Every brand that sells online knows this struggle: a carefully nurtured lead makes it all the way to the “place order” button… and then clicks away before completing the transaction. But don’t abandon hope when a customer abandons a cart! A timely, relevant follow-up message can transform those almost-there engagements into actual conversions.
With Customer.io’s powerful visual workflow builder, you can easily create an effective, hyper-personalized abandoned cart campaign that runs on auto-pilot. Once you’ve got that down, you can repurpose the same logic to move leads through every stage of your sales funnel. Here’s how it works.
To get started, you’ll need to create two events: checkout_started
and checkout_completed
. These will determine when someone enters and exits the campaign. Both will need an unique identifying attribute like checkout_id
.
With your events created, the build itself is quick and easy:
checkout_started
event as the trigger; customers will enter the campaign when they begin the checkout processcheckout_completed
event with the same checkout_id
as the triggering event) within the timeframe you set, they’ll exit the campaign, receiving no messages. If they don’t, they’ll get a message reminding them to check out What to do if your events don’t have a unique identifier
No problem; you can apply the same logic using only the events themselves. For most cases, this will work as flawlessly as if you had an unique identifier.
There might be some situations where multiple checkouts could be started, and that will require some tweaking in your trigger settings to adapt how often a campaign should be triggered.
checkout_started
and checkout_completed
events for your customers.You can repurpose this campaign throughout your sales funnel. It works wherever you need to monitor whether a person will take the next step naturally and give them a nudge when needed—and it can be a game-changer anywhere customers tend to stall or exit altogether.
For instance, a T-shirt printing business could use it to offer one-to-one support to customers who start custom design projects but don’t finish them within 72 hours. Or a fintech app could use it to remind new subscribers about the benefits of connecting their bank account if they haven’t done so after 24 hours. A mobile app could use this approach to prod people to start using the app if they’ve downloaded it but not opened it yet. There are endless possibilities.
I like to describe abandoned cart campaigns and other simple, high-impact workflows as building blocks. Individually, they are easy to master, and they deliver immediate value. After you start putting them into place, you can combine multiple blocks to build powerful workflows that deliver an incredibly individualized customer experience at scale.