Abandoned Cart Coupon Code Ideas for Customer Winback

Here's some ideas you can implement this week to target coupon code emails to your "churn risk" customers who just Abandoned Cart so you can win them back.

If you don't have a sales or service team who can proactively call or email Abandoned Cart customers (or it wouldn't be economical to do so), then sending a "Winback"-level coupon offer to your "Churn Risk" Abandoned Cart customers may be the best way to quickly close the sale. 

This will be a short post. If you've already implemented our Two Segment Abandoned Cart, our New Customer Winback, and our New Customer Journey Segmentation article then you should be able to get these Abandoned Cart emails live in 1-2 hours!

Quick Steps:

1. Build a Churn Risk Customer List
2. Build a Discount & 2-3 Abandoned Emails
3. Build and Launch the Workflow

Build a Churn Risk Customer List

You'll want to create a HubSpot Active List to use in the trigger criteria to identify the "Churn Risk" customers. The reason it's best to use a list rather than raw criteria is that:

1. You'll need to put this list in as an exclusion criteria for any other abandoned cart campaigns (that way they don't get this content AND the other ones you're sending)
2. Given that you'll use this in multiple places, this makes it easier to update the "Churn Risk" criteria in a single place, if you want

We've identified 4 major stages of customer activity based on their "Last Order Date", which are:

1. Active
2. Drifting
3. Churn Risk
4. Lost

I discuss these 4 in more detail in this article, and though it's about New Customers these 4 categories apply to any lifecycle stage.

In the two articles I referenced above there's two major ways to build criteria for for your "Churn Risk" Active List, using either raw "Last Order Date" criteria ranges or a "Recency Rating" custom dropdown.

Easy Method: Raw Last Order Date

Create a new Active List called "All Churn Risk Customers", or something like that, and apply the following Last Order Date criteria, which I also described in this New Customer Winback targeting article. 

It's possible to be super math-savvy about this, but without getting into complicated Excel analysis of your customer base, just launch a first version based on your gut instincts of your customer needs.

Let's say, for sake of example your "Average Days Between Orders" is 107 days.

Your "Churn Risk" New Customers will be those who haven't bought between 3-4 times that "Average Days Between Orders". In this "107 days" example, that's 321-428 days since their last order.

If their last order was MORE than 428 days ago, we're considering them a "Lost" new customer, so you're going to launch this email series to customers who are in the previous "Churn Risk" stage. 

Think through the numbers and do the math for your own business, but here's what the Active List criteria would look like per the criteria above:

For the sake of getting more data in this test, you could also open this up to all "Churn Risk" and "Lost" customers, in case some lost customers come back and abandon. That would look like just the first criteria, and maybe change the list name: 

Robust Method: Recency Rating Custom Dropdown

This requires implementing this article's "Customer Recency Rating" properties, list, and workflow  methodology, but if you've built this then setting up this list will be more robust for future changes and be easier to implement.

Here's what the criteria looks like for "Churn Risk" customers using the "Customer Recency Rating" value:

Here's what that looks like if you want to include "Lost" along with "Churn Risk":

Build a Discount & 2-3 Abandoned Emails

In this other Winback article, I covered how to identify a discount that would be the best fit for your business. When I help implement a Winback campaign the discount is commonly between 15-30%.

Again, the idea here is that it's more economical to just offer a discount to close that sale than try to call the customer to help them or give them a soft reminder to try to close the sale without a discount.

It's a very good sign that this "Churn Risk" customer has abandoned a cart, which means that they're about 90% to the finish line. They came to you first, so this isn't like a standard "Winback" campaign where you're reaching out to them to try to get a sale. So you might not need to discount as much as you would in that scenario.

My recommendation would be to match whatever "Winback" discount amount you're using in your other campaigns, see how it affects sales, and then experiment with cutting the discount in half and see if sales diminish or not.

You want something that works to close sales, first, and then you can optimize how little of a discount you can get away with, second.

I would use a fixed discount code that you generate in your shopping cart and then just update in the emails every 2-3 months.

I would also make sure though not to use the exact same winback code that you're using in other campaigns even if they're the same % or $ amount, that way it can be clear to you, even from your shopping cart reporting, which email campaign actually closed the sale.

Maybe you use MISSYOU-45KLT for your New Customer winback code but WELCOMEBACK-45KLT for your Abandoned Cart winback code, which makes it easy for you to track the difference of which coupon is contributing more to closing sales.

Since they took an action first, you can reach out to them with subject line and body copy that reflects that with sentiments like:

• "We've Missed You!"
• "It's good to see you back!"
• "Haven't seen you in a while!"

Here's how to create a custom HubSpot module for the Abandoned Cart emails that will load in the Abandoned Cart content. We also sell an Email/Workflow pack for $250 that includes two Abandoned Cart emails with a workflow if you haven't gotten that far yet and want us to do most of the work for you. 

Build and Launch the Workflow

Just like I wrote in this article, you'll need to involve this Active List in the Workflow Triggers for all Abandoned Cart workflows.

At a base level, the workflow should have this, and you can layer in other criteria, as needed:

Make sure you understand how HubSpot handles re-enrollment.

Note that you want re-enrollment to be on the "Current Abandoned Cart" criteria, NOT the "All Churn Risk Customers" list membership.

Both will be required before the workflow is triggered, even during re-enrollment. But you want to check for the trigger when a new abandoned cart is made, NOT when they've had an abandoned cart open for the last few months and they just just changed stages from "Drifting" to "Churn Risk" which would put them into that "All Churn Risk Customers".

Having "All Churn Risk Customers" list checked off for re-enrollment would trigger abandoned emails in that scenario, which is not what you'd want.

Finally, you need to make sure this "All Churn Risk Customers" list is excluded in any other Abandoned Cart workflows, or else contacts could be simultaneously enrolled into this new workflow as well as your other ones.

Excluding them in your trigger criteria looks like this, just making sure contacts who are enrolled into your other Abandoned Cart workflows are not a member of this "All Churn Risk Customers" list:

Test Results and Grow Sales

There are many ways you can follow up with Abandoned Carts or send coupon offers specific to Abandoned Cart conversions and this is just another example. You'll have to split test, review conversion results, and decide what works best for your business based on the conversion and engagement data. But the good news is that Abandoned Cart is one of the most critical and common touch points for ecommerce, so it's usually a good place to invest your time and optimize your results. I hope this helps you grow your business in the new year! 

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