Recover Abandoned Carts

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Integrate Collect Tracking Code into your website.
• Upload your product catalog to Marketing Cloud Engagement.
• Create an email message that contains abandoned cart items.

Leave It Behind

Can you imagine if people abandoned their shopping carts in the real world as frequently as they abandon their virtual carts? Salesforce research shows that people abandon up to 69 percent of online shopping carts. If that many carts were left lingering in the aisles, you’d never make it through the store! And while online stores don’t have to deal with physical shopping carts blocking the way, they do have to address what stands in the way of customers completing a purchase. Because if you can get even a few people to come back and complete their purchase, you increase revenue and strengthen the customer experience. Simply put, behavioral triggers remind shoppers that they left something behind and can give them an incentive to come back and get it.

Watch this video to see how behavioral triggers work, then join us back here as we follow outdoor gear and apparel retailer Northern Trail Outfitters’ use of behavioral triggers.

Create a Behavioral Trigger

Michele Hansley is a technical marketer at Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), and she’s been charged with recovering potential revenue from abandoned carts. She was chosen for this task because she’s comfortable working with HTML and website integrations, so she has already started getting NTO’s website ready for deployment of behavioral triggers. Let’s follow along.

In this module, we assume you are a Marketing Cloud Engagement user with the proper permissions and access to create behavioral triggers. If you can’t access these features, that’s OK. Read along to learn how Michele would take the steps in a production org. Don't try to follow these steps in your Trailhead Playground. Marketing Cloud Engagement isn't available in the Trailhead Playground.

Track Your Products

First, Michele logs in to her Marketing Cloud Engagement tenant and navigates to the Einstein tab, then she selects Email Recommendations. Next, she clicks OK to start the process.

1. She selects Product and clicks Next.
2. A few mandatory attributes, such as product code and name, are already selected. Michele also wants to include SkuID, ImageLink, and Description in the target data extension that stores the information for future sends. She selects those attributes and clicks Next.
3. She decides to include customer user profile attributes and localization support in the process. She selects Enable for both options and clicks Next.
4. She makes sure the process tracks cart and purchase activity and clicks Next.
5. She reviews the final summary and clicks Finish.

At this point, Michele gets a prompt to send installation instructions to her web team. She enters all of the appropriate email addresses (including her own, because she’s supervising the process). Of course, she can also navigate to the code implementation section to see all of the code she needs to integrate with the NTO website.

In Collect Tracking Code Implementation, Michele clicks On next to the Batch Upload header. She then clicks Upload Catalog to upload a .csv file containing the SKU and other characteristics of NTO’s product offerings. This step requires mapping some fields from the catalog to the online shop—a fairly simple task. 

She also works with her team to get the code snippets integrated into NTO’s online shopping experience. This process takes a little time because of all the moving parts and team members involved. However, the group eventually gets everything in place and receives confirmation that the site and Marketing Cloud Engagement are working properly. Now it’s time to craft the email!

Create the Behavioral Trigger Journey

Michele navigates to Journey Builder and selects Behavioral Triggers. She’s ready to create the framework that gathers the abandoned cart information.

1. In Journey Builder, Michele clicks Get Started.
2. She selects Abandoned Cart and clicks Next.
3. She configures the suppression rules to prevent sends to customers who either received a previous trigger or made a purchase within the past 24 hours. These settings prevent customers from getting overwhelmed by too many email messages. She clicks Next.
4. She reviews the information and clicks Finish.
5. Finally, she clicks  and sets the Session Timeout Limit to 30 minutes. This setting represents the amount of time used to identify when a shopping session is considered abandoned.

Next, Michele navigates to Content Builder and creates a brand-new email message around a Behavioral Triggers content block. She drags that block over to the canvas and determines how many products to show and what information to include.

She decides to get creative and build two more abandoned cart email messages—one with a more enticing offer, and a final message that includes the best offer as part of her call to action. All of the materials are in place, so Michele is ready to head to Journey Builder and set up the journey that powers these email sends. We take a look at that in the next unit.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Behavioral Triggers
• Salesforce Help: Collect Tracking Code