Cart retargeting is a marketing strategy that re-engages shoppers who have added items to their shopping carts but abandoned them before completing a purchase.
Cart abandonment is a common problem: Research from Baymard Institute puts the average rate at around 70%. Those carts aren’t necessarily lost, though. By following up with shoppers who have left items behind, you can prompt them to complete their purchase.
Below, learn what abandoned cart retargeting is, how it works, the tools that support it, and tips to help you reduce shopping cart abandonment.
What is cart retargeting?
Cart retargeting is a strategy brands use to bring shoppers back to their abandoned online shopping carts and complete their purchases. The cart retargeting process begins when a shopper visits your ecommerce store, adds one or more items to their cart, and then leaves without making a purchase. It then entails following up with customers through personalized emails, SMS messages, and retargeting ads.
How cart retargeting works
An abandoned cart retargeting strategy follows this basic flow.
Track user behavior
Tracking tools and ecommerce platforms like the Meta Pixel, Google Ads, and Shopify use cookies, pixels (pieces of code you add to your site), and logged-in account data to capture your visitors’ browsing behavior. For example, Shopify’s tracking tools can show which products a shopper added to their cart and how far into the checkout process they got before leaving.
Create audiences
Use tracking data to build targeted audiences, or groups of website visitors categorized by their behavior. Rather than treating every cart abandoner the same, segment shoppers by signals like how recently they abandoned, the value of the items left behind, or how far they got in checkout.
You can either create these lists directly within platforms like Meta Ads and Google Ads or transfer them over from Shopify Audiences.
If you’re using Shopify Messaging and Flow, you don’t even need to create custom audiences. Instead, you can create a trigger—such as a customer abandoning their cart—and layer in conditions like time elapsed or minimum cart value to control who gets a follow-up and when.
Automate follow-ups
Use your audience segments to trigger automated follow-ups across channels like email, SMS, and retargeting ads. Dynamic ads populate with the items a shopper left behind, while automated email sequences bring cart abandoners back to your ecommerce site to complete their purchase. This process is designed to recover abandoned carts and reclaim lost revenue.
Cart retargeting tools
Shopify’s built-in tools automate owned channels like email and SMS, which let you avoid spending money on paid aids. Social media ad platforms and Google Ads use tracking pixels and audience data to re-engage cart abandoners through paid ads, reaching shoppers who left without sharing their email address.
The two approaches work in combination; owned channels like SMS and email recover the shoppers you can contact directly, while paid retargeting reaches the rest as they browse elsewhere. Consider using these tools to bring it all together.
Shopify tools
Shopify has multiple tools to aid store owners with cart retargeting. Shopify Flow lets you build automated workflows, including one that sends a recovery email when a customer adds items to their cart but doesn’t proceed to checkout.
Shopify Messaging allows you to create, customize, and manage email and SMS templates, including those for abandoned carts.
Tique Chandler, founder of the raw honey brand Chandler Honey, says that setting up abandoned cart alerts is one of her top three automation tips, and that she relies on Shopify’s marketing automations for cart retargeting.
“I set up a sequence so that if [customers are] giving their email address, I have a sequence of emails that goes out that tries to bring them back in, tells them about my story, tells them about the brand, and tries to get them to be a customer,” she says on Shopify Masters.
Social media tools
Some social media ad platforms use their own tracking pixels to help online retailers build custom audiences out of their website visitors, and serve ads to cart abandoners on their platforms.
If you’re advertising on Instagram and Facebook, for example, you can install the Meta Pixel on your ecommerce site to track actions that shoppers take there and build retargeting audiences, enabling you to serve ads to cart abandoners across Facebook and Instagram.
TikTok has its own pixel, which you can install to retarget people through TikTok ads. The Pinterest ad platform uses the Pinterest tag to help you build retargeting campaigns.
Google Ads
Google Ads helps online retailers serve dynamic ads to previous visitors across Google search, Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites. To use Google Ads for retargeting campaigns, install the Google tag, or connect Google Ads through Shopify, so you can track website visitors and build audience segments.
Third-party software
Third-party software tools like Klaviyo, Omnisend, and ActiveCampaign have features for automated emails and SMS flows for cart abandonment recovery, advanced segmentation, and personalized messaging.
Use these platforms to create multistep recovery sequences that send personalized messages based on factors like purchase history, cart value, or how far a shopper progressed in the checkout process.
How to create a cart retargeting strategy
- Set up tracking
- Build abandoned cart flows
- Design personalized, multichannel messaging
- Address the root causes of cart abandonment
Follow these steps to make the most of your cart retargeting strategy.
1. Set up tracking
First, make sure your online store is accurately tracking browsing behavior, cart activity, and checkout page drop-offs. This information will help you construct automations and custom audiences to target through email marketing and retargeting ads on platforms like Facebook and Google Ads.
2. Build abandoned cart flows
Consider building an abandoned cart flow, which is a type of automated marketing workflow that uses email, SMS, or both to encourage customers to return to their carts and complete their purchases.
Jacob Sappington, director of email strategy at the ecommerce-focused growth agency Homestead Studio, says on Shopify Masters that online retailers should be collecting email and SMS information “right from the start” to aid in retargeting efforts and workflow construction.
“Once you’ve got those users coming into your customer relationship management system, set up the bare basics, like a welcome series, browse abandoned, abandoned checkout, and a post-purchase sequence,” he says. Within these four different flows, “you’re collecting people at the moment of user acquisition.”
3. Design personalized, multichannel messaging
Personalized emails, SMS, and ad copy can reference the exact products a shopper left behind, which keeps the follow-up relevant to what the shopper was actually considering.
For emails and SMS, tools like Shopify Messaging and Klaviyo will automatically populate the product name, image, and price from a specific shopper’s cart and plug it into a template message. For retargeting ads, you’ll select an ad template, then platforms like Meta Ads and Google Ads will automatically serve each cart abandoner an ad that features the product they left behind.
You can also experiment with testing incentives like free shipping or discount codes, which can be set up in Shopify Flow, to entice shoppers to complete their purchase.
4. Address the root causes of cart abandonment
High cart abandonment often traces back to a friction point at checkout, and finding it usually starts with the data. Chris Sherman, CEO of Island Creek Oysters, had his team analyze their data and realized that shoppers routinely abandoned carts when they saw the shipping price.
“Everyone’s willing to pay whatever to get premium oysters shipped to them in Chicago or Denver or wherever they may be, but people get to the cart and then they see the shipping is pretty significant as a percentage of the cost,” he says on Shopify Masters. “So we made the simple decision to say, OK, we’re just going to embed shipping into the cost. And overnight, that drove sales.”
In addition to shipping costs, a survey by Baymard Institute found other common reasons for cart abandonment: extra costs (like fees and taxes), being required to create an account, slow delivery, and a long or complicated checkout process. Any unnecessary friction can lead to abandoned shopping carts.
Cart retargeting FAQ
What is the best way to recover abandoned carts?
An effective approach is a cart retargeting email flow. Send an automated sequence that tracks website visitor data, establishes behavioral triggers and conditions, and follows up with personalized messaging through emails when online shoppers leave products in their carts.
How effective is cart retargeting?
Cart recovery flows are among the highest-earning automations you can set up. According to Klaviyo’s marketing benchmarks, abandoned cart email flows generate more revenue per recipient than any other category (including welcome, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and winback flows).
What channels work best for cart retargeting?
Email reaches shoppers who already showed purchase intent, costs less per send than SMS or paid ads, and can dynamically pull in products a shopper left behind. SMS also works well as a fast, high-visibility follow-up. Retargeting ads on Facebook and Google re-engage shoppers as they browse elsewhere.
