About WooCommerce Emails, settings, send test messages & custom email templates!

An abandoned cart sequence is three emails rather than one: a reminder about an hour after the cart is left, a message answering the usual objections the next day, and a final nudge after three days. All three are written out below, subject line, opening line and button text included, ready to paste into a plugin that can send them. After the templates comes the reasoning: what gets a subject line opened, which tone works and which backfires, where the call to action goes, and the consent question that decides whether you can send any of this at all in the EU.

Three abandoned cart emails you can co

Replace the placeholders with your own, keep them short, and send them from a person’s name rather than “noreply”.

Email	When	Its one job
1	About 1 hour after the cart is abandoned	Assume a technical problem, not a change of mind
2	24 hours	Answer the objection that actually stopped them
3	72 hours	Close the loop, with an incentive only if you use one

Email 1, after one hour: the cart is saved

Most carts left within the hour were not rejected. The payment failed, the phone rang, the connection dropped. Treat it that way and do not discount anything yet.

Subject: Your cart is still here, {first_name}
Alternative subject: Did something go wrong at checkout?
Preheader: Everything you picked is saved, nothing was lost.

Body:

Hi {first_name},

You left a few things in your cart at {store_name} and we have kept them for you. Nothing was lost and you do not have to start again.

{cart_items}

If something went wrong at checkout, a card that would not go through or a page that would not load, reply to this email and we will sort it out.

Button: Back to my cart

Email 2, after 24 hours: answer the objection

A day later, the most likely reason is not forgetfulness but an unanswered question. Shipping cost, delivery time and returns account for most of them, so answer all three without waiting to be asked.

Subject: Still thinking it over?
Alternative subject: Three things people ask before ordering {product_name}
Preheader: Shipping, delivery time and returns, answered.

Body:

Hi {first_name},

Your cart is still saved. If something stopped you, it is usually one of these three:

Shipping: {shipping cost and the threshold for free delivery}
Delivery: {typical delivery time}
Returns: {return window and who pays}

{cart_items}

Anything else, just reply. A person reads these.

Button: Finish my order

Email 3, after 72 hours: the last one

The final email is the only place an incentive belongs, and it is optional. Send a discount in every sequence and you teach regular customers to abandon carts on purpose.

Subject: Last reminder about your cart
Alternative subject: We are releasing your cart tomorrow
Preheader: One click if you still want it.

Body:

Hi {first_name},

This is the last email about your cart. After tomorrow we release the items back into stock.

{cart_items}

{Optional: Use the code {coupon_code} for {value} off, valid for 48 hours.}

If the timing is wrong, no problem. You can always find these in the shop later.

Button: Complete my order

How to change these for your shop

Three adjustments do most of the work. Use the words your customers use, so if they call it a basket, the email says basket. Put the product image in, because a cart described in words is far less persuasive than the thing itself. And sign off with a name and a real reply address, since a reply to an abandoned cart email is a customer telling you exactly why your checkout lost them.

Table of contents

• Three abandoned cart emails you can copy
• Subject lines: getting the email opened
• Tone: choosing the right one
• Copy and images
• Call to action: getting people to finish checking out
• Navigation: what other links to use
• Before you send: consent and frequency
• ShopMagic Abandoned Carts, a free add-on
• Summary
• Frequently asked questions

Subject lines: getting your abandoned cart emails opened

Most people scan an inbox for what matters and archive the rest unread. An abandoned cart email is competing in that scan, which means the subject line does more work than the entire body.

Four things make a marketing subject line survive the scan:

1. Legitimate: recognisably from a brand the reader knows, with a clear subject and no spam signals.
2. Arouses interest: news, a development or product information in an area the reader cares about.
3. Provides value: a discount, early access, something personalised.
4. Creates urgency: time-limited and needing action.

The example above hits three of the four at once: the sender is known, the offer has a stated monetary value, and the giveaway has an end date. The reader does not have to work out why the email matters.

One caution specific to abandoned carts. Urgency works, but only when it is true. “Your cart expires in 2 hours” from a shop whose carts never expire is the fastest way to teach customers to ignore everything you send.

Tone: choosing the right one for your abandoned cart email template

Two real emails, two opposite outcomes from the same intention.

Helpful

“We’ve kept your shopping bag safe” puts the shop on the customer’s side: something was looked after on their behalf. The lines underneath return to a plain service register, inviting the customer to email if anything went wrong, so the warmth is in the opening and the usefulness is in the body.

The picture carries tone as well as the words do. Two dogs guarding bags before a trip is an emotional cue rather than a product shot, and it is doing a job the copy cannot.

Clever

“Distracted? Confused?” reaches for humour and lands on a guess about the reader, namely that they did not finish because something was wrong with them rather than with the checkout. The body is genuinely helpful, offering assistance by email, but the opening has already set a register the rest has to climb back from.

The lesson is not that humour fails. It is that humour at the reader’s expense competes with the one thing the email needs to do. A joke about your own checkout is safe. A joke about the customer’s attention span is not.

Copy and images: what to lead with

The examples so far are image-led, but a plain text email works too, and is the right place to start if you do not have a designed template yet.

Good copy is simple, inviting, informative and written in the right register. This collection of examples is useful for seeing the range before you write your own.

Over time, add images, because a picture of the abandoned product does in one glance what a paragraph struggles to do, and a properly laid out email reads as a real shop rather than an automated nudge. Start with text, though. A plain email that goes out this week beats a designed one that goes out next quarter.

Call to action: getting people to finish checking out

Every abandoned cart email has one thing in common: a call to action.

Both are simple and leave no doubt about what to click. The second adds urgency with “items in your tote are going fast”, and the word tote instead of cart is a small signal that the shop speaks its customers’ language.

Showing related products alongside the cart is worth testing too. If the original item no longer appeals, a second reason to click is better than none, and the goal is to get the reader back on the site at all.

Two rules worth holding to. One primary button, not three competing ones, because a reader deciding between buttons is a reader deciding nothing. And the link should go to the cart with the items already in it, not to the homepage. An email that makes the customer rebuild their cart has wasted the open.

Navigation: what other links to use in your abandoned cart email template

Adding your normal navigation to the email gives a reader who has lost interest in the product somewhere else to go. The risk is clutter, so the usual compromise is a simplified menu of broad categories at the top.

The alternative is to leave the menu out and lay the email out like a cart, with a few non-product links at the bottom. The example below does that well.

Either way, the main button stays the most prominent thing in the email. Navigation is the fallback, not the offer.

Before you send: consent and frequency

Two things to settle before the first email goes out, because both are easier to get right at the start than to unpick later.

Consent. An abandoned cart email goes to someone who typed an address into your checkout and did not complete a purchase. Whether you may email them, and on what basis, depends on where you and they are. If you sell into the EU or the UK, this is a question for whoever handles your privacy policy, not one to settle from a blog post. What you can do regardless is make it visible: say at checkout that you may send a reminder, and put an unsubscribe link in every one of these emails.

This is also why the email has to be captured early. WP Desk telemetry from 19,803 WooCommerce stores, collected in August 2026, shows 86.2% of orders placed as guests. A guest who leaves has no account behind them, so if the address was not captured before they dropped out, there is nobody to write to.

Frequency. In a MarketingSherpa study, 51% of consumers found abandoned cart emails helpful, while 38% found them annoying.

That split is the argument for three emails and a stop. The sequence ends whether or not the customer buys, and a customer who has received it once does not get it again for a while.

ShopMagic Abandoned Carts add-on

WooCommerce has no abandoned cart trigger of its own, so none of the above can be built by editing email templates. There is no template to edit and no event to attach it to.

ShopMagic Abandoned Carts is a free add-on that adds the missing piece: it records the cart, captures the address, and lets you decide how long after abandonment each message goes out.

Building the emails

The content editor handles images and structure without PHP or HTML, which matters here because the three emails above are meant to be edited repeatedly rather than written once. Placeholders pull in the customer’s name and cart contents, so one template serves every customer.

Timing and segmentation

Each email in the sequence is a separate automation with its own delay, which is what makes the one hour, 24 hour and 72 hour structure possible. Filters let you treat a 500 cart differently from a 50 one, so the discount in email three can go only where it is worth giving.

Emails are only half of it. The other half is the checkout itself, and reducing the abandoned cart rate in WooCommerce covers the carts you never have to recover because they were never abandoned.

Summary

An abandoned cart email template is not one email. It is a short sequence with three different jobs: an hour in, you assume the checkout failed and tell the customer their cart is safe; a day in, you answer the shipping, delivery and returns questions that stopped them; three days in, you close the loop and, only here, offer an incentive if you use one at all. The three templates at the top of this page are written to that structure and can be pasted in as they are.

What makes each one work is ordinary. A subject line that is recognisable and true, including the urgency, which has to be real. A tone that puts the shop on the customer’s side rather than making a joke at their expense. One button, pointing at the cart with the items still in it. Navigation as a fallback for a reader who no longer wants the product, never competing with the main action.

Two things to settle before sending: how you handle consent for emailing someone who did not complete a purchase, which is a question for whoever owns your privacy policy, and a hard stop at the end of the sequence, because roughly as many people find these emails annoying as find them helpful. WooCommerce cannot do any of this on its own, since it has no abandoned cart trigger, so the sequence needs a plugin. Write the three emails in plain text first, send them to yourself, and only then worry about the design.

Frequently asked questions

How many abandoned cart emails should I send?

Three, then stop. One about an hour after abandonment, one after 24 hours and one after 72. More than that moves you from helpful to annoying for a large share of recipients.

When should the first abandoned cart email go out?

Roughly an hour in. That timing catches the carts lost to a failed payment or an interruption, which are the easiest ones to recover and do not need a discount.

Should I include a discount?

Only in the last email, if at all. A discount in every sequence teaches regular customers that abandoning a cart is how you get money off.

Can WooCommerce send abandoned cart emails by itself?

No. There is no abandoned cart trigger in WooCommerce core, so this cannot be done by editing an email template. It needs a plugin that records the cart and captures the address.

What should the abandoned cart email link to?

The cart with the items already in it, not the homepage. Making the customer rebuild the cart wastes the one open you were given.

What subject line works best?

One that is recognisable as coming from you and says something true. Urgency helps, but only if the deadline is real, since an invented expiry trains people to ignore your email entirely.

Do I need consent to send abandoned cart emails?

It depends on where you and the customer are, and in the EU and UK it is a question for whoever maintains your privacy policy. Regardless of the answer, say at checkout that a reminder may follow and include an unsubscribe link in every message.

Is a plain text abandoned cart email good enough?

To start, yes. A plain email sent this week recovers more carts than a designed one that never ships. Add product images once the sequence is running.