Powerful, best-in-class, commission-free abandoned cart features for your store
The articles below will let you know how to get the best from your plugin. If you’ve purchased an extension – feel free to get in touch on our support form.
Your campaign emails can contain a number of tags that will be replaced dynamically based on the customer and cart details. The list of standard tags provided by the free plugin are on the “Email replacement tags” article.
This article covers the additional tags available with the Pro add-on.
This will be replaced with an auto-generated discount code, unique per customer. See more about auto-discount codes here.
By default the cart recovery plugin tracks all carts, and sends out campaigns to all carts that enter the recovery process. Sometimes though you might not want to send campaigns to some users. For example if you have some users who are wholesale customers that you don’t want campaigns to go to.
Cart Recovery (v2.3.1 or higher) and Cart Recovery Pro (v1.9.2 or higher) include filters that let you block campaigns being sent to individual carts.
Here’s an example that will block sending of campaigns to any carts that belong to logged in users.
Within your filter, you can access the customer’s email, their cart details, and the campaign being sent. So, for example you could block the campaign being sent to people whose email matched a specific domain.
The latest release of the Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin features some updates to the reporting, making it even easier to see the value of the orders that you’re recovering. The status page now shows the total value of orders recovered in the last 30, and 90 days as headline stats for your store:
Stats will start recording as soon as you upgrade, and the blocks will show as soon as you have recovered carts.
Restrict Content Pro is a full-featured, powerful membership solution for WordPress, allowing you to lock away your premium content, and give access to membership levels you define.
While it’s not an e-Commerce solution in the traditional sense, it’s still important to realise that if you run a membership site with Restrict Content Pro – you could still be losing prospective members at checkout.
The latest release of Cart Recovery for WordPress integrates with Restrict Content Pro out of the box, meaning you get all of the standard abandoned cart recovery features for your membership site. It supports multiple membership levels, central registration pages, or even separate registration pages.
The Pro add-on also has full support for Restrict Content Pro, which means you get its professional features for your store:
Auto-generated abandoned cart discount codes for Restrict Content Pro
Try Cart Recovery for WordPress
While the Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin let’s you easily edit the content of your recovery emails online using WordPress’s standard editor, you may occasionally want more control over the layout of the email. Perhaps you have an existing email template that you want to use to fit in with the rest of your store email campaigns – or maybe you just want to apply some minor markup /styling changes.
Standard order button
All of the email markup is controlled by HTML templates which can be overridden in your WordPress theme without having to modify the plugin itself. As an example, we’ll look at changing the styling of the call-to-action button in the email. Out of the box – the button looks like this:Here’s the steps we need to go through to change the styling of that button.
We won’t customise the templates in the plugin directly as they would be overwritten on the next plugin update. However – the plugin will check your active theme for customised versions of templates, and will use those in preference to the bundled versions giving you a simple way to modify templates. So that the plugin can find the templates you need to create a new folder called crfw in your theme (note: We always recommend using a child theme).
Next you’ll need to move any templates that you want to modify into the new crfw folder in your theme. The original versions of the templates can be found in wp-content/plugins/cart-recovery/templates. In our case, the template file we need is called email-cart-button.php, so we copy that into our theme, inside the new crfw folder.
Now you can edit the template files in your theme – safe in the knowledge that they won’t be overwritten by plugin updates. We’re going to open up the cart email button template, which looks like this:
<center><a style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; color: #fff; text-decoration: none; line-height: 2em; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; border-radius: 5px; text-transform: capitalize; background-color: #348eda; margin: 0; border-color: #348eda; border-style: solid; border-width: 10px 20px; margin: 2em 0;" href="{cart_url}"><?php _e( 'Finish your order now', 'cart-recovery' ); ?></a></center>For a quick demo, we’ll change the button colour to black, by changing background-color: #348eda; margin: 0; border-color: #348eda; to background-color: #000000; margin: 0; border-color: #000000;
Customised order button
There we have it …
This guide will take you through setting up an abandoned cart recovery campaign with Easy Digital Downloads and the Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin. This is a great plugin to try out abandoned cart recovery, letting you set up an automated recovery email in just a few minutes.
The plugin is available from the WordPress.org plugin repository – or you can grab a copy and register for updates on this site. Just install, and activate the plugin as you would any other WordPress plugin.
Once you’ve activated it, you’ll see a new top-level menu item called “Cart Recovery” in your WordPress admin dashboard.
This is where you can modify the settings (on the Tracking options tab), change your recovery email content (on the Simple campaign tab), and also track carts that are being abandoned, recovered and abandoned on the Recovery status tab.
To set up the plugin, you’ll first want to check the Tracking options tab. Here you can set the “From address” and name that will be used for the emails that go out.
These will auto-populate from WordPress’ core settings, so should be correct – although you may want to have recovery emails go from a specific account.
Also on this page there is a checkbox to enable tracking, and campaign emails. You won’t be able to turn this on until your store has processed an order and the plugin has verified that it can track everything it needs from Easy Digital Downloads. We’ll come back to this later.
The Simple campaign tab is where you can set up the email content for your campaign. You can choose the subject line, and the email content.
Again, default content is provided for your abandoned cart campaign – however you’re free to change it however you want. There are a number of email replacement tags that can be used to insert customer-specific information into the email. The sample content includes most of them already – but a handle list is available on the page.
Now that you’ve configured your emails you just need to activate your campaign. The plugin won’t let you activate until it’s seen a completed order go through Easy Digital Downloads. You can either place a test order yourself, or wait for a real order to go through.
Once that’s happened, then the checkbox on the Tracking options tab will be available, simply check it, and save and your campaign will be active.
You’re up and running!
Once your campaign is active, the plugin will start tracking carts, and checkouts in Easy Digital Downloads – you can monitor the process on the Recovery status tab.
This will show you a breakdown of how many carts didn’t convert, how many did, and how many are currently going through the recovery process.
If you want more detail on the customers, and their carts, then Cart Recovery for WordPress Pro gives you a list of all carts, and their contents, including the ability to export to CSV. It’ll also give you auto-generated, per-customer discount codes, multiple emails, and flexible campaign timing.
Including discount codes in your abandoned cart recovery emails can be a great way of getting a sale completed. There are a couple of different options for including discount codes:
When you’re using the Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin you have full control over your email content, so it’s easy to add in fixed discount codes like this into your campaign email:
Obviously you can be as creative as you want here – working the code into buttons, images or banners in the email for best effect.
Using fixed codes like this has its advantages:
It can have some disadvantages though. Fixed discount codes like this tend to get shared on discount sites, with potentially anyone able to take advantage of the code even if they’ve never had an abandoned cart, and would have been happy to complete the purchase at full price if a code wasn’t available.
“Hey everyone, did you know you can get 10% off at Acme Inc. using code WELCOMEBACK!? “
The best way to avoid discount-code sharing is by creating unique, single-use codes for each customer. Even if a customer does share the code – it can only be used once.
Fortunately this is something that Cart Recovery for WordPress Pro makes a breeze. When you’re setting up your campaign you can use the special replacement tag {discount}. When your campaign is triggered, the plugin will automatically generate a unique, one-time use discount code, and replace the code details into the email.
So, this:
Take 10% off your order with the code {discount}
gets automatically turned into this – with a unique code per customer email:
Take 10% off your order with the code TEMPTING-2FD7EF1B
Find out more in our article about Unique discount code generation in abandoned cart emails.
Today – we’re going to take a look at how you can quickly, and easily set up abandoned cart recovery on your WooCommerce powered store using the FREE Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin:
This guide walks you through how easy it is to set up an abandoned cart recovery campaign on a WooCommerce store. Watch the video – or step through the walkthrough / transcript below.
What do I mean by “Cart recovery”?
Well – if you shop online, at some point you’re sure to have come across an “abandoned cart” campaign. You add a product to your cart, but you don’t complete your purchase. Perhaps you’re shopping around for a better price, you want to check with your partner before you finalise the purchase, or maybe you just need some more information about the product. Some time later you receive an email from the store reminding you that you added some products to your cart, but didn’t complete your purchase.
These emails are great at getting people to finalise their order.
If you’re not tracking abandoned carts already you’re probably completely unaware of the sales that you’re missing out on. Even if you’re tracking goals that don’t complete in your analytics package – you still don’t have the information you need to follow up those sales.
Today – we’re going to look at how you can quickly and easily set up an abandoned cart recovery campaign on a WooCommerce store.
The Cart Recovery for WordPress plugin is a great way to get started with abandoned cart recovery, letting you set up automated recovery emails really simply. Not only that, but the core plugin is completely free.
Although we’re looking at WooCommerce today – the cart recovery plugin works with Easy Digital Downloads and WP e-Commerce as well.
We’re going to look at a test store for the purposes of this demo – but the process is the same for an established site, and the great news is that it will only take you a couple of minutes.
The first thing we’re going to do is install the Cart Recovery plugin. The plugin is available from the WordPress.org plugin repository – or you can grab a copy and register for updates on this site. As you can see, the plugin is completely free, you just need to provide your details and you’ll get a download link straight away. We’ll use a copy we’ve already downloaded.
We’ll head to our store – this is a demo install. It just has WooCommerce, the basic Storefront theme, and a single test product so we can show orders. We’ll log in and go the plugins page, install the plugin, and then activate it.
As soon as the plugin is active we’ll get a new menu item in the WordPress admin area. This holds everything to do with Cart recovery – let’s take a look.
Main cart recovery status page
The main screen gives you a simple overview of carts that are “in recovery” on your site. It will show how many carts didn’t convert, how many did, and how many are still in progress. These are obviously all blank at the moment as this is a fresh install.
The next tab along is the main options. Here you can set the from address and name that will go on your emails . They’ll default in from the main WordPress settings – so we’ll leave them as is. Obviously you can change these if you need to. You’ll notice a checkbox on this screen that’s greyed out. This will be disabled initially until the plugin has had a chance to confirm that it can detect carts and successful orders and so you have a chance to set up your campaign. We’ll come back to this in a little while.
Email content admin page
The final tab is the most interesting. This is where you set up the content for your recovery email. You can see that the plugin provides some default content – although you’re completely free to change it to suit your needs. You can choose the email subject, and the email content. The plugin will take of sending your email out to customers with abandoned carts – wrapped up in a nice, neat, HTML template. The email content contains a couple of replacement tags that can be used to populate customer information into each email as it goes out.
There are tags for the cart content itself so your customers will get a nice, neat table of what was in their basket. There are call to action buttons, and there are also tags for links so you can make whatever text, buttons or graphics you want into links back to the checkout.
So – we’ll head over to our store, and place a test order, so we can activate the campaign.
As we said we have a single test product, which we add to our basket, and head to checkout. We’ll enter some test details for the purposes of this demo. We’ve set the store up for cheque payment so we don’t have to provide payment. We’ll place our order and that’s it. That’s the order complete within WooCommerce – let’s have a look at the Cart recovery plugin.
There’s no real change on the first tab since our order completed normally. If we head over to the second tab now that a completed order has been received, the plugin will let us activate our campaign. Let’s do that. That’s it – the campaign is now active. Carts will be tracked, and emails sent out automatically. Let’s try it out.
We’ll head back to our test product, add it to our cart, and head over to checkout. We’re going to pretend to be a customer – so we’ll put in some test details. Now here’s where your customer might pause the process. Maybe they have a query about shipping prices, maybe they don’t have their payment details on them. So – they leave the process right there. Let’s have a look at what that looks like in Cart Recovery.
Status page showing pending cart.
On this first screen we can see that there’s a pending order underway. This is a cart that is in the process of going through checkout. It hasn’t been left long enough for the Cart Recovery plugin to say that it has been abandoned – but it’s in progress. For our real orders that complete normally – they will come and go from this screen. We don’t show normally completed orders here to avoid cluttering up the display.
However – if we just leave that basket, and don’t touch it, after 20 minutes, the plugin will put the cart into recovery. Let’s pause here, and check back in 20 minutes….
So – 20 minutes ago we left our cart in Pending status. The customer had started going through checkout but the system hadn’t yet established that they had left it and failed to complete. Here’s what we saw within Cart Recovery – we saw one pending cart sat there waiting. Twenty minutes have now passed, so let’s reload this screen and see what’s changed.
As expected, the cart has moved on from status Pending, into Recovery. That means that the plugin has identified that nothing has changed on that cart for twenty minutes, and it has decided that it should go through a recovery process. In a further thirty minutes time our campaign will actually go out. So – let’s pause here, and then take a look at that campaign when it goes out…
When we left off, our cart was in the recovery process. Thirty minutes after that the recovery campaign will get sent, so let’s have a look at what came through.
Cart recovery campaign email.
This is the email that got sent, you can see that it’s got our content that we set up in the admin area. What has also happened is that the replacement tags have been replaced with the actual customer information. The cart content has been replaced with this nice little breakdown of what was in the cart; the product image, the product name, and the price. All the information that the customer needs to remember what they were buying.
All of our links have been replaced with links back to the checkout process, including the call to action buttons. When the customer clicks through on those they get taken straight back to checkout, we’re not asking them to find their products again, or add them to the cart again – they’ve all been brought through, into the basket, into checkout straight away.
That’s a cart recovery campaign set up on WooCommerce. It probably took us about five minutes with a bit of explanation either side. It’s really east to try this out on your store. There are Pro add-ons available which give you more features, such as multiple emails, flexible email timing, and per-customer discount codes. If that’s something that interests you then check that out, but if you just want to give it a try, you can try the free version, maybe upgrade later – or just stick with the free version if that works for you.
Hope you get time to check it out.
Install & activate the plugin as you would any normal plugin. If in doubt – check out the the plugin installation article in the WordPress Codex.
Cart recovery for WordPress will show up in your WordPress admin area as “Cart recovery”. The plugin will start tracking visitors at checkout straight away. As soon as a customer has visited checkout and provided their email address they’ll show up in the admin area on the “Cart list” tab:
The “Simple campaign” tab will let you choose when to send your email, and what the email should say. The default email content includes a number of tags that will be replaced with dynamic information based on the customer, and cart contents. You can see the full list of available tags in this support article.
Once carts are being tracked the plugin will check that successful orders are being captured. No-one wants to send recovery emails to customers who completed their order!
Until a successful order has been placed, you won’t be able to activate your email campaign. As soon as you have, and you’re happy with your campaign content – then simply enable campaigns by ticking the option in the plugin settings. You can also override your “From” address, and email on this page:
Your campaign emails can contain a number of tags that will be replaced dynamically based on the customer and cart details. The list of tags you can use is shown below.
Note: This article covers the standard tags available with the free plugin. The Pro add-on adds additional tags which are listed separately in the “Advanced email replacement tags” article.
This will be replaced with the user’s cart details – to remind them what they were purchasing.
A link straight to checkout. This link also contains information that the plugin will pick up on to re-populate the user’s cart – making for a seamless experience.
This will be replaced with a clear call-to-action button linked back to your store. This link contains information that the plugin will pick up on to re-populate the user’s cart – and taking them straight to checkout.
This will be replaced with the customer’s first name if they’ve provided one. If not, then the word “friend” will be inserted instead so your copy still makes sense.
For example, “Hi {first_name},” would become “Hi Bob,” if the customer had given us their name, or “Hi friend,” if not.
This will be replaced with the customer’s last name if they’ve provided one. If not, then a blank string will be inserted instead.
This will be replaced with your main store email address as set up on your WordPress site.
This will be replaced with the URL of the unique per-customer unsubscribe link to allow customer’s to opt-out of further emails in this campaign.
This will be replaced with the subject line of your email campaign as you’ve configured it on the campaign setup pages.
This will be replaced your store name.
