Abandoned Cart Journey Use Case

An abandoned cart Journey is a useful strategy to have in place; this Journey will allow you to target customers that have abandoned items in their e-cart, sending reminders and offers with the goal of incentivizing them to complete their purchase.

Journeys requires some more technical aspects of set up to be able to configure a successful Journey. However, assuming some pre-requisites have been fulfilled, the creation of the actual Journey can be completed in a few simple steps.

If you are a non-technical marketer that is hoping to build an abandoned cart Journey, this guide is for you.

Note: This guide will cover the elements needed to create an Abandoned Cart Journey using an Abandoned Cart moment, and therefore will not be using events from the Cheetah Digital platform.

Scope

This guide explains how the Abandoned Cart Journey works and how to configure it effectively. This use case begins when the website sends an Abandoned Cart moment to Journeys; within Moments you can define exactly when you consider a cart to be abandoned and, therefore, when this event will be activated. Based on the customer's preferred communication channel, the Journey sends a reminder via email or mobile push notification.

The Journey continues with a strategic series of follow-up messages, including an offer email and a final reminder, as well as wait periods to maximize engagement.

Customers who complete their purchase are moved to a positive exit path. Those who don’t will exit the Journey through a neutral exit.

 

Pre-requisites

When creating your Journey, make sure you have the following pre-requisites in place. You might need help from technical marketers or expert users to complete these tasks.

For creating your Journey

  1. Ensure you have access to the following applications:

    • Journeys

    • Cheetah Digital

    • Marigold Moments

  2. Marigold Moments must be configured to use in your Journeys. Refer to Configuring Marigold Moments for details.

  3. The following signals have been configured in Marigold Moments:

    • Item placed in cart signal

    • Purchase signal

    • Empty cart signal

  4. If you plan to use personalization or advanced event triggers within your messages, ensure that the moment_event and moment_event_items tables are joined to your Cheetah Digital sending table.

For publishing your Journey

  1. Ensure all of your Campaigns have been completed and that the correct settings have been applied

  2. All of the Journey steps must be correctly configured and connected to an exit

 

Step 1: Create an Abandon Cart Moment

First, you will need to set up an Abandon Cart Moment with the Marigold Moments application. This will provide the basis for the Start step and will define the requirements needed for a customer to be added to the Journey.

Note: If an abandoned cart Moment has already been created with the required settings, it is not necessary to create a new one; you may prefer to use the existing Moment and restrict the target audience using the Audience Selection tool within the Journey settings.

  1. Within Marigold Moments, click New Moment

  2. Select the Cart Abandon template

  3. When creating this Moment, assuming the previous pre-requisites were set up correctly, you will be able to select your target audience.

  4. Under Custom moment settings adjust the length of time after which the cart is considered as abandoned.

You can see more information about creating this moment in Step 3 of our Abandoned Cart Use Case for Marigold Moments.

 

Step 2: Create the Journey

Now you should be ready to create your Journey.

  1. Within the Journeys homepage, click + Add New Journey. You can choose to create a new Journey from a blank canvas however, if it is your first time creating a Journey, we recommend choosing from our available templates.

  2. Click Templates.

  3. Scroll down to browse the templates and click on the Abandoned Cart template.

  4. Name your new Journey and edit the description. This will make it easier to find when you begin creating more Journeys. Click Create.

  5. Next, you will be taken to the Journey Canvas where your Abandoned Cart Journey has been created! The Journey will contain all of the steps required to complete your Journey, how you will need to configure each step to ensure that they work correctly.

    Note: You can customize the Journey based on your marketing needs by editing the elements within the template; you can remove different steps, adjust the wait times, or rearrange the order.

 

Step 3: Set up your Campaigns

We recommend creating your Campaigns from within Journeys. You can then use the Cheetah Digital platform to create the content for each Campaign and configure the associated settings.

Each Campaign will define the messages sent to new customers or subscribers throughout the Abandoned Cart Journey.

The Abandoned Cart template includes four Send Message/SMS steps, each requiring a Campaign to be linked to it:

  • Reminder Email

  • Reminder SMS 

  • Offer Email

  • Last Chance Email

Note: It is possible to edit the layout of the Journey and remove any steps that you do not need. Alternatively, you can also add more.

  1. To create a Campaign from your Journey, click on the Send step and, under the Campaign settings, click Select.

  2. From within the new panel that appears, click New Campaign.

  3. Here, adjust the settings for your new campaign including the:

    • Location for where it should be found within Cheetah Digital

    • Name

    • Associated attribute

  4. Once complete, click Create.

  5. Repeat steps 1-4 for each Send Message/SMS step present in the Journey.

It is important that these Campaigns are set up correctly so that they are able to communicate with Journeys. After you have linked each step to a Campaign, head to Cheetah Digital to configure them and create the Campaign content.

  1. Find your Campaigns on the Production > Campaigns page.

  2. To edit each Campaign, click on their entry within the table. You should see your Campaigns at the top of the table but use the available filters to locate the Campaigns, if necessary.

  3. In the Setup tab, click Add Event Trigger

  4. In the pop-up that appears, select Advanced Event Trigger and click Save

    Note: For the purpose of this use case, we recommend setting all Event Triggers as Advanced Event Triggers, however Simple Event Triggers are also available should you require them. For more information on the different triggers and the associated settings, see our guide.

  5. Repeat steps 1-4 for each Campaign that you created within Journeys

With the correct settings in place you can now create the content for each Campaign, see our Creating Email Campaigns guide for more info.

 

Step 4: Configure you Journey settings

To make sure your Journey will run smoothly and that everything is connected correctly, we’ll need to check the Journey settings.

Click on the Settings button to open the Journey Settings panel on the left hand side. Here, you can edit the name of your Journey and adjust the icon, if required.

By default, most of the following settings will be applied upon creation of your Journey, but it is always good practise to double check that they are correct, as these are required for the Journey to function:

Setting name Required setting
Event Subscription Subscribe automatically
App Selection Must include only Signals & Marigold Moments
Audience Selection Define a specific audience group by entering the configured Audience name from Marigold Moments (Integration tab > Audience Configuration)

 

Step 5: Configure your Journey steps

Now you need to put everything together. Although the Journey template will include all of the steps required for it to function, certain steps will need some additional set up.

If you take a look at the Abandoned Cart template that has been created, you will see some of the following steps:

  • Start Journey

  • Update Journey

  • Decision step

  • Wait step

  • Send Message (Email/Notification)

  • Exit Journey

Below, we will take you through the configuration that is required, if any, for the steps in the abandoned cart Journey template.

Start Journey

Your Start Journey step needs to listen to the Moment that you created in Step 1 so that your target audience can be added to the Journey.

  1. Click on the Start Journey step to open the associated settings.

  2. Under the Event settings, click Select to choose the event that will activate your Start step.

  3. This will open up a screen showing all of the available events (Marigold Moments and signals from the integrated websites); click on Cart Abandon and click Select.

    This ensures that whenever a user triggers this event – abandons their cart – they’ll automatically be added to your Abandoned Cart Journey.

For more information on setting up your Start step, see our Start Journey step guide.

Update Journey

Similarly to your Start Journey step, the Update Journey step needs to listen for a specific event. These steps give you more control over the analytics associated with your Journey and allow you to define positive and negative outcomes (events you wish to increase and those you wish to decrease, respectively).

If you wish to keep these within your Journey, they will also need to be connected to a Moment; as standard in the Abandoned Cart Journey template, you will have an Empty Cart Update Journey step and a Purchase Update Journey step, both of which would need an associated Moment.

You can follow the same steps for Creating a Moment as discussed in Step 2 and then link it to your steps as shown above in configuring your Start Journey step; once your Moment has been created, simply click on the step and select your Moment from the event list.

For more information on how to configure an Update Journey step, see our associated guide.

Decision Steps

Decision steps allow you to split your audience based on specific conditions, enabling more targeted and personalized communication strategies.

For example, in the abandoned cart Journey Template, you can see that the audience is split between those that have SMS enabled, and those that do not.

To ensure this functions correctly, you will need to use the expression builder to define the conditions that will split the audience.

Note: A basic expression you can use to split your audience in this way is:

Select Customer Data and then select the attribute that indicates whether or not the customer has a mobile phone number, or your preferred method of communication. Setting this to is equal TRUE, as shown above, means that anyone who has a mobile phone will receive an SMS campaign, and anyone who does not will receive an email campaign.

For more information on how to do this, see our Decision step guide.

Send Message

Your Send Message steps are where you will link each of your Campaigns, prompting your communications to be sent out to the target audience; these can be either SMS, email, or a notification using Cheetah Digital.

If you followed this guide from the beginning, you should have already created a Campaign for each Send Message step within Step 3. With the Campaigns created, there are a few settings you will need to check:

  1. Click on one of the Send Message steps to open the settings panel.

  2. If your Campaign has an Advanced Event Trigger, some additional settings will appear in the settings panel of the step.

  • Campaign Personalization

    • Table-based Personalization - uses the simple trigger within your Campaign

    • Event-based Personalization - uses the advanced trigger within your Campaign

  • Save Payload Data - this allows you to store the data from this Campaign for use in other Campaigns later on within your Journey

  • Table Overrides - choose an alternative email column, if you have one

Note: If you select Save Payload Data in the first Campaign within your Journey, any Campaign thereafter can be set up with a Simple Event Trigger and can use the data collected previously.

For more information on how to send your Campaigns via Journeys, see our Send step guide.

Wait steps

Wait steps are used to manage the cadence of your Journey; you can define the length of time a customer will have to wait at each step before moving on to the next.

  1. To configure each Wait step, click on the Wait step within the Journey to open the settings panel.

  2. Under Wait Step, input the duration you want the customers to wait, and select the time period (minutes, hours, days, or weeks) from the dropdown menu.

For more information on the Wait step, see our Wait step guide.

Step 6: Validating your Journey

Validate your Journey to ensure all of the steps have been configured correctly and all of the supporting items are functioning.

Use the health check tool will review all of the elements of your Journey and let you know if there are any potential problems.

Additionally, each step will display a small error icon if it has not been configured correctly.

For more information on these features, see our Validating your Journey article.

Step 7: Publish your Journey

Once you’re finished, click Publish in the top right corner of the screen.

If you have not set up your Journey correctly, you will be shown a warning message with the details of any errors and limitations to your Journey.

After publishing, your Journey will automatically begin enrolling new subscribers as they meet the Abandoned Cart Moment’s criteria.