Orchestration use case: abandon cart

Overview

Abandon campaigns such as abandon cart, browse, or search are great ways to send relevant message content to contacts at the moment they're engaged with your product or service.

Podium Orchestrations make it easy to set up an abandon campaign series. Simply set a trigger, add a delay and audience filter, and build out your message content. You can also add additional messages based on time delays or a contact's real-time behavior.

Pass the trigger data

In order for the abandon cart message to send, there needs to be data sent to the system that will trigger the automation.

In the case of an abandon cart message, we'll use the trigger of When a contact adds an item to the cart and add a delay for the message to send. We can use an audience filter to exclude any contacts that placed an order during the delay. This will prevent contacts from receiving an abandon cart message if they purchased the item.

This strategy utilizes three primary pieces of data:

1. Cart attribute

Purpose: Used to filter the audience based on items existing in the contact's cart at the time of send. Also used to personalize the message content with the actual items left in the cart.
Data type: An object stored as contact attribute data. The object contains an array of cartitem objects each describing the items in the cart.

2. Cart event

Purpose: This custom-named event is used to trigger the Orchestration. It is not necessary to pass any properties along with this event because the details of the cart will be written to the cart attribute above.
Data type: Event data stored in the event (contactactivities) collection.

The actual name of the event is up to you, but we typically recommend cart.

3. Order data

Purpose: This data will be used in an audience filter to exclude contacts that have made a purchase within a specified timeframe.
Data type: An object stored in the orders collection.

Methods

There are two ways you can send the data to Cordial:

Javascript Listener implementation: Javascript code placed on your website that sends data to Cordial. Learn more about setting up the core Javascript code.
Rest API implementation: a server-side alternative to Javascript that sends data to Cordial via API. Learn about updating contact records via API.

Create the Orchestration

1. Navigate to Automations > Podium Orchestrations and click New.

2. Give the Orchestration a name and click Continue.

3. From the main Orchestration page, you can set the trigger, delay, audience filter, and message content.

Define the trigger

This abandon cart Orchestration will be triggered by a contact adding an item to their cart.

1. To set this trigger in Podium, click the Trigger component.

2. Select the option for A contact’s real time behavior.

3. Choose the custom event name (cart in this example).

Build the automation

Once the trigger is set, you can build out the automation by configuring the delay, audience filter, and message content.

Define the delay

1. Click on the Delay component to set a delay for the message send after the trigger is met.

2. For the abandon cart message we'll set the delay for two hours. This will give time for the contact to potentially order the item after it was added to the cart.

Define the filter

1. Click on the Filter component to set an audience filter that will include or exclude contacts.

2. Select Filter by an audience and click Add Audience to go to the Audience Builder.

3. From here you can create an audience from scratch or recall a saved audience. For this message, we'll add an audience filter that will:

Include contacts that have items in their cart. This will prevent a message from getting sent to a contact that has an empty cart.
Exclude contacts that have purchased anything in the past two hours. This will prevent a message being sent to a contact that has ordered an item during the delay.

Define the action

1. Click on the Action component to define the action for this automation.

2. We're using the email channel for this abandon cart message, so choose Send an email.

3. Complete the fields for Message name, Message tags, choose the Message editor type, and set the message Classification as promotional or transactional.

4. Click Continue to go to the message creation page.

5. Here you can configure the Message Header, Message Content, and Delivery Settings.

6. Once the message has been created successfully, Publish the message.

Message content

Using Smarty, you can personalize message content with the items in the contact's cart at the time the message sends.

The following is a very simple example of rendering the cart items in the body of the message. You can apply additional markup and styling according to your brand.

You left the following items in your cart:<br> 

{foreach $contact.cart.cartitems as $item} 
<b><a href="{$item.url}">{$item.name}</a></b><br> 
SKU: {$item.sku}<br/> Description: {$item.description}<br>
Qty: {$item.qty}<br/> Price: {$item.amount}<br><br> 
<a href="{$item.url}"><img src="{$item.images.0}" /></a><br>
{/foreach}

Additional messages

While a single abandon cart message might be sufficient, it's easy to add additional messages according to your campaign strategy.

One strategy might be to send another message a day later with a discount offer for the item(s) in the cart. Click on the Plus button to the right of the initial automation to add additional messages, each with their own delay, filter, and action.

Additional triggers

It's also possible to add additional triggers by clicking the Plus icon below the initial automation. When a secondary trigger is added, it will be labeled as Wait Until, denoting that the message will not be sent unless the specified behavior is performed by the contact.

There are options for:

Do not wait
Wait for previous message events: Opened, Clicked, or Bounced
Wait for Other event (message event or custom-named event)

For example, if a contact opens the initial message but doesn't make a purchase, you could trigger a follow up message.

Publish and enable

1. Once you've configured your components and published your messages, you can publish the entire Orchestration by clicking the Publish Draft button.

If any components are not complete or there are unpublished messages, you'll see an error with the incomplete components highlighted.

2. After successfully publishing the Orchestration, you can then enable it using the Enable/Disable dropdown.

3. Once the messages start sending, you can view message performance stats directly in the Orchestration.