Build a cart recovery flow

Most people who abandon a cart were not rejecting you — they were interrupted. Cart recovery is the automation with the clearest return, and the one most easily made irritating.

Prerequisites

• A connected store (Shopify or WooCommerce)
• A verified sender domain (Verify your sending domain) — recovery mail that lands in spam recovers nothing
• Consent to send marketing to these contacts

The flow

Trigger:    Cart abandoned
Condition:  Cart value over 25

Wait:       1 hour
Condition:  Order still not placed
Action:     Email 1 — the reminder

Wait:       23 hours
Condition:  Order still not placed
Action:     Email 2 — handle the objection

Wait:       48 hours
Condition:  Order still not placed
Action:     Email 3 — final, with an incentive

Three messages. Stop there — a fourth converts almost nobody and generates spam complaints that damage every email you send afterwards.

What each message should say

Email 1 — the reminder (1 hour). Assume distraction, not doubt. Show what they left, link straight back to the cart, and say nothing else. No discount: most recoveries happen here, and discounting immediately trains customers to abandon deliberately.

Email 2 — the objection (24 hours). They did not come back, so something is stopping them. Address the real reasons: shipping cost and speed, returns policy, sizing. Offer help — a link to chat converts more than another product image.

Email 3 — the incentive (72 hours). Now a discount is reasonable. Keep it modest and time-bound. This is also the natural place to stop.

The condition that matters

Order still not placed, re-checked before every message. Without it you will email a discount code to someone who bought at full price an hour ago. That is a worse outcome than sending nothing at all.

The value threshold

Filtering out very low-value carts is worth doing. Recovering a small cart with a discount can be margin-negative once you account for the discount and the deliverability cost of the send.

Measuring

Track recovery rate — recovered orders divided by abandoned carts — not open rate. A single-digit recovery rate is normal and still significant revenue.

Watch unsubscribes on this flow specifically. A spike means the sequence is too aggressive, and the damage extends to every campaign you send afterwards.