Mailchimp Guide (part 4) Abandoned Carts

Using Mailchimp in Magento 2

Part 4 - Abandoned Carts

The last step to have all our store information Synced correctly is setting the Abandoned Carts.

Enabling the Abandoned Cart Configuration will start the syncing process for Abandoned Carts.

First thing we need to know is that the abandoned carts won't start sending unless the Store is completely synced. As we mentioned before, the automations won't start until the Account Synced flag has updated and we can see the date in the Configuration, incidentally any abandoned cart created prior to this are not taken into account.

As in the case of orders, we have a First Date field, so every abandoned cart created later than that date will sync. The reason for this is to not sync old abandoned carts since it makes no sense to send an email to a customer that abandoned a shopping cart several months ago.

The Redirect Page indicates where we want to take the Customer when they click the button in the abandoned cart automation email that indicates the customer to recover their cart, by default we send him to the Shopping Cart, but we can select a different option if needed. In case a customer abandons a cart while being logged into their account, we send them directly to the Login Page or the Shopping Cart depending on if they're logged in or not.

The last option available to enable is if we want to save the Customer Email to the quote at the moment they add it or not. When the email is added in checkout, we can see there is an ajax call made that is going to verify if a customer with that email exists, and in case it exists in Magento it asks them if they want to login, if we enable that last setting, then we take advantage of that ajax call to save the email to the Cart(this is done by default to logged in customers but not guests). In some countries where GDPR is in effect this should not be done, we shouldn't save ANY customer information without their permission.

With that done, there is nothing else required for the Carts to start syncing.

Now, when is a cart 'abandoned'?

In Magento, an abandoned cart exists only if a logged in customer adds any products to the Cart, but never finishes the Checkout process.

Here the process is fairly simple, if a logged in customer leaves products in their cart, as we know, the cart does not get deleted in this case, it's unique, so we can send it to Mailchimp.

What about the guests?

This is a different case, to begin with, Magento does not consider Guest Carts as Abandoned Carts, but we do. Based on a few criteria:

• 1) If we abandon a cart as a guest, with a customer email, then it's not an abandoned cart. As it would not be logical to send an email to a registered customer of something that anybody with that email address in their possession could have done.

• 2) If the email that exists in the cart is not from a registered customer, then our module checks a few more things to consider it an abandoned cart.

  • a) Is there an existing order for that same email, which is newer than the Quote? Then the cart is not an abandoned cart. The customer may have started adding products to the cart but did not finish the checkout process for whatever reason, then, when they tried to keep buying, the cookie expired, so they had to start over and finally placed the order in a different session. So in this case it is clearly not an abandoned cart.

  • b) Is there a newer abandoned cart using that same email address? It's the same as before, but the customer did not finish the checkout process. So the abandoned cart that matters is the newest.

Obviously, if the cart is modified (for example, a new product is added to the cart), it resyncs to Mailchimp.

And if the cart turns into an order, it gets deleted from Mailchimp.

Now, let's see how to set this from Mailchimp's Side.

Here we have two possibilities, the fast and easy one is going to Connected Sites.

There we can choose our Mailchimp Store, and the only thing we need to do is click on the 'Add' button for the Abandoned Cart Email.

Here we can identify two different areas, the first one:

It contains information about when we are sending the email (In this case, 6 hours after the cart was abandoned), from which email address is the email going to be sent, and the subject for the email.

We can choose a different timespan instead of 6 hours.

The second area is the Email Design, where we see different templates to choose from or we could create our own from scratch.

In this case, only one abandoned cart email will be sent to the customer, depending on the criteria chosen in the 'Sends To' setting.

The second possibility is more complex but also contains a lot more personalization.

It is to define an Email Series, this will send more than just one abandoned cart email.

Let's check how to do this:

We are going to the Campaigns, and we click on 'Create Campaign'

We are going to choose 'Email'

We select Automated, then E-Commerce, and finally 'Turn on an abandoned cart email'

And then we are going to choose 'Email Series' and our Mailchimp Store.

By default, there appear 3 emails in the series.

There we are going to be able to edit when we want to send them, just like the simple emails, we can edit the content, and even segment it via different criteria.

We can also add more emails to the series.

This allows for more flexibility, as we can for example, send the first email 20 minutes after the cart was abandoned.

Then, if it is still abandoned we can send another email one or two hours later, offering the customer a discount coupon or something similar.

And finally, we could send a last email after two hours.

There are a lot of possibilities and different ways to build an Email Series for abandoned carts, and we can always choose how we want to set this.

As mentioned before, if the customer purchases the abandoned cart, then the cart is deleted from Mailchimp and the series stops sending for that specific email until a new abandoned cart is sent.

Another important thing to keep in mind, is that Mailchimp sends the first email of an Email Series to ALL customers that abandon a cart, but the next emails are ONLY sent to your List Subscribers. This is due to legal reasons, as the first email is only considered as a Transactional Email, but the rest are considered a Campaign, and you cannot send a campaign to someone that is not subscribed to your Mailchimp List.

In the Order Grid you can see the orders that are a result of purchasing via an Abandoned Cart email (they clicked on the email link and went through with the checkout process) indicated with an image of Freddie.

As we can see above, order 3 has a little monkey (Freddie). This means that the order is the result of a Mailchimp Campaign, it might be because the customer clicked on the button as a result of an Abandoned Cart email or just a normal Campaign.

The truth is that this order is the result of a Mailchimp Campaign, this way we can easily see in Magento how successful our campaigns are.

We hope this Guide has helped you understand better how the Abandoned Carts work, if you need any assistance don't hesitate to contact us, as always we will try our best to help you with any issues.