Ecommerce email conversion audit findings: a BROKEN automation

"What do you mean my email automation isn't working?" Email conversion audit finds broken abandoned cart automation.

Are you missing out on sales, and you don’t even know it? 😱

One of my clients was!

In December I did an email audit and found major errors in an abandoned cart automation. 

One broken element in an automation could be costing you thousands in lost sales.

I want to share the email conversion audit findings with you today, so you know what type of issues to look out for.

First stage of the Email Conversion Audit

A client asked me to audit her ecommerce email automations and find opportunities to improve sales conversions.

When I got to the Abandoned Cart sequence I was shocked at what I found.

The abandoned cart sequence was meant to be 3 emails over 3 days to remind customers to return and complete their purchase.

The first email went out about 2 hours after a customer added an item to their cart and didn’t complete the check out. So far so good.

Email conversion audit findings: A screen shot from the Klaviyo flow, showing the email automation parameters I discovered in the email conversion audit findings. Trigger: people will enter this flow when they Checkout Started. Flow Filters (2): Placed Order zero times since starting this flow AND Checkout Started zero times since starting this flow. Wait 2 hours.

The email averaged 54% open rate, 11% click rate, and 5.3% conversion rate, and made a total of $2420 from 19 sales and 343 email deliveries.

But something was wrong with this automation.

The second and third emails were blocked from sending.

This means the ecommerce store was missing a LOT of opportunities for sales.

I thought you’d like to hear about this, so you know what to look for in your own emails. Maybe your email automations aren’t working how you expected, which could be costing you sales.

Let’s get into the details of the email conversion audit findings (step by step)

From here on, I’m going to get into some technical details of an email audit. 

I’ll show you the kind of issues to look for in an audit and why it’s important to check that your automations are working correctly.

If email tech isn’t your cup of tea, contact me about doing an Email Conversion Audit on your email automations for you.

Here goes…

The email automation is a Klaviyo Flow for an abandoned cart email sequence (see image below – I’ve removed any identifying details from the screen shot).

What this screen shot means is:

Half the recipients got assigned to Email 1A, and half got assigned to Email 1B. Same email content, just a different subject line.

This A/B split test lets email marketers test which subject line will get more opens, and which email content will get more clicks and sales.

In this case, both emails got similar results, with slightly higher open and click rates on email 1B (despite having fewer recipients, and so lower dollars overall).

Email conversion audit findings: A screen shot from the Klaviyo flow, showing the email automation parameters I discovered in the email conversion audit findings. Image text reads: Conditional split: email is part of a 50% random sample. Main abandoned cart email reminder #1A, or main abandoned cart reminder #1B. Email 1A got 57.3% opens, 10.6% click rate, 5% order rate, total sales $1390. Skipped 930. Email B got 51.4% open rate, 11.8% click rate, 5.6% order rate, $1030 sales. Skipped 835.

A total of 1765 people were skipped from these emails. This is because they failed the filter called “Has Placed Order zero times since starting this flow”. 

THIS IS GREAT!

In this case, it means that the customer completed their purchase and placed an order in the last few hours. So they don’t need an abandoned cart reminder email, and they were skipped appropriately.

Now let’s look at email 2 and what went wrong. (AKA “What do you mean it’s not working? 😱”)

After email 1A or 1B, the flow rule says to wait 20 hours, then send email 2.

Email conversion audit findings: A screen shot from the Klaviyo flow, showing the email automation parameters I discovered in the email conversion audit findings. Wait 20 hours in both tracks, then sent Abandoned cart email 2 (the same subject and content for both). Email A Skipped 946, Email B skipped 981. Both Delivered 0. 0% open rate, 0% click rate, 0% placed order.

But ALL recipients are being skipped. Delivered: 0. Skipped: 1927 in total.

711 people have completed a purchase in the previous 22 hours, so they are correctly skipped. 

The filter parameters for this email are:

  • They have Placed Order zero times over all time
  • They have Checkout Started zero times over all time.

OH NO!!

The reason they’re in THIS flow is BECAUSE they started a checkout 22 hours ago and didn’t complete it.

But this filter parameter is excluding people who have EVER started a checkout. This creates a paradox and stops this second email from sending.

Look at them all!

Email conversion audit findings: A screen shot from the Klaviyo flow, showing reasons why this email automation skipped each person. The list shows 5 lines saying "Has Checkout Started zero times over all time" and 3 times saying "Has Placed Order zero times over all time"

How do you fix this fault in an email automation or flow?

The correct filter phrase should be:

  • They have Placed Order zero times since starting this flow (to exclude anyone who checked out in the last 22 hours)

This filter is also excluding anyone who has EVER made a purchase with the company. Which means that second-time customers who already love the product won’t get a second reminder email.

Pretty soon, I’ll be fixing this flow for the client and I can report back on changes in a couple of months. 

At the moment, only 54% of abandoned cart customers are opening an email. 

This means half miss the message altogether.

I’d expect to see a greater completion rate from 2-3 emails. I can’t wait to share results with you when I know more.

Over to you. How are your email automations performing?

Take a look at your email automations and see if you can find anomalies like the one I shared today.

This level of detail gets pretty technical and it can be confusing if you’re not an email strategist. 

If you’re not confident with email strategy yourself and you’d like me to investigate your email automations and find opportunities to improve your sales conversions, please get in touch on my contact page.

Happy emailing!