How do I maximize my email collection for abandoned carts?

Abandoned Carts and Email Collection

In order to understand why you want to maximize email collection, we first have to understand what Recapture needs to do its job most effectively.  Recapture will associate an email address and the contents of cart so you can reach out and try to recover them and complete their purchase.  In order to do that, your customer needs to:

  1. Browse your site
  2. Add some items to the cart somewhere
  3. At some point, enter an email address either on the checkout page or on a popup
  4. Wait for about 30 min

And then Recapture can contact them about abandoned carts.  The key step is #3--entering an email address.  By default, Magento and Shopify will give you an email address field on the checkout form.  But many other opportunities exist to collect their email!  Such as:

  • Email popups
  • Mailing list signups
  • Top railing email signups
  • and so on...

Recapture can take advantage of these other email fields being entered.  There are some tricks to help with it, however.

Maximizing the Email Collection Rate

1) Make sure that you're giving the customer a chance to ENTER their email...somewhere.

You shouldn't wait until checkout to grab the customer's email.  Using a simple email collector from Recapture can help!  Recapture's Email Collectors allow you to post a popup at various times, such as:

  • After the customer has visited a certain number of pages
  • After the customer has viewed a certain number of products
  • After a certain amount of time on the site has elapsed
  • After they've added items to their cart
If you already have an email collector on your site of some kind, Recapture will automatically notice that field and most likely capture emails from it.  The one exception would be if there are JavaScript errors on your store's pages, which can interfere with the loading of Recapture's JavaScript library to help with this.

2) Use our "Add to Cart" hover which asks for the email immediately

Recapture has a new feature where we override the Add to Cart button to produce an effect when they hover over the button to enter their email in order to add the item to their cart.

Using this feature has a dramatic increase in email collection rates, which leads to much higher cart recovery rates.  We strongly recommend this on all platforms, but especially Shopify, where our script can't run on the checkout page (this is a Shopify limitation unfortunately), and you get a better chance of capturing the customer's email before checkout when it really counts!

3)  If your store requires login to view, try this:

SHOPIFY:  Open your Shopify theme editor, and edit the section of the theme's layout.liquid and paste this in:

<strong>{% if customer %}  <input type="hidden" name="ra-customer-email" value="{{ customer.email }}">{% endif %}</strong>
	

By putting that into your theme and Recapture will pull the customer email in every time.

WOOCOMMERCE: Put this script into your main layout or footer PHP file to do the same thing:

<?php
        if (get_current_user_id() != 0) {
              $user = wp_get_current_user();
              if (strlen($user->user_email) > 0) {
                  $user_email = filter_var($user->user_email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
                  echo '<input type="hidden" name="ra-customer-email" value="'.$user_email.'>';
              }
          }
?>
4)  If you're on Magento 1, you should enable this option within the Recapture extension as well:
a. System Menu => Configuration
b. Click on Recapture Connector => Extension Options
c. Set the ‘Enable Pre-submit Email Capturing’ option to ‘Yes’ and press ‘Save Config’