoned Cart Automation

Audience

For the example of this article, a new Audience must be created. This Audience will join two tables. The first table is called “cart”. This table receives information when a customer abandons the cart. It contains data on the customer_id, a date, and the items abandoned.

The second table referenced by the Audience is the “customer” table. This table contains all the customer information normally accessed by Campaigns. In this example, the following columns are referenced:

The SQL statement being used in this example is:

SELECT
   city_and_glory.cart.customer_id,
   city_and_glory.cart.cart_date,
   city_and_glory.cart.cart_items,
   city_and_glory.customer.email as EmailAddress,
   city_and_glory.customer.first_name,
   city_and_glory.customer.last_name
FROM
   city_and_glory.cart
JOIN
   city_and_glory.customer
ON
   (city_and_glory.cart.customer_id = city_and_glory.customer.id)
WHERE 
   city_and_glory.cart.cart_date = Gears.date?string(‘yyyy-MM-dd’);

In many cases, the data within the “cart” table is populated frequently. This can vary based on how quickly a client wants to contact the customer that abandoned a cart.

If a notification needs to be sent immediately, then another approach needs to be taken. A Transactional Campaign is used for immediate notifications.

Once an Audience is configured, test it using the Preview Audience option.

Confirm that the SQL statement returns data correctly.

Save the Audience.

Template

For this example, customers that abandoned their cart receive a reminder email. The Template for this contact includes some personalized information like the name of the customer.

Sometimes, the actual items in the cart are included in the email. If this is the case, Supplemental, Hosted, or External Data must be added to the Template with information on the items and a column must be included in the Audience data to combine the two tables.

Using the Drag-and-Drop Builder, create the Template for the Abandoned Cart contact.

Test the Template as normal and save it.

Campaign

With the other elements ready, create a Marketing Campaign. This Campaign will run on a daily schedule, select any records that have abandoned carts within the current date, and contact those individuals using the attached Template.

Create a new Campaign and select the Audience and Template for Abandoned Cart Automation.

With the Audience and the Template attached, the last step of setting up the Abandoned Cart Automation is configuring the schedule. This example assumes that data is being frequently written into the “cart” table for customers that have abandoned their shopping cart.

Navigate to the Schedule option on the left side of the screen.

For this example, set the Schedule to Daily. Choose the time that the Campaign should run.

Each day, at the specified time, Audience data is processed and any customer within the “cart” table and a “cart_date” field with the current date will receive a contact.

Saving this schedule for the Campaign completes the Abandoned Cart Automation.

This process can be basic, as shown in the above example, but it can also be very complex depending on the business requirements.