Do you want to prevent losing potential revenue? Of course you do! In addition to email cart abandonment messages, why not send your abandoners text alert messages also known as abandoned shopping cart notifications.
But before you do, there are a few things you need to do to remain compliant based on policies the industry has implemented that may require you to gain explicit permission to send text reminders about abandoned carts.
This guide will walk you through those requirements and the features in the Listrak platform you can use to implement a compliant SMS abandoned cart campaign. Click a link to learn more about how compliance requirements impact your SMS program.
Acquisition
A customer must first be double opted-in and receive explicit messaging at the time of opt-in that indicated they consented to receive abandoned cart notifications.
Example of a Keyword/Phrase campaign:
💡 If using a List Subscription campaign, the web form needs to have a consent statement and the cellphone number cannot be a required field.
Contact Management
During the onboarding phase here at Listrak, you may need to import your SMS contacts from your previous provider by using our SMS List Import wizard. Our import tool will automatically assign the contacts with an opt-in status as 'Single Opt-in' and their marketing consent set to 'Not' to receive abandoned cart notifications.
To override these default settings use the options in the import wizard to change the opt-in status to 'Double Opt-in' and the marketing consent to 'Yes' to receive abandoned cart notifications. You can also use the tool to override an existing contact's current opt-in status.
You can then use this data in a Subscription Split when building an SMS cart abandonment journey to ensure only those contacts who are compliant (double opt-in and have consented) receive the cart abandonment notifications.
Re-permission Messaging
A data acquisition message can be used to capture consent from your existing SMS contacts by requesting consent to receive abandoned cart notifications. If the contact consents (replies Y) their opt-in status is set to 'Double Opt-in' and the marketing consent is set to 'Yes' to receive abandoned cart notifications.
💡 The message content is very similar to the acquisition campaign with the differences being the exclusion of the keyword or phrase and verbiage in the confirmation message.
Example of a Message Consent Data Acquisition campaign:
You may ask yourself...
Why would I need to send out a re-permission message if my acquisition campaign messaging is compliant?
If you imported previous SMS subscribers during your onboarding with Listrak that did not provide consent to receive abandoned cart reminders a re-permission message would keep you in compliance.
My current acquisition campaign doesn't have cart reminder language and I want to start sending abandoned cart notification messages, what should I do?
Implement a re-permission campaign and update your acquisition messaging to be in compliance.
Automated Cart Abandonment Journeys
Subscription splits in Journey Hub allow you to utilize the compliance data you know about your SMS contacts; such as their mobile carrier, opt-in status and, marketing consent status (as mentioned in the Contact Management section) to send messages that meet cart reminder notification requirements.
Before you begin strategizing and building your cart abandonment journey, there are a few additional requirements you need to know to keep your program in compliance:
Cart reminder messages must include STOP to opt-out instructions.
Cart reminder messages must be delivered within 48 hours after abandonment.
Only ONE cart reminder message (that implicitly mentions cart abandonment and links to cart) may be sent per cart abandonment session, per subscriber.
Example of a Cart Abandonment journey:
⚠️ You can not include a re-permission (data acquisition) SMS message in a cart abandonment journey.
Additional guidelines can be found here SMS Compliance guide.