This article assumes you’re familiar with how journeys work in Attentive. See What are journeys? for an introduction to journeys. If you’re interested in building journeys for specific products, see Branching in journeys.
Attentive offers prebuilt session abandonment journeys with best practices already built in. If you decide to modify a prebuilt journey or create a session abandonment journey from scratch, we recommend following the best practices listed below.
Text-only journeys
The text-only pre-built journey includes the following best practices:
- A wait step set to fifteen minutes after the initial trigger
- In our experience with thousands of customers, we've found that sending the message within the first 60 minutes results in more conversions.
- Text messages for abandonment events must be sent within 48 hours to meet carrier guidelines.
- A branch step after the wait step to filter out subscribers who have viewed a product at least once since starting the journey.
- If you want to narrow the list of subscribers who receive a message, you can also branch to exclude subscribers who have already made a purchase within the last X days.
- A branch step to send messages only to a segment of subscribers who are only opted in to receive text messages (i.e., they aren’t subscribed to both email and text messages). This prevents duplicate text messages being sent to subscribers who have also opted in to receive emails.
- A Send text message step with copy similar to the following: “Hey
{{subscriber.firstName}}
, we noticed you checking us out. Have you seen our best sellers yet? short link to your website”- Your journey can include only one text message per abandonment event to meet carrier guidelines.
- Smart sending is enabled. You can adjust smart sending and quiet hours settings in the Messages tab of Settings.
Multi-channel journeys
The multi-channel (i.e., email & text message) prebuilt journey includes the following best practices:
- A Wait step set to fifteen minutes after the initial trigger
- In our experience with thousands of customers, we've found that sending the message within the first 60 minutes results in more conversions.
- Text messages for abandonment events must be sent within 48 hours to meet carrier guidelines.
- A branch step after the wait step to filter out subscribers who have viewed a product at least once since starting the journey.
- If you want to further narrow the list of subscribers who receive a message, you can also branch to exclude subscribers who have already made a purchase within the last X days.
- A branch step to separate subscribers who have opted in only to text messages and subscribers who have opted in to both email and text messages. This prevents duplicate text messages being sent to subscribers who have also opted in to receive emails.
- For text-only subscribers, a Send text message step with copy similar to the following: “Hey
{{subscriber.firstName}}
, we noticed you checking us out. Have you seen our best sellers yet? short link to your website”- Your journey can include only one text message per abandonment event to meet carrier guidelines.
- Smart sending is enabled. You can adjust smart sending and quiet hours settings in the Messages tab of Settings.
- For email and text message subscribers, a Send email step with copy similar to the following:
- Subject line: “We noticed you checking us out…”
- Body: Include product recommendations and/or best sellers, as well as copy that introduces your brand.
- A wait step set to four hours after the previous text or email message was sent.
- Another branch step after the wait step to filter out subscribers who have viewed a product at least once since starting the journey.
- Another series (up to three) of send email and wait steps with subject lines and body copy that incentivize subscribers to make a purchase by including an offer.
Carrier guidelines for abandonment text messages
If you customize your session abandonment journey, keep in mind that carriers require that abandonment text messages must be sent within 48 hours of the triggering event and that you can only send one text message per abandonment journey. For more information, see Carrier guidelines for abandonment messages.
Quiet hours
Quiet hours apply to triggered messages. If a message is triggered during your set quiet hours (local time of recipient), the message is delayed until quiet hours end. You can adjust quiet hours settings in the Messages tab of Settings.
More information about session abandonment journeys
See the following articles for more information about session abandonment journeys: