How does the cart abandonment email work? When does it send, and to who?

Question

1. What triggers a customer to be added to the list and the e-mail to be sent?

2. How long of a delay is there before the e-mail goes out?

3. Does this get sent to guests (all people that give an e-mail), or does it only get sent to people who have set up an account?

4. Does the list function as a way of tracking the e-mails that have been sent, or is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Cart Abandonment is when a customer comes to the site, adds items to their cart, enters the checkout process, and then exits the site without removing the items from their cart.

1. If after entering the checkout process a user subsequently
a) completes their order
b) manually removes all items from their cart

2. The script to send out all cart abandonment emails runs daily at 10a Eastern. When you create a cart abandonment email in Settings > Cart Abandonment, you specify the Wait in days. The abandonment email is sent after that wait time expires, at the next possible time that the script runs.

Ex: You set a wait of 2 days. A customer shops on Monday afternoon, then abandons. After 48 hours, the wait expires Wednesday afternoon and they are put onto the tmp list to receive a cart abandonment email. When the script runs Thursday morning at 10a Eastern, they are sent the email.

3. The cart abandonment email sends to anyone who begins checkout and has provided their email address during their shopping session.

4. When the cart abandonment emails are sent out, anyone sent an email is added to a customer group: Customers > Groups > Cart Abandonment. You specify in Settings > Options > Cart Abandonment Options how long someone stays in that customer group after they are added. An email can only appear in a customer group once, and multiple cart abandonment emails can be sent out if someone never comes back to complete an order, so this customer group list does not accurately represent how many cart abandonment emails are sent, or the resulting activity from those emails.

You can append referrer codes to the links in your Cart Abandonment email template under Design > Template Library > Email Confirmation Templates >  Cart Abandonment Email (cart_abandonment.tpl). For more information on referrer codes and reporting, look under Reporting > Referrers in your store.

Other analytics programs, like Google, have tools for tracking links from various promotional sources as well. Look in Google's help topics for information on tagging ad campaign links. Resulting activity would then be tracked through your Google Analytics account.
 

Answer 2

The variable, {$session_link} should be included in any link that you wish to reactivate the customer's session.

Its format is: order_id=123&session_id=ABCDEFG1234567890

Example use:
<a href="http://my-store.com/viewcart?{$session_link}">View Cart</a>

With a promo attached to the link:
<a href="http://my-store.com/viewcart?p=PROMO_CODE&{$session_link}">View Cart</a>