11 Best Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines (That Work)

Ecommerce businesses lose around $18 billion in yearly sales revenue because of the abandoned carts, and the number is predicted to increase in the future. But, did you know that more than 40% of customers who abandoned their carts return to the online store after receiving a cart recovery email? For that to happen, you first really need to design some abandoned cart email subject lines that will actually get the job done.

Wondering why? Well, billions of emails are sent and received every day, and this number keeps on increasing for shoppers. If the person is an active online user surfing various websites, they would probably be looking at a long list of unread emails every morning.

For businesses, that’s an opportunity, and there’s a lot of traffic to cross. This is exactly the reason you need to get the best abandoned cart email subject lines, so the customer’s attention is right at your store.

The subject line is all about making an impact that leads to the customer actually opening your email. If your abandoned cart subject lines aren’t striking, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. To capture more revenue, keep reading!

What Are Abandoned Cart Emails?

First, let’s start by addressing what an abandoned cart is, and then that will lead us to the email part. An abandoned cart is one when a person browses through an online portal and adds products/services to the digital cart but then leaves the website without making a purchase.

To explain this departure, there can be a lot of reasons behind this. Let’s say that a visitor visits your online store and adds bakery products to their cart, and once they proceed to the checkout page after entering the address, there is a $10 extra shipping charge. The visitor isn’t happy with this and closes the website.

Let’s now check out an abandoned cart email.

Generally, when the visitor is about to leave a website, businesses try to capture their email by presenting them with a popup using exit-intent software. An abandoned cart email is simply a follow-up email to remind the customer of completing their purchase.

To continue with the previous example, you will be sending an abandoned cart email to the visitor who didn’t purchase the bakery products because of shipping charges. Remind her of completing the purchase and give a coupon code for free shipping. The visitor will happily return to your website to buy the products.

That’s how abandoned cart emails work. But, for the potential customer to open and read your email, you need to be perfect in curating the abandoned cart email subject lines. Let’s check the importance of the same. You can also try SalesBlink’s Free Subject Line Generator.

Quick Tip: How Picreel Prevents Shopping Cart Abandonment?

Picreel is an exit-intent popup tool that smartly tracks the visitor’s activities and displays the right popup at the right time. Every business wants to decrease its bounce rates and increase the conversion rates for efficient sales.

As we talked about shopping cart abandonment earlier, a lot of people leave an e-commerce portal at the checkout page. Is there anything you can do to make them stay? Identify when the visitor is about to leave and give them reasons such as discount coupons, free shipping, gifts, etc. to make them stay. This prevents shopping cart abandonment.

The best thing about it is, you can use an exit-intent popup to collect the email address of the visitor. Even if the shopper decides to abandon the cart today, you can use the captured email addresses to send abandoned cart emails. Also, you can integrate Picreel easily with your email service providers to transfer leads quickly.

Why Are Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines Important?

Many marketing teams focus on designing a beautiful email, and the subject line seems like a minor detail. Well, this minor detail will be the deciding factor in most cases whether the abandoning customer opens your email or not.

The abandoned cart email subject lines can have a significant effect on your open rate and eventually the conversion rate.

Let’s put it in this way. Your team invested a lot of time in deciding the graphics of the email, the content copy, and the call-to-action (CTA) button. But, if nobody notices or opens your email, then all this hard work isn’t going to pay off.

Abandoned cart subject lines draw potential customers in, pique their interest, and attract them to click into the email to find what’s inside. Some interesting stats to support this are:

• More than 47% of email recipients open the emails based on the subject line.
• Abandoned cart emails recorded a 40% open rate on average than the typical marketing emails that have a 12% open rate. This simply implies that abandoned cart subject lines are more impactful, and shoppers are more likely to open these emails.
• In general, a person receives 121 emails per day. So, it is a lot of competition, and a good subject line helps in shining out.

It might seem like a typical task to craft an amazing subject line for the abandoned cart email, but there’s a good side to it. Most of the customers will be already expecting your say in the abandoned cart email.

It makes complete sense as the customer has already shown interest in your product/service. They might be looking for reasons to proceed with your business. You now just need to give them a little push to continue and complete their purchase.

Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines: Best Practices

While curating the content for an article or blog, there are a lot of parts to pique a customer’s interest. But that’s not the case with an email subject line. You hardly have 2-3 seconds to grab the customer’s attention. That’s why you need to follow some best practices and golden rules of writing abandoned cart email subject lines.

Simple

Confusing subject lines can send an email straight to trash or spam. Avoid the common misconception here – CAPS or excessive punctuation, special characters, etc., in subject lines, attracts the recipient. Rather this affects the readability of the content, and instead of getting the recipient’s attention, it ultimately leads to a poor open rate.

The trick here is to keep the subject line simple and to the point. An ideal subject line can be: “You left something in your cart” or “Here’s a discount coupon to finish your purchase!”.

Minimal

Less is more. That’s the best approach here. There is no direct connection or statistics between the subject line length and open rate but being minimalistic is perfect for mobile devices.

When a customer opens an inbox on their laptop or computer, they will see around 60 or more characters of the subject line. But when it comes to mobile devices, the number of characters drops to around 30.

A lengthy subject line can be like: “We noticed you left something in your cart without completing the purchase”. This can be put up briefly as “We saved these items for you”.

Visual Communication

Special characters can hurt the open rate but in recent years, emojis are ruling the email marketing strategies. With the help of the right emoticons or emojis, you can be more expressive to your audience.

By replacing certain words with emojis or expressive icons, you can creatively engage with the recipients. Especially if you are writing funny abandoned cart email subject lines, emojis work most of the time.

Also, make sure to know your customer’s ages and preferences before implementing the emoticon strategy. Match it with your brand’s personality and test it to find whether it suits your business or not.

Personalization

Running an automated email marketing campaign will enable you to send emails to the abandoning customers, but they are receiving a lot of similar emails daily. Smart personalization is the key to set your email’s subject line apart from the rest.

The point here is to make the customer feel a personal touch by being as specific as possible. You can personalize your subject line by adding the customer’s name or letting them know what exactly they abandoned in the cart.

This can be like: “Marie, we saved these items for you!” or “Delicious anniversary special strawberry cake is waiting for you in the cart.” Including such personalized touch in your email subject lines can be an effective tactic.

A/B Testing

You can follow the above-mentioned best practices for cart abandonment subject lines, but the success will depend on the brand’s audience. For that, you need to segment your audience.

Let’s say that a particular business might have a younger audience, and they respond well to acronyms and emojis, while other audiences of another company may be older who won’t respond the same to emoticon strategy.

So, the best way to fully understand what your audience responds to is to A/B test the subject lines. Check the subject lines to which recipients are responding the most and gradually improve your cart abandonment email subject line strategy.

Now that we know the best practices for crafting the subject lines let’s look at the different types of subject lines for abandoned cart emails.

11 Best Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines

Before you go all brainstorming to find the perfect subject line, there are some tried, tested, and proven formulas that can help you in 2021. Here we go with the 11 best-abandoned cart email subject lines.

1. The ‘Forgot Stuff’ Subject Lines

Probably the most common type of subject line, and if you’ve ever left something in your cart, you would’ve surely received this in your inbox. Some of these include:

• Did you forget this product?
• Oops, you forgot something in the basket!
• Looks like you forgot this product.
• Forgot to check out?
• You left something behind.
• Ready to complete your order? Purchase it now!

The customer has already shown interest in the products and was interrupted due to some reason. Their departure or abandonment wasn’t because of the product cost or shipping charges. That’s why you are simply reminding them to complete the order.

2. The ‘Funny n Friendly’ Subject Lines

Sometimes, playing with words to create a funny subject line makes the recipient feel really good about your brand. Some funny subject lines to connect with your customers are:

• Let me teleport you back to your cart!
• Your cart is really feeling alone.
• Your cart misses you; your ex does not!
• Your cart has found love again. I hope it’s YOU!
• Did you really forget about me so soon?
• Oh, God! Your cart just slid down the stairs. Save it!

The use of an informal tone with a fun-loving approach will surely strike a chord to catch the recipient’s attention.

3. The ‘Incentivized’ Subject Lines

Customers abandon the shopping carts for a lot of reasons. But two of the biggest contributors are comparing prices and shipping charges. If you know the reason for abandonment, you can address that in the subject line such as:

• Free shipping on your next order!
• Get free shipping on this product today.
• Hey, forgot something in your cart? Here’s an extra 10% off!
• The good news, the price of this product just dropped.
• We have a 20% discount just for you!
• Get 20% cashback when you complete your purchase.

Make it crystal clear in the subject line that you are offering the recipient something in return for them completing the purchase.

4. The ‘Personalized’ Subject Lines

Personalized email subject lines have higher unique open rates. With the help of an exit-intent popup, you can easily collect the personal information and preferences of the visitor to address them with a personal touch. Some of the personalized subject lines include:

• Hey David, you left something behind.
• Your pair of black shoes is still waiting.
• Free shipping offer for Marie.
• Hey Ross, your cart is expiring soon.
• Mike, complete your purchase in two clicks.
• Don’t leave these delectable cupcakes in your cart.

Try and use the shopper’s name and details about the product(s) they left in the cart. Keep it neat and simple, and wait for the results.

5. The ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ Subject Lines

Well, it is a proven and smart sales tactic in the marketing world. Nobody loves missing out on something. Create a sense of urgency that the customer might be missing a great deal if they don’t instantly get back to their cart. Some examples include:

• The product in your cart is going fast.
• Almost sold out!
• Don’t miss out – only 5 more left in stock.
• Limited time deal: 15% off on your cart!
• The last 12 hours left till the sale ends.
• Your cart is expiring soon. Order now!

The information like product availability or time sensitivity in your subject line encourages the recipient to complete the order.

6. The ‘Product n Brand Related’ Subject Lines

Using copy related to your product and brand in abandonment cart subject lines can help the customers in reminding about your brand. With a lot of stuff going on in the shopper’s online world, a gentle reminder about your product can be pretty helpful. This includes:

• Purchase your one-month PM tool subscription from ProProfs now.
• Your sunscreen lotion from XYZ is waiting in the cart.
• Complete your ABC’s order right away to avail 10% discount.
• Your bakery items from XYZ are in your basket.
• Are you hungry yet? Get your chocolate pack now!
• Your shoes-packed cart is about to run away from XYZ store.

Mentioning the product and brand name in the subject line will help them remind them why they added the product to the cart. It increases the chances of sales.

7. The ‘Curiosity-driven’ Subject Lines

A curiosity-induced approach works in the sales field to get the attention of potential customers. Humans are curious creatures, and that can be used to curate the subject lines by including some curiosity so that the recipient opens your email message. Some of these are:

• Harry, you won’t believe this!
• A gift exclusively for you.
• Is it your lucky day?
• You earned it, Nats!
• Richard, I’ve got something special for you!
• Your absolute favorites waiting for you.

By using curiosity as a factor, you can lead the recipient with similar email content to the abandoned cart so that they complete their purchase.

8. The ‘Nudge’ Subject Lines

For some of your audience, you need a little more than ‘forgot something?’ Here, your shoppers are interested in your product and just need that little push to cross the finish line. Just a simple reminder to get them back on track is all you need to do. Some subject lines include:

• Your product is just a few clicks away.
• You’re nearly there.
• Complete the checkout in 3 steps.
• Your product is almost ready to ship.
• You’re so close to getting this 5-star rated product.
• Complete your purchase and access premium rewards.

Your potential customers have already done the hard work of browsing the products and adding them to the cart. Try to focus on reminding them about the positives.

9. The ‘Review’ Subject Lines

A lot of times, customers abandon the cart because they judge the quality of products. In such cases, you need to reassure the recipient by providing them some genuine reviews. The subject lines in such emails are:

• The product in your cart is rated 4.5/5 by our customers!
• Get this 5-star rated product now! Plus, enjoy free shipping.
• Check out your cart with confidence.
• Customer reviews for this product are waiting inside.
• Check out our customer’s experience with this product.
• The last 5 customers rated this product 5/5. Order now!

Potential customers feel more confident about going back to the cart when they read the reviews of the product they want to order.

10. The ‘Emoji’ Subject Lines

Emojis have replaced words and phrases in recent times, and the trend doesn’t seem to fade. When used in a good fashion in abandoned cart subject lines, the attention of the recipient is right at your email. Some emoji-based subject lines include:

• Your cart is wondering where you went ❤️
• There’s still time to save! ⏰
• Your cart made us send this reminder 🙂
• Did you forget about me, Raul? 😱
• 600 minutes of free shipping starts now! ⚡
• Your cart is still in ❤️ with you. Give it a chance, maybe? 👀

When you read these subject lines, you must have noticed the emojis first, right? That’s exactly the idea behind these.

11. The ‘Customer Service’ Subject Lines

Customer service is all about reaching out to the customers to get their valuable feedback for enhancing their experience. That’s the same logic when it comes to abandoned carts. It’s important for your team to understand what triggered the visitor to abandon their cart. Such abandoned cart email subject lines are:

• Don’t worry; we’re here to help!
• Was there some issue or glitch checking out?
• Having trouble completing the order?
• How can we help?
• Not a problem, we have saved your cart.
• Was there an issue with the product availability or prices?

Customer service subject lines focus on addressing the pain points of the recipient and letting them know that the company cares about their customers.

Ready to Bring Back Abandoning Customers?

Abandoned cart emails help businesses in recovering potentially lost sales. However, even the world’s best-abandoned cart email copies are worthless if they never get opened. That’s why subject lines shouldn’t be considered mere afterthoughts as they are more important than your email copy.

Remember, every customer who abandoned their cart must have a reason to do so. An abandoned cart email subject line is your best opportunity to address that reason or give them a better cause to pick up their cart.

Go on, think of some impressive abandoned cart email subject lines for your visitors and deliver the very best of the lot to your potential customers’ inboxes. Hurry, the clock is ticking!