Recover Lost Revenue: Leveraging Salesforce’s Abandoned Cart Solution Kit

How Salesforce’s Abandoned Cart Solution Can Still Drive Sales Despite Being Deprecated

As the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, cart abandonment remains a significant challenge for retailers. Shoppers add items to their carts but often fail to complete the purchase. Salesforce’s Abandoned Cart Solution Kit was created to combat this issue by re-engaging customers and driving them back to complete their transactions. Although this solution kit has been deprecated by Salesforce, its framework is still highly valuable for businesses looking to increase revenue and enhance the customer experience.

What Is the Abandoned Cart Solution Kit?

The Abandoned Cart Solution Kit allows retailers to reconnect with shoppers who leave items in their carts without completing a purchase. By leveraging Salesforce B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud, businesses can send personalized, behaviour-driven emails that nudge customers to return and complete their order.

Key Benefits:

• Increase completed purchases: Bring shoppers back to finish their orders, driving gross merchandise volume (GMV).
• Personalized experience: Use shopper data from Marketing Cloud to tailor emails and content based on the customer’s preferences.
• Behavioural insights: Gain insights into shopping behaviour to improve future engagements and marketing strategies.

How Does the Abandoned Cart Workflow Work?

Here’s a breakdown of how the Abandoned Cart Solution typically operates:

Workflow

1. A customer adds items to their cart but leaves without purchasing.
2. Marketing Cloud tracks this behaviour using the collect.js code on the e-commerce site.
3. The shopper’s information is sent to Marketing Cloud, where they are placed into a journey for re-engagement.
4. Marketing Cloud sends the first abandoned cart email to the shopper.
5. If the shopper doesn’t respond, additional emails or other creative content is sent as follow-ups.
6. When the customer clicks on a link in the email and completes their purchase, they are exited from the abandoned cart journey and moved into a post-purchase communication flow.

By leveraging Marketing Cloud and its journey builder, you can send emails at the perfect moment to ensure maximum engagement.

Why Does It Still Matter?

Even though Salesforce has stopped maintaining this solution kit, the functionality it provides remains essential for e-commerce businesses. With minimal customizations and proper integration between B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud, this solution can be easily adapted to your needs, helping you recover potentially lost revenue from abandoned carts.

Additional Benefits:

• Automated follow-ups: Automatically trigger email campaigns when a cart is abandoned.
• Behavioural triggers: Use Marketing Cloud’s behavioural triggers to personalize emails based on shopper behaviour and product preferences.
• Improved customer engagement: Keep customers engaged even after they’ve left your website, offering incentives and discounts to motivate purchases.

Design Considerations and Technical Requirements

To fully implement this solution, you’ll need:

• Salesforce B2C Commerce (Composable Commerce, SFRA, SiteGenesis or even “custom head”)
• Marketing Cloud for email personalization and journey automation
• Personalization Builder in Marketing Cloud for behavioural tracking via collect.js

The collect.js script captures customer behaviour, monitors which items have been left in the cart, and triggers an automated response based on the customer’s journey. You can then set up follow-up communications tailored to customer preferences.

Understand the Flow of Data

Challenges and Customization Needs

While the Abandoned Cart Solution Kit offers a great starting point, there are a few challenges you may encounter:

• Customization for email content: You’ll need to design creative, engaging email templates and ensure the content reflects the shopper’s preferences and the products left in the cart.
• Data integration: Syncing data between Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud requires some technical setup to ensure real-time updates are being processed.

If implemented correctly, these challenges can be easily overcome, and the benefits in terms of recovered revenue are substantial.

Exploring an Alternative: Using Interaction Studio for Cart Recovery

While the Abandoned Cart Solution Kit provides a powerful framework for recovering lost sales, you can also leverage Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (now known as Marketing Cloud Personalization) to enhance your cart recovery strategy even further. This alternative approach allows you to use real-time behavioural data and segmentation to deliver hyper-personalized communications.

Interaction Studio monitors customer behaviour in real-time and determines when a customer has abandoned their cart. It can segment these shoppers based on their actions, and then trigger personalized email campaigns in Marketing Cloud.

Here’s how the Interaction Studio workflow operates:

Workflow with Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio)

• Cart Abandonment Detection: Interaction Studio monitors customer activity and identifies when a cart is abandoned.
• Real-Time Segmentation: The customer is placed in a specific segment, such as “abandoned cart” or “abandoned browse.”
• Personalized Messaging: Using data collected from Interaction Studio, Marketing Cloud sends personalized emails with dynamic product recommendations based on what was left in the cart.
• Data Sync: Interaction Studio syncs this segment back to Marketing Cloud, ensuring that customers who complete their purchase are removed from further abandoned cart journeys.

Why Interaction Studio?

Understand the Flow of Data with Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly
Interaction Studio)

• Real-time personalization: Interaction Studio enables real-time behavioural tracking, allowing businesses to react instantly when a cart is abandoned.
• Enhanced segmentation: This approach allows for more granular segmentation, which can help tailor email campaigns even further.
• Dynamic product recommendations: Leverage Einstein Email Recommendations to provide product suggestions based on the shopper’s activity and preferences.

By integrating Interaction Studio with Marketing Cloud, businesses can take cart recovery a step further, delivering highly personalized, real-time messages that increase the likelihood of purchase completion.

Final Thoughts

Though deprecated, Salesforce’s Abandoned Cart Solution Kit is still an incredibly powerful tool for e-commerce businesses looking to recover lost sales. By integrating B2C Commerce and Marketing Cloud, and automating follow-up emails, you can re-engage with customers who have abandoned their carts and encourage them to complete their purchase.

If you’re looking to boost sales and improve customer engagement, this solution is worth exploring despite its deprecated status. With the right configurations and strategies, you can unlock new revenue opportunities and enhance the overall shopping experience for your customers.

My name is Oleg Sapishchuk, and I’m an experienced digital leader specializing in digital transformation and unified commerce solutions for some of the world’s most recognized brands. I frequently write about Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud and share insights on how businesses can leverage technology for growth. I invite you to follow my Medium profile for more industry knowledge and perspectives on the future of digital leadership.