# This guide will help you understand
What is an abandoned cart campaign and why you should use it
How to create this scenario step-by-step using Bloomreach Engagement
How to insert the abandoned products in the email template
How to AB test and evaluate your campaign
Watch this short introductory video about this feature:
# What is an abandoned cart campaign
Abandoned cart campaign automatically sends an email to customers who have left without ordering items they added to their cart. The average e-commerce loses over 75% of its online sales to cart abandonment. In other words, over 3/4 of shoppers choose to leave the site without completing a purchase. As the customers have already added products to the basket, they were quite far in the buying decision process. Remind the customers after a few hours or days that they have forgotten the items in the basket and increase the conversion rate easily.
## How your campaign will look like
You will have created the following scenario including the email template:
# How to create it using Bloomreach Engagement
This guide will show you how to create an abandoned cart campaign from scratch.
## Prerequisites
| Bloomreach Engagement Skills |
| **Intermediate** - we will guide you step-by-step but we assume you are comfortable navigating and working with basic components in Bloomreach Engagement. If you get stuck at any point, go back and read an article for that respective feature, mainly these: _ [Scenarios](🔗) _ [Aggregates and running aggregates](🔗) * [Expressions](🔗) |
| Data and tracking |
**1. Tracking of the event** `cart_update`
Required attributes:
_ `action` = `add/remove` - tracked for every change of the contents of the shopping cart
_ `product_list` - contains the current list of items present in the cart together with other required values to personalize the email. This attribute needs to contain all products that are in the cart _after_ the last `action`= `add` or `remove`. Read the [**Recommended data section**](🔗) to see what values specifically you might need
* Click [**here**](🔗) to see the tracking code snippet |
**2. Tracking of the event** `purchase`
Click [**here**](🔗) to see the tracking code snippet |
| **3. Imported product catalog** You need to have a catalog of your products identifiable by their id, which is the same one that is collected in your cart_update event. You can read more about catalogs [**here**](🔗). |
| **4. Integrated email domain** |
## Creating the scenario
Pro tip
We need to check the AB split instead of whether an email was delivered to keep the same rules for both the variant and control group for evaluation purposes. If we looked only at delivered emails, the control group would not be affected (as they don't receive any email). We recommend to use a period of at least 7 days).
Save this aggregate to your project as you might need it to display certain information (which is contained in the `
product_list` attribute) in the emails.
Good job!
You have just created the abandoned cart scenario. Test it out on yourself and once you feel confident, start the campaign live.
## Evaluation
Read our guide on [AB Test Basic Evaluation](🔗) to learn how you can evaluate your campaign.
# Recommended data
If you want to display attributes of the items left in the cart in the email (such as an image, link, title, price, etc..) you need to have this information stored somewhere.
Using Jinja, you can fetch it either from your product catalog imported in Bloomreach Engagement or directly from the event `cart_update` and its attribute (usually called) `product_list`, which then contains the values you might use. The screenshot below depicts how the event might look like:
These are the attributes you might need for creating a personalized email. Note that it doesn't matter whether each attribute is present in the catalog, the event attribute or combination of both, as explained above.
| Value | Use case |
`title` | Showing the name of the product. |
`image` | Needed to fetch the product image in the email. |
`url` | Use if you want to hyperlink each product in the email. |
`total_price_local_currency` | Total price of the cart in local currency. This makes it easier to tell customers they are qualified for free shipping or state how much more they need to spend to qualify. |
`total_price` | Total price of the cart in reference currency. If you operate with more currencies, always track the prices/value in your reference currency too. This will be used to easily calculate revenue/value of carts etc. in a single currency. |
`price` | To show the price of each product. |
`quantity` | \# units of a product in the cart. |
# Advanced
## Custom wait time
It is a good idea to explore different wait times for different customers. You can enter this jinja into a custom wait node to send an email at the time the customer has last purchased and are therefore likely to be active.
The referenced aggregate is looking at last purchase timestamp aggregate, which looks like this:
Always remember to change the aggregate ID to the aggregate you create in your project.
## Using recommendations
An often-used strategy to enhance follow-up emails is to include personalized recommended products within the email. To set up email recommendations follow this [guide](🔗).
The important question, however, is: _What products to include within the email_? Based on your industry, region, and customer segment, different options make more sense, but we have shortlisted several of them:
Reminding items that the customer already viewed.
[Customer recent interactions template](🔗)
Adding similar items to items included in the basket (that the customer has not seen yet)
[Textual Similarity template](🔗)
Adding other items that can be interesting to the customer
[Customers who viewed this item also viewed template](🔗)
Adding complementary products to the added product
[Customers who bought this item also bought template](🔗)