Recover Lost Revenue Automatically with LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery

Win back the sales you already earned, and make more money online with LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery.

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How to Recover Lost Course Revenue with Cart Abandonment Recovery

LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery captures abandoned course and membership checkouts and sends a three-email follow-up sequence so you can win back sales you already almost earned. In this training, Chris Badgett covers why nearly 7 in 10 carts are abandoned, how LifterLMS recovered $319,019 with the same system, and a live demo of the recovery emails, Integrations settings, coupons, and the Cart Recovery reporting dashboard. It is included in the Earth bundle and every higher plan.

What You’ll Learn

• Why nearly 7 in 10 online checkouts are abandoned, and why that unfinished sale is still recoverable
• How a three-email sequence at 1 hour, 24 hours, and 72 hours wins carts back without hard selling
• What LifterLMS recovered with the same system on its own store, including why email one does most of the work
• How to install Cart Abandonment Recovery, use the default settings, and tune coupons and data retention
• Where to read abandoned carts, conversion rate, and recovered revenue inside LifterLMS Reporting

Key Takeaways

• Install Cart Abandonment Recovery from LifterLMS, Add-ons and More, activate it, and leave the defaults on unless you have a reason to change them.
• Require email on checkout so the sequence can start. Name is helpful. Visitors who leave before email need a different tactic, such as an exit-intent popup.
• Keep the 1 hour, 24 hour, and 72 hour timing. LifterLMS proved that cadence on its own store, and email one recovered about 60 percent of recovered carts.
• Leave the Email #3 coupon on with a short expiry if price hesitation is common, and use the CAR- prefix so recovery discounts are easy to spot in reports.
• Open LifterLMS, Reporting, Cart Recovery each week, or enable the weekly digest, so you can see recovered revenue instead of guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Recover Lost Revenue Automatically with LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery

What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and welcome to this training on how to recover lost revenue automatically.

This presentation is all about the new Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on for LifterLMS. What it does is allow you to recover lost revenue automatically, to essentially win back sales that you’ve already almost earned and make more money online. And I have proof that this works, which I’m going to show you in a little bit.

You’re going to see a full live demo of LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery. We’re going to show you how it works and how to set it up. I’m actually super proud of this one, because literally all you have to do is install the plugin, activate it, and it starts working immediately. There are a bunch of settings you can fine-tune, but we’re here to help you make more money online.

Here’s what we’re going to cover: why you lose sales you already earned, how the Cart Abandonment Recovery system works and how to win them back, and how to turn it on and start recovering lost revenue right away.

Checkout Optimization and the LMScast Podcast

I also want to mention we just recorded a podcast episode on the LMScast podcast which is all about checkout optimization, of which cart abandonment recovery is one of six techniques we use to optimize checkout and increase your revenue and conversions. If you’re not already a listener of the LMScast podcast, that’s our podcast we’ve been doing for over 12 years. I would encourage you to sign up for that. It’s on Spotify, YouTube, Audible, even Amazon. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you’re interested in today’s topic and want to go deeper on checkout optimization, that episode is worth your time.

Why Nearly 7 in 10 Online Shopping Carts Are Abandoned

This is based on the data that nearly seven in 10 shopping carts are abandoned. There’s a company called the Baymard Institute that ran a study, 50 studies actually, and they documented that 70.22% of shopping carts are abandoned online.

So it’s a huge problem. Obviously you can’t save them all, but there are some in that seven out of 10 people on your checkout that you can win back, and we’re going to show you how to do that today.

Cart abandonment is natural. Your website isn’t broken. It’s just human behavior. If you’ve ever known somebody, maybe a friend, a parent, a child, with a shopping habit where they’re constantly shopping but not always buying things, that is cart abandonment in action.

The Hard Part of the Sale Is Already Done

The hard part is already done. The fact that you got somebody on your learning management system website, they’re interested in your courses and memberships. Then they raised their hand, they checked out your products, they added the course or membership to the cart, and then they vanish at the last second. They even started filling out the checkout form, but they just didn’t complete the checkout.

So that sale is not gone. It’s just unfinished. There’s a phrase we say in sales, which is the fortune is in the follow-up. Sometimes sales is all about following up. Not in an annoying way, but just in a helpful way, and that is the way LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery is designed. You don’t need to lose all 100% of your abandoned carts anymore.

Most Buyers Need More Than One Touch Before They Enroll

Most people need more than one touch before they buy. I heard a study once that it’s like seven touches. And what is a touch? A touch might mean they read one of your blog posts, they see you on YouTube, they go to your website. That’s three touches. The next week they come back, that’s the fourth touch. Then they send a message to you through your contact form. Then you respond to them, so that’s the sixth touch, and then they go to your shopping cart, and then they abandon, and then you get the follow-up, and they buy. That’s an example of graceful follow-up, and just the multiple touch points it takes sometimes to make a sale.

How LifterLMS Recovered $319,019 with Cart Abandonment Recovery

At LifterLMS, our software sales site, and also on academy.lifterlms.com, we run a cart abandonment system. In the past eight years, we’ve recovered $319,019 doing cart abandonment recovery. And this is an exact figure that was just calculated through our cart abandonment reporting.

You’ll notice there’s basically these three emails in our cart abandonment system. The first email happens 1 hour after they abandon the cart, the next one 24 hours later, and the final one 72 hours later. And you can see different people respond to the different emails. Even just having this first email recovered 60% of the abandoned carts that were recovered, which is amazing. We’re going to go into what’s in that email and how it works in just a little bit.

Why LifterLMS Built Cart Abandonment Recovery for Course Creators

We want to hand you the same system. I’m a huge fan of cart abandonment recovery because it simply works. These ideas I’m teaching you today, I learned about a decade ago and then figured out how to do that for our software sales site. And we realized this same system would be helpful for course creators and education companies. At LifterLMS we care about your success more than anybody else in the industry. So of course we built that solution for you.

This is the Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on. We made it available in all plans. So it’s included in our lowest cost plan, which is called the Earth bundle, which is basically our e-commerce bundle. You get the payment gateways, but you also get Cart Abandonment Recovery, because we want to see you make more money online.

How Cart Abandonment Recovery Captures the Checkout

So how does it work? The first step is the cart is saved. Cart Abandonment Recovery does require people to enter their email address in the checkout, at a minimum, before they abandon. Which is actually quite common. People start filling out the form. It’s not like they see the checkout and they leave, but that does happen, and there’s not much you can do for those folks outside of using an exit-intent popup, which we have a whole webinar about how to do with Popup Maker. It’s a great tool.

But once they’ve entered their email address in the checkout, perhaps put in their name, that’s all we need to initiate LifterLMS’s Cart Abandonment Recovery sequence.

The Three Email Recovery Sequence at 1 Hour, 24 Hours, and 72 Hours

The sequence is an automated series of three emails that goes out on a custom schedule. We set it based on what we know works, but you can change the spacing between these emails if you want to. And then the sale comes back. They click the button in the email, they’re back on your checkout. Their information is already there. They’re ready to go and complete the checkout.

Cart abandonment recovery is not pushy. It’s not a hard sale. There’s no shaming of the user for abandoning the cart. It’s more of just a quick courtesy check.

The main message of the first and second emails is essentially: hey, did something go wrong? Did you mean to leave the checkout? Here’s a quick link to recover your checkout. The third email is different and it has a coupon. It’s sort of like your last chance, which does convert as well.

The three emails are spread out 1 hour, 24 hours, 72 hours. You can change those if you want to, but I would encourage you to stick with what we’ve proven works with the 1 hour, 1 day, 3 days later system.

Data Retention, Privacy, and Transactional Recovery Emails

You also see in the settings a data retention period. What this means is we hold that email address in the Cart Abandonment Recovery system for 90 days, but then if they don’t return and they don’t check out, we remove it because it’s a privacy issue. You had a chance to recover them, they didn’t complete the checkout, so that email is not saved forever. That’s part of best practices in data retention and privacy.

These are basically treated as transactional emails, not marketing emails. A transactional email is more like a receipt for a purchase. This is sort of like a hey, are you sure you didn’t want to complete your checkout? It’s transactional in that sense.

The Last Chance Email with a Personal Single Use Coupon

The last email is sort of your last chance. You’ve reminded them twice over a two-day period. And then the third one is like, hey, it looks like you’re not completing your checkout. We’re here to offer you a coupon that you can use, but this coupon code expires by default in 3 days. So this is sort of your last chance. Maybe it was the price. Maybe that was the objection as to why they didn’t buy.

That last email automatically creates a dynamic coupon that’s personal to just that one user, with a 3-day expiry before it will no longer work. That’s your last chance to recover the cart.

The Cart Recovery Reporting Dashboard

We also added a dashboard so that you can see inside your LifterLMS reporting how your cart abandonment is doing, what’s the conversion rate. Even small numbers here can have dramatic impact on revenue. In one example, 7.6 percent of carts were recovered, generating $64,000 in revenue.

You’ll also see unsubscribes right there. That’s another part of best practices in this kind of transactional follow-up email style. We do give the user the ability to unsubscribe from those emails if they’re just really not interested in returning to the cart. It’s only a light-touch three-email sequence, but that unsubscribe is best practice for the users.

Who Should Use Cart Abandonment Recovery

Who uses Cart Abandonment Recovery? People who charge for their courses: course creators, membership site owners, coaches, online academies, nonprofits and associations, continuing education providers, or anyone who is selling access to online learning using LifterLMS.

And it is key here that it’s for anyone selling online. What I mean by that is this system is not used for free enrollments. This is only for courses and memberships in LifterLMS that have a paid access plan associated with them.

Angela Brown and Why Recovery Protects Your Mission

I love this testimonial. This is one of my favorite LifterLMS users, named Angela Brown. She helps house cleaners and maids build their businesses. She’s done a huge amount of business with her Savvy Cleaner Academy, and she’s built a huge education company helping entrepreneurs in the house cleaning, maid, and cleaning company niches. What she said is if a house cleaning lady can make a fine living teaching others how to clean, anybody can.

Recovery is all about making sure more of that money actually lands. You don’t have to be super technical or an e-commerce expert to use this system. You should definitely do it if you’re charging for courses and memberships.

Like I mentioned, LifterLMS has made an extra $319,019 with this cart recovery system. It really just helps you pursue your mission and keep your business running. And it also helps learners. If somebody was maybe on the fence, or they couldn’t find their credit card, or life got busy, you’re actually doing them a service reminding them of what they were about to do and the value you were about to add through your online education.

Live Demo Setup on a LifterLMS Demo Site

So we’re going to look at it live now. We’re going to look at the emails first, then the settings, and then the recovery dashboard.

I’m going to pull a demo site on the screen. This is a LifterLMS demo site. We offer these demo sites, by the way, for a dollar. People often get these when they’re evaluating LifterLMS, but if you ever want to play around with the Cart Abandonment Recovery system before getting in through the Earth bundle or any of our plans, you can get the $1 demo site.

How to Inspect Recovery Emails with WP Mail Logging

Let’s take a look at the emails first. I’m going to go into the back end of the site here.

This is an interesting trick which you may not be aware of. Like I mentioned, this is a transactional email. This is not a marketing email. A transactional email is typically sent directly from your website. A LifterLMS purchase receipt is a transactional email. When a user resets their password, that’s a transactional email. And sometimes it’s hard to see what emails your website is sending, but if you ever want to keep a log of all the emails your website has sent, you can install a plugin like WP Mail Logging. This is just a free plugin. I’ve used this one a lot just to see all the emails that my website is sending.

Email One the One Hour Checkout Rescue Message

I’m going to go back in history a little bit here, and we’ll start at the beginning. Here you can see the first email, where this user abandoned the cart, and then this is email one. It’s basically saying, hey, looks like you were in the middle of enrolling in a course. If you ran into a technical issue or got distracted, you can pick right up where you left off here.

If we open that recovery link, you can see we’re right back on the checkout with that same course in the cart. So that’s what email one looks like.

Email Two the Product Reminder with a Direct Checkout Link

In terms of email two, I’m just going to go into my transactional email history here. We have the course name. This time this email really reinforces the product that they were actually looking at, whereas the first email is about, hey, did something go wrong, we’re here to help recover your cart. This email is like, hey, you were looking at this particular course or membership. Here’s a link to go look at the course as a reminder of what you were shopping for. And then we have the direct-to-checkout button again.

Here you can see the unsubscribe from these reminders. Again, they’re not added to an infinite email list. This is just transactional emails for Cart Abandonment Recovery.

Email Three the Final Reminder with a Unique Coupon Code

And then we can see the third email right here. This is the last chance email. We mention the product again, and this is a note that it’s the final email we’re going to be sending about this product. You can see here they can complete their enrollment, go right to checkout. And the system has automatically generated a coupon code that’s unique, that expires in 3 days from when this email was sent. That’s kind of your last ditch effort to recover the cart in that way.

The Weekly Cart Recovery Digest Email

While we’re back here looking at the emails, you can also see the report that comes through. You can see weekly, and I love this about the cart abandonment system that we’ve been using at LifterLMS for many years, is that every week I get an email, and almost every week there’s at least one or two recovered carts with a significant amount of money. That’s why it added up to $319,019 over the course of several years. This recovery digest email is just a good reminder. I always enjoy getting these emails and seeing how my cart recovery is working.

Cart Abandonment Recovery Settings under LifterLMS Integrations

So let’s jump into the settings. If we go into LifterLMS, Settings, and then jump into Integrations, you can see we have Cart Abandonment Recovery right up here.

This is what I’m saying. If you do nothing but install this plugin and activate it, it’s just going to start working right away. These are the default settings. Email number one, 1 hour. Email two, 24 hours. Email three, 72 hours.

And then the data retention here is just a privacy policy best practice of only retaining the data for a certain period. However, if they do convert and you recover the cart, their data will not be deleted. They will be included in the system and all your reporting. It’s just about keeping the data for the people that abandoned your cart but didn’t complete the checkout.

Coupon Prefix Discount Type and Weekly Report Options

There’s a coupon code prefix, and what this does is make it helpful when you’re looking at your e-commerce data, your sales data, your reporting data. All the coupon codes will start with CAR. CAR, by the way, stands for Cart Abandonment Recovery, but you can change this. This is just a quick and easy way for you to look at your coupon usage and know, when you’re looking at coupons, which ones were cart abandonment coupons.

The Cart Abandonment Recovery coupon option is optional, so you can check or uncheck the box. You can do different types of discounts. I did 10% and I had my coupon expire after 3 days. It’s up to you if you want to play with that, if you want to do 50% off or 5% or 20%, expire for 3 days, 1 week, whatever you want to do.

And then down here, the weekly report is all about sending you that weekly digest of your recovered carts, which I personally really like to look at. So I’d encourage you to have that weekly report enabled.

How to Read the LifterLMS Cart Recovery Report

Last thing to show you is just in the reporting. I’m going to LifterLMS, Reporting, and you can see there’s a new area up here at the top called Cart Recovery. I’m going to click on that.

And you can see here how you can filter how your carts are recovering over time, how many carts were abandoned, how many were recovered, what’s your conversion rate, and what was your recovered revenue, and if anybody has unsubscribed. So that is the reporting feature.

Why Cart Abandonment Recovery Is in Every Paid LifterLMS Plan

Before we get into questions, if you go to lifterlms.com/pricing, you’ll notice that Cart Abandonment Recovery is included in our lowest paid plan, which means then it’s included in all the plans. If you think about it, if you recovered $200 a year, you would pay off your first year of your software license with the Cart Abandonment Recovery system. It’s kind of a no-brainer. And in my experience, you get significantly more than the cost of your software when using a system like that.

I highly recommend that you get going with LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery. You can turn it on once. You can set it and forget it. It’s one of those cool tools that just works automatically. It’s just well designed. You put in the options you want, or just use what we have set by default which is proven to work. And it’s ready to roll. Everything is tracked. It’s in the Earth bundle.

If you don’t have the Earth bundle yet, go ahead and consider that. Turn it on, upgrade to Earth bundle or any bundle plan. If you’re an existing customer, you may already have access to this and just aren’t using it. I would encourage you to install it, activate it, and reach out to our team if you have any questions.

Your next move is I would encourage you to recover your first lost sale this week. Just turn it on, set your timing, and let the automated follow-up do the work.

Does Cart Abandonment Recovery Work with WooCommerce

I’ll answer one question that comes up a lot. Does this work with WooCommerce? And the answer is no. This is for the LifterLMS checkout system. LifterLMS has a really conversion-optimized simple checkout that’s less steps, less complicated than WooCommerce. So if you are using WooCommerce though, there are some cart abandonment systems for WooCommerce made by other companies that are out there, but this system that we’ve demoed today is for LifterLMS checkout, which means you’re using like the LifterLMS Stripe and or PayPal payment gateway.

I definitely recommend using both Stripe and PayPal, giving users the option of two ways to pay, because sometimes people abandon the cart because let’s say their credit card transaction doesn’t go through, but then if you don’t have PayPal available, you’re not giving them a second option, and then they’re just going to leave. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll try a different card or try to reenter the card. Maybe they made a typo or whatever. But there’s all kinds of reasons that carts get abandoned.

Like I said, on the LMScast podcast, we’re doing an episode on six ways to optimize your checkout. Cart abandonment recovery is just one of those.

Install Activate and Recover Your First Lost Sale This Week

I just want to thank you for coming to this training on the new LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on. Thank you for letting me do my best work. My life’s mission is my company mission, which is to lift up others through education. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Thank you so much for coming, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.