BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails – How To Guide
Running a BigCommerce store is a great way to sell your products online. However, sometimes customers might add items to your cart, but never purchase them. Luckily, the BigCommerce platform keeps tracks of these “abandoned carts”. They also offer a user friendly way to contact customers who have left their cart full via “Abandoned Cart Emails”.
According to SaleCycle, 75.6% people put items in their online shopping cart only to leave it without completing their purchase.¹
That’s a lot of money on the table! What would it mean to you to get 1%, 5%, 10% or 20% of those “lost” sales? That’s exactly what a proper abandoned cart campaign can do for you.
We’ve put together a How To Guide for store owners like you to activate and customize your abandoned cart emails.
Getting Started
Before we begin, we’re going to assume you have access to Abandoned Cart Emails via a “Plus” level BigCommerce plan at minimum. To learn more about the feature, see the BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Saver support article on the subject.
Now then, to begin the process, log in to your BigCommerce account and access your store Dashboard. From here you’ll want to find “Store Setup > Store Settings > Miscellaneous” Then scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll be able to activate the abandoned cart emails as well as make some choices about how often you will be notified.
Now then, to edit the emails, From the dashboard you’ll want to find “Marketing > Abandoned Cart Notifications”. On this screen you’ll be able to activate or deactivate 3 different emails.
In order to edit an email from the Abandoned Cart Notifications screen, find the header “Action” and click the three dots corresponding to the email you want to edit. You’ll be presented with the following screen:
From here you can change your Subject Line, Message, Coupon Code and Send Time. For most users, this is enough customization to add some personality and branding to your emails. Feel free to add your logo or other images and bring your emails to life!
How to Customize your Emails Further
To really bring your branding and design to your abandoned cart emails, you’ll need knowledge in HTML and CSS. BigCommerce uses a template system that allows you to fine-tune the emails you send. We’ve put together a breakdown of the default abandoned cart email that illustrates how these templates fit within one another.
You might be wondering what all these variables mean. Variables are dynamic elements are generated in your email. This includes things like your customer’s name, items in their cart, and much more. There’s so many variables to go over, so we’ve laid out the variables you’ll be using in your emails in the glossary below.
Variable Glossary
%%GLOBAL_AC_EmailBody%%
“Abandoned Cart Notification” user customizable section from the BigCommerce dashboard.
CUSTOMIZATION: ( Dashboard > Marketing > Abandoned Cart Notifications > Action > Edit )
%%GLOBAL_AC_EmailFooter%%
“EmailFooter.html”, found in the “Email Templates” section of the BigCommerce dashboard.
CUSTOMIZATION: ( Dashboard > Storefront > Email Templates > Snippets > EmailFooter.html > Action > Edit )
%%GLOBAL_AC_UnsubscribeLink%%
The URL used to unsubscribe the particular recipient from future abandoned cart emails.
%%LNG_AC_EmailUnsubscribe%%
A string of text, “Unsubscribe”. Replace this with your own text to change the output.
%%LNG_AC_EmailUnsubscribeSuffix%%
A string of text, “from future emails like this”. Replace this with your own text to change the output.
%%FIRSTNAME%%
The First Name of the customer as entered during checkout.
%%LASTNAME%%
The Last Name of the customer as entered during checkout.
%%FULLNAME%%
The First and Last Name of the customer as entered during checkout, separated by a space.
%%CARTCONTENTS%%
“ACCartContents.html”, found in the “Email Templates” section of the BigCommerce dashboard.
CUSTOMIZATION: ( Dashboard > Storefront > Email Templates > Snippets > ACCartContents.html > Action > Edit )
%%COUPONBOX%%
“ACCouponBox.html”, found in the “Email Templates” section of the BigCommerce dashboard.
CUSTOMIZATION: ( Dashboard > Storefront > Email Templates > Snippets > ACCouponBox.html > Action > Edit )
%%CHECKOUTLINK%%
Tthe URL used to link directly to the customer’s abandoned cart. Does not require customer login.
%%GLOBAL_ProductURL%%
The URL used to link to the Product Page of a particular item found in a customer’s cart.
%%GLOBAL_ProductThumbnailUrl%%
The URL used to generate the image thumbnail for an item found in a customer’s cart.
%%GLOBAL_ProductName%%
The full name of a product in a customer’s cart.
%%GLOBAL_ProductQuantity%%
The quantity of a certain item as selected by the customer.
%%GLOBAL_ProductAttributes%%
The attributes of a certain item as selected by the consumer. For example: Color, Size or other Variants
%%GLOBAL_StoreName%%
The store name as set by the store owner in the BigCommerce dashboard.
CUSTOMIZATION: ( Dashboard > Store Setup > Store Profile > Store Name )
%%GLOBAL_ShopPathNormal%%
The store’s URL prefixed with HTTP.
Using these variables, templates and standard email practices you can go from the default email to a full on branded email. Just look at what we’ve done for one of our clients recently and you’ll see that the difference can be drastic!
If you are looking to edit your own Abandoned Cart Emails and aren’t sure how to achieve results like we’ve shown above, we can help! Contact us and we can work together to recover abandoned carts for your store.
