Supercharge Abandoned Cart Emails with Live Chat

Most stores seem to have abandoned cart email campaigns that are some variation of reminder, reminder with discount, and then a hail Mary discount. But in most cases, there’s a question holding someone back from buying. A reminder or discount doesn’t solve that.

We’ve seen killer results by integrating live chat into abandoned cart emails to quickly answer questions (and get sales):

1. Visitors get your abandon cart email
2. Simple CTA with “ have a quick question? Our team is online on chat right now.”
3. Visitor clicks, website opens with their cart contents, and the chat box is open with a live agent able to help.

To be transparent, we run 24/7 live chat teams for 100+ stores and implement this for most of them. But it’s definitely something you can implement yourself if you have to staff to execute on 24/7 live chat.

Here’s the key pieces: 

Add Live Chat in the Checkout Process

With Shopify Plus this is easy, but it’s critical to have live chat directly within to check out. Not only can you predict abandons and engage before they leave (refer to our previous blog post about Live Chat Cart Recovery), but you need this to continue the conversation when visitors come back from abandon cart emails.

Keep the CTA in Emails Simple

You don’t need to get fancy with your call to action for live chat in emails. Just make it a clear option for people to chat with your team with one click. Typically, we see a simple text or small image link as a secondary call to action in the emails perform well. 

Segment These Visitors for White Glove Treatment

Yes, everyone should get great treatment. But you should prioritize abandoned cart return visitors even more ; )

When someone clicks to the website from abandoned cart emails, make sure to tag the URL they click. This probably already happens anyway, but you’ll need this to trigger the chat box to automatically open after the click and can also use the tags to flag your team to treat them differently than a normal chat.

The specifics depends on your chat software, but tagging from the email link is all you really need.

Here’s a blog post that goes into more detail on the overall strategy of using live strategically in the checkout process. But integrating into your emails is an easy win.