If you’re trying to reduce your cart abandonment rate and redirect all of that lost potential revenue straight into your pocket, welcome to the club – you’ve come to the right place. Cart abandonment is a well-known issue, and marketing experts will tell you: the struggle is real. But there’s good news. It’s actually not that difficult an issue to put a huge dent it. It just comes down to good old-fashioned salesmanship!
In relation to other potential leads, customers with abandoned carts are the ripest for sales and upsales, so if you don’t already have email templates in place to target them directly, it’s high time you start. We mean now.
Below we’ve highlighted a few impactful abandoned cart emails so that you can start building your own internal templates based on your brand’s previous defined messaging and communication style.
Want these inspiring templates to go? We’ve attached plenty more in a swipe file you can download at the bottom of this page!
Brooklinen
Brooklinen is a New York-based sheet company that’s particularly well-placed to kick off our journey through cart abandonment emails, as they manage to hit all of the important components in one clean and simple template.
The first thing we notice: the giant “We’ve reserved your cart for the next 72 hours” statement. By putting this genuinely helpful, practical information front and center, the Brooklinen team makes the entire email feel valuable and considerate. Just above that, in a font size so small it almost seems cheeky, it draws attention to its playful side with one carefully crafted, on-brand line “Sheet happens,” Just below, in a bright blue box (notice it’s the only bright color on the screen) is a straight-forward call to action button: “See My Cart.”
These three elements are the most important in any abandoned cart email, and they’re all neatly packed into one big central box: a headline that draws the customer back in, a reminder of the brand’s value proposition, and a clear call to action. Below that, just for good measure, Brooklinen has chosen to sparingly name drop some great press and share their social media logos. This is the marketing version of a humblebrag, and whether we’ll admit it or not – we all love it.
Casper – Email A
Casper has been doing an outstanding job of using marketing and branding to skyrocket the perceived value of their one-style-fits-all mattress. It’s no surprise their email marketing is just as neatly honed. “Come back to bed,” says the headline of this email template. Casper’s brand is young, minimalistic, and playful – all of that shines through in this email. They’ve used humor and flirtatious intimacy to re-engage the customer and pull them back into their virtual store.
“True story: I actually called out of work the day after my first night’s sleep because I was so comfortable and wanted to stay in bed all day.”
Adding this playful, mischievous, and most importantly, highly praising testimonial into the email, they’re supporting that brand identity with the social capital that comes with true feedback from fellow customers. This is a beautiful way to build trust and welcome potential customers into the fold of the company’s existing community. The call to action, in this case, follows a reminder of what the potential customer had in their cart – just in case they might need to have their memory jogged in order to complete their purchase.
Casper – Email B
Because we always want to insist on the importance of A/B testing all your marketing assets, we’re showing you an example of two great A/B emails that Casper could use to target and optimize their conversion efforts. Now, this template feels a bit more like you’re back on the website itself. Instead of calling the reader back, they’re making them feel like they just stepped out of their Email Inbox, and back into Casper-world.
The GIF of two people talking along with the headline “We’re here to help” are humanizing, personal and help engage the potential customer just as an in-person saleswoman might. In this email they’ve tried to increase their chances of reengagement by using two main call to actions: “return to cart” and “ chat with Casper.” Maybe their customer interviews have shown that a large number of people who are abandoning their carts feel like they aren’t informed enough to make a purchase, as a mattress is a high-ticket item. Keep an eye on these kinds of challenges, as they’ll vary greatly on your industry, your audience, and your differentiating factors. In this case, for example, some might insist they prefer buying a bed from a person, not a website – and a personalized support experience can give them the best of both worlds. Clearly, Casper is betting that this potential customer needs to talk to someone before they buy, so they’ve added three more calls to action on the bottom of the email, all related to contacting their customer service directly.
Beardbrand – Email A
Beardbrand’s entire experience is rich with premium style and understated masculinity. For their cart abandonment email, they made some bold and clearly successful choices in what would appear to be an effort to seem practical and no-nonsense. In contrast to the email templates we’ve seen above, Beardbrand chose to leave out the playfulness and highly-designed templates to create something that looks more like an old-school HTML email. Just like your neighborhood barber, the casual yet personal “Hey John, We noticed…” attracts their potential customer in a simple, memorable way that perfectly fits their brand.
Beyond that, they’ve really taken time to craft that message with the expectation that their target audience will read this email just as they would the earnest letter of a dear friend. The line “demand is pretty high and we’ll return these items to our shelf soon” is just another humblebrag that creates urgency while sounding helpful and sincere.
Beardbrand – Email B
Here’s another example of a great opportunity to A/B test. Though many companies are having great responses to their beautifully designed email templates, some may get more results from a simple HTML email.
Beardbrand’s email A evoked this simple, pared-down aesthetic, but their second email goes all in. On top of that, Beardbrand has created a persona called Keith Calhoun (real or fictional) that creates a unique and personal experience for the potential customer. All they have to do from here is hit reply, and they’ve been reengaged in a wildly effective yet simple way.
That said, there is still one call to action that uses the natural email formatting of blue links to highlight a path back into their abandoned cart, so readers are naturally guided back into the store in a way that feels natural, and again – helpful.
Dollar Shave Club
Value prop, value prop, value prop. These guys took the value proposition idea and ran with, and because of their audience and their brand identity, it really worked for them! The Dollar Shave Club used bullet points to list their favorite features, and then covered their packaging as well as their email templates with catchy value propositions and quirky taglines: “We deliver amazing razors for a few bucks a month;” “Welcome to your better bathroom, it just got a lot cooler in there;” “Shave time, shave money;” “I like shaving with a dull razor: No one ever.”
By using the packaging in their email, the Dollar Shave Club creates the impression of having already received your new razor, which again brings the customer back to their original cart. For some audiences, that may feel like too aggressive of a strategy, but that’s why A/B testing is so important. What works for one brand doesn’t necessarily work for another. If we compare this email template to the Beardbrand emails above, the copy and design for these two beard-themed companies really could not be more different.
As helpful as it is to look through all of these templates, don’t forget that your audience is its own wild community of unicorns that need to be interviewed, researched, and A/B-tested for the best results. The more emails you see, the easier it is to understand how to assemble your own and prepare them for testing, so we’ve put together this swipe file to make it simple to get inspired.
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