Saving Lost Sales with WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro

Many eCommerce store owners know that 7 of every 10 orders on your site will be abandoned by the customer without completing the purchase. This represents a loss in revenue over twice as large as what your store makes each year.

Would all of these customers have purchased from your store? Probably not. Sometimes people add items to their carts just to check pricing, shipping options, or other costs. However, you can take steps to save these abandoned carts to drive additional revenue, and there are plugins available to help.

The WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro plugin can help WooCommerce stores save their lost carts by emailing customers who’ve abandoned their carts to try to complete the sale. You can include a link to the checkout with the cart items saved, and optionally send coupons with the email to incentivize purchase.

We’ve published a full Abandoned Cart Pro review before, so we’ll be going through some of the updates to the plugin in today’s review since some useful new features have been added.

The plugin setup has been improved to make it easier for store owners to get up and running with their abandoned cart campaigns. Settings now use the WordPress settings API so they look more like the rest of your site, and plugin licensing can be entered here as well.

 

Old Settings

New Settings

There’s a new setting to disable guest carts for abandoned cart emails. When a guest user reaches the checkout page and enters an email address, this is saved and used to send abandoned cart campaigns. If you disable guest emails, abandoned cart emails will only be sent to logged in users instead.

Email template installation and setup is now easier and features improved coupon support. First, three default templates are installed with the plugin to expedite your setup so you have pre-made campaigns that are ready to go.

You can edit these default campaigns or duplicate them to get your own abandoned cart emails set up. Templates already include checkout links and products in the abandoned cart, so they’re very easy to update. The second and third email campaigns even include coupon codes for 5% off and 10% off (respectively) to incentivize purchase if the first recovery email isn’t successful.

The emails list also now displays the percent recovery for each campaign — this shows you the number of recoveries for that specific campaign so you can get a sense of where in the recovery cycle you’ve recovered the sale, giving you some insight into how emails are working. For example, if you include a coupon code in your second email and this converts the most recoveries, you can consider including this in other campaigns.

Old email list

New email list

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro now lets you generate unique coupon codes to add to email templates, which will be single-use for the customer. You can create a template coupon that provides a discount, and then this will be duplicated for a one-time use coupon code. The coupon type (i.e., cart percentage) and amount are copied over to the new unique coupon code. However, other fields, such as “provides free shipping” or a minimum spend, are not copied.

If you don’t want to generate unique codes (as this can make a lot of coupons) or you want to provide coupons without a discount (like free shipping), you can insert a standard coupon code for the customer, which I’d recommend making one-time use per customer. This will insert the coupon code without generating a new, unique code.

Old coupon settings

Generate Coupon Codes

There are also some new email merge tags that can be used for specific product details (such as the product name), or cart information (such as the cart’s total).

Old Merge Tags

New Merge Tags

Finally, the email merge tag to show “Product Information / Cart Content” can automatically create a table of items in the abandoned cart. Instead of using the {{products.cart}} merge tag (as it did previously), an HTML table is added, which lets you modify what’s included in the table (you couldn’t modify the table contents in previous versions).

This table will add a new row for each item in the abandoned cart automatically.

New email sample

WooCommerce Abandon Cart Pro will still show you lists of all abandoned orders, recovered orders, and sent emails for your shop. Abandoned Orders will display the list of all orders that have been abandoned and their status (i.e., if a new cart was created or not) for as many days as you’ve opted to keep.

Abandoned orders list

Sent Emails will show any recovery emails sent by your store, the campaign sent, whether it was opened or not, and if any links in the email were clicked.

Sent Emails

The Recovered orders view is similar to abandoned orders, and lists out any orders that have been recovered after they were abandoned.

Recovered carts

A new report has been added as well: Product Report. This table shows you a list of any products that have been in an abandoned cart on your site, along with how many times that product has been abandoned and recovered.

Product Report

This way, you can get some insight into why carts are abandoned — for example, if certain products are frequently abandoned and not recovered, you can determine if this is just due to the product’s popularity, or if there’s something else going on (such as product pricing).

There are several other small improvements and refinements in version 2.4+ of WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro. For example, failed orders are now treated as abandoned and will trigger your email campaigns.

There are also several “under-the-hood” improvements to the codebase, which improve security and performance overall.

Support for the WooCommerce Product Bundles extension has been added to list out any products in the bundle in abandoned cart recovery emails, but still show the bundle price.

You can also personalize recovery email subject lines by using the {{customer.firstname}} or {{product.name}} merge tags in the email subject like, such as “Hey {{customer.firstname}}, your cart is ready for you 🙂". Personalized subject lines can increase open rates for emails to improve your abandoned cart campaigns.

While there are tons of improvements to be had, there are still a few minor downsides:

• As of WooCommerce 2.3, all plugins can use the wc_mail() function to send emails, which lets third party plugins use the default WooCommerce templates. I’d love to see abandoned cart emails do this so they use the same templates as other emails.
• Unique, generated coupons do not copy other fields (such as “provides free shipping”), which means your coupon has to provide a discount (it can’t only provide free shipping).
• This is a tiny thing for me, but I’d love to be able to activate and deactivate campaigns without having to edit them.

The suggestions / comments from our previous review have been added, such as product reports and recovery percentages for email campaigns, so I’m hopeful for further improvements to the plugin 🙂

Since our last review of the plugin, WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro has been much improved:

• the installation process is smoother due to improved settings and the installation of default emails
• email templates can now automatically generate coupon codes so each code is one-time use (not a generic code)
• emails now let you customize the cart table and personalize subject lines
• reporting is improved to give you insight on which products are abandoned and recovered most
• you can now view conversion rates for email campaigns to see which are most successful

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro is a still great tool to drive additional revenue via converting abandoned orders, and the changes made to it in the months since we last reviewed it have been very useful improvements. Default templates make it easier to use the plugin and improve email campaign set up and management. Improved compatibility for other plugins like Product Bundles improves support for several kinds of stores.

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Pro is definitely helpful to get insight into when or why customers leave carts on your site, and is great for converting sales you might have otherwise lost to recover additional revenue.