Terminology
- Flow – the automated sequence of emails that fires when someone leaves items in their basket without buying.
- Conversion rate – the percentage of people who received the email and actually went on to buy, not just open it or click through.
- AOV (Average Order Value) – the average amount spent per order, which changes how much consideration time someone needs before committing.
- Discount-first behaviour – when customers learn that abandoning a basket reliably produces a discount, so they start doing it deliberately rather than by accident.
- Multi-touch sequence – a series of emails spread across time, each doing a different job, rather than one message attempting everything at once.
Think about any car dealership you've ever walked out of. The salesperson throws something in at the last moment, free mats, a tank of fuel, maybe a year's servicing to seal the deal. It happens reliably enough that most people now walk in already expecting it, and if nothing materialises they feel vaguely shortchanged even though they were never promised anything. The dealership trained them into that expectation without meaning to, just by doing it consistently enough that it became the obvious pattern. Online abandoned cart flows have done exactly the same thing to shoppers, except instead of floor mats it's ten percent off, and customers figured it out considerably faster.
None of them are being particularly cynical about it. They're just doing what any sensible person does when a pattern reliably saves them money. A flow that fires a discount within hours of every abandonment starts looking less like a recovery tool and more like a scheme that rewards waiting. Unlike an actual loyalty programme, you're paying for it each time without getting a meaningful relationship back in return.
Where the structure falls apart
The instinct when conversions dip is to rewrite the email. Usually that means a new subject line, a swapped image, maybe a punchier call to action somewhere near the bottom. Occasionally that helps marginally, but it's almost never the actual problem, because the problem tends to live in the structure rather than the words. Research looking at hundreds of ecommerce brands found that the average abandoned cart sequence sits at around 1.52 emails, with the majority of brands relying on a single follow-up. A single email is being asked to remind, reassure, and persuade all in one go, with no second or third chance to catch someone who simply wasn't ready the moment it arrived. Google Support
Then there's where the discount sits within that sequence, which matters more than most brands realise. Looking at how brands actually structure their flows, the vast majority include an offer in the very first email, even though shifting smaller incentives to later messages and saving stronger ones for the final email avoids training shoppers into discount-first behaviour. Once someone learns that leaving a basket produces a code, they will keep doing it. At that point the flow has become the problem it was built to solve. Google Support
Timing gets configured at launch and rarely revisited, which is a shame because the gap between sends appears to matter considerably. One large-scale review of cart flows found performance peaking with around 18 hours between the first two emails, roughly a day between the second and third, and sends performing best in the evening window between 6 and 9pm, peaking at 7pm. A flow firing at 3am because that's when the automation was originally configured is working against itself before the subject line even gets a look in. Google Support
Is your flow a recovery tool or a discount machine?
Rebuilding starts with committing to a proper sequence rather than a single email with a vague fallback. Three messages tends to be the point at which returns begin dropping off, with the first email recovering the bulk of total recoveries, the second adding a smaller amount, and the third smaller still, with anything beyond three generating diminishing returns and increasing complaint risk. Longer is rarely better here, so the goal is a tighter sequence done properly rather than more messages doing less.
The more consequential change is where any incentive lives in that sequence. Start the first email with a plain reminder, stock availability, a note on delivery, nothing beyond that. Hold any discount back for the second message at the earliest, and save a stronger offer for the third if you're using one at all. It feels counterintuitive to sit on the thing that appears to "work," but the version that works in the short term is the one steadily training price-sensitive customers to never pay full price again.
Timing should flex by product rather than being a single blanket setting across everything. An impulse buy decays fast and benefits from an earlier first send. A considered, higher-value purchase needs more breathing room, since the person is probably still weighing up alternatives elsewhere. How well that distinction holds up across every product category is genuinely difficult to predict without testing your own data, and applying someone else's benchmarks is always a rougher instrument than it looks in a report.
Most flows were built once, probably by whoever set the email platform up with a tutorial open in another tab, and occasionally someone updated a subject line or swapped an image, but the underlying sequence was never seriously revisited. Structures left untouched tend to calcify around assumptions that may now be two platform updates and a significant shift in customer behaviour out of date.
What has been your experience with abandoned carts? Do you agree with my thoughts or think something else would work even better? Let us know!
