How We Recovered £120,000 in Abandoned Carts
Emma Clarke
Account Director
A furniture brand had a 78% cart abandonment rate and no recovery flows in place. We built a multi-step Klaviyo sequence that recovered £120,000 in a single quarter.
A mid-market furniture brand was generating consistent traffic from Google Shopping but watching the majority of visitors leave without purchasing. Their cart abandonment rate sat at 78% — not unusually high for furniture given the considered-purchase nature of the category, but entirely without any recovery mechanism. There were no abandonment emails. No browse abandonment flows. No SMS recovery. Just lost revenue.
The Opportunity
Before building flows, we needed to understand why customers were abandoning. We surveyed 600 recent website visitors who hadn't purchased using a Typeform embedded in a post-visit email. The results pointed clearly to three primary objections: price uncertainty, delivery timeline concerns, and the desire to 'think about it' for higher-ticket items.
Building the Recovery Flows
We built the recovery infrastructure in Klaviyo, connected to Shopify via the native integration. The sequence was designed around the three identified objections rather than generic 'you left something behind' messaging.
Email 1 — 1 Hour After Abandonment: The Nudge
A clean, product-focused email with a hero image of the abandoned item, its current price, and a single CTA. No discount. No pressure. For a brand selling £600 sofas, urgency-led messaging performs poorly — trust and reassurance perform better.
Email 2 — 24 Hours: Handle the Objection
This email was split-tested across two versions: Version A addressed delivery timelines with a specific delivery window for the abandoned item's postcode. Version B featured a customer review of the specific product alongside a 'satisfaction guarantee' message. Version B outperformed Version A by 31%.
Email 3 — 72 Hours: The Incentive
For customers who still hadn't converted, the third email introduced a 5% discount code valid for 48 hours. Crucially, this was only shown to non-converting customers — not sent universally — protecting margin from customers who would have converted without incentive.
- Total recovered revenue in Q1: £120,000
- Flow open rate average: 54%
- Recovery rate (abandoned cart to purchase): 11%
- Net margin on recovered orders: 28% (minimal discounting)
Emma Clarke
Account Director, Flex Commerce
