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Dec 7, 2021
Grow your e-commerce sales with a browse abandonment flow in Klaviyo!
This video below goes through this tutorial with a screen recording.
The browse abandonment flow is a series of automated emails that are triggered when someone has visited a particular product page but did not start or complete their checkout.
Looking at this funnel, compared to the abandoned cart flow - which is triggered when someone starts a checkout - browse abandonment emails are sent when a visitor doesn't even start the checkout. All a site visitor has to do is to view an item to trigger the flow.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up the browse abandonment flow for your Shopify or BigCommerce store using Klaviyo. It should work for other platforms as well. The goal of this flow is to remind customers what they were looking at and bring them back to that specific product. These emails are effective because they are highly personalised and show the products that the customer was already browsing.
First, we need to have the trigger, so Klaviyo knows when someone looks at a product on your site. We will start by making sure that Klaviyo is connected to your Ecommerce platform and that the “Viewed product” script is working correctly on your site.
If you are using Shopify, make sure you check the checkbox next to “Automatically add Klaviyo onsite javascript”.
When you connect it, Klaviyo will add a lot of great features to your account, including pre-populating your flow library, and hopefully add the “Viewed product” tracking script which will enable the browse abandon functionality.
To check whether the “Viewed Product” script is working, click on the analytics tab in Klaviyo and click “See all metrics”.
Scroll down and choose the viewed product metric.
If you can see data coming through, and an activity feed of people, then you know your “Viewed product” script is already installed. If this is the case, you can skip too constructing the email flow.
However, if there is no “Viewed product” metric, or no data, meaning your graph shows a flat line, this means you do not have the code installed on your site. Don’t worry, it is a simple installation process that we will go over now.
Click on your account on the top right, select “Setup Web Tracking”.
You’ll be brought to this page, which shows the steps on how to install this on your site.
The first step should have been completed when you integrated your store with Klaviyo.
Next, you need to add the code snippet to product.liquid on your Shopify theme. Copy the code on this page to your clipboard.
In another tab, open your Shopify store, select Themes in the Sales Channels on the right.
Then, click on Actions and select “Edit Code”.
Next, navigate to the product.liquid page, and paste the code there and save. Once that is done, hit save, and your viewed product script should be working properly.
You can check if it works by browsing your live site. Data should come through the “Viewed product” metric now.
The “Viewed Product” script that we just installed associates a cookie carrying the email address information from the user, to a person’s browser. This tracks what products they are looking at; but to “connect” the cookie with a customer’s profile, the customer must either:
Click through to your website from an email; OR
Sign up through a popup or a form on your site. We have another blog outlining how to set up a popup/form with Klaviyo, so if you haven't set one up yet, read through that first, otherwise your Browse Abandonment flow will not be as effective.
The easiest way to test that the tracking script is working is to sign up with the Klaviyo form on your website. Open a private tab on your chosen browser - find the pop-up or form on the website and enter your details, mainly your email address. Now that you have given your store your email address, browse several products on your store to give Klaviyo browse data.
Now open up your profile in Klaviyo by searching your email address. If it’s worked, then you should be able to see your browsing behavior in Klaviyo. So I’ll look up the email address in Klaviyo, and can see my browsing behavior, including product views, which is what we’ll use to trigger the browse flow emails, and includes the details we need to make the email.
Now, we will go through setting up the Browse Abandonment Flow emails.
Starting with Klaviyo’s default browse abandonment flow. Go to the Flows tab on the left of Klaviyo and click on “Create a Flow” in the top right.
Then choose Klaviyo’s Standard Browse Abandonment email flow template.
This creates a placeholder flow with the technical components all in place. Once a website visitor views a product, after 2 hours, an email will be sent to the visitor with only their last viewed item. So, for example, if the customer had viewed 5 products, the email will only be populated with the last item they viewed.
Klaviyo’s default Browse Abandonment flow also has some flow filters by default. Click on the trigger block to see the flow filters.
The filter means you will only email subscribers who have browsed around your website and looked at products but have not “Started a checkout” or “Placed an order”.
If the customers browse and start a checkout, then they will no longer receive the Browse Abandonment emails, because they will receive the Abandoned Cart emails instead. These rules are there to prevent Klaviyo from sending too many emails to your customers. This helps to ensure customers only receive the most relevant emails specific to their stage in the buying process.
The last rule here, “Has not been in the flow in the last 30 days”, means a customer will only receive the Browse Abandonment email once a month. We use this rule so customers who are browsing all the time don’t get annoyed with receiving too many of the same emails.
Now, it is time to build the email.
Open up the first Browse Abandonment email by clicking on the first email action block in the flow and selecting edit on the left.
Select Edit Content
When you open the email you will see some code, also called merge tags, that might look a bit strange.
This is the code that will be replaced with the product the customer last viewed. Click ‘Preview’ on the left, and preview in Klaviyo you can see the email as a customer would see it, with the merge tags replaced with the appreciate content.
You can edit the styling of the merge tag block, but don’t edit the code of the block or the content might not work.
Edit the email to match your business’s brand. If you want an example of this, there is a timelapse in the video linked to this blog above at timestamp 8:52.
If you need a more in-depth video on how to build beautiful-looking emails, check out our blog on building email tempaltes using the Klaviyo editor.
After you have designed your email, check if the Browse Abandon Block works. Once again select ‘Preview’ and “Preview in Klaviyo”, and you will see your finished design as the customer will.
It is also a good idea to add a reminder email a few days after the first, to give customers another chance to come back and make their purchase.
Back on the flow page, rather than creating a new email and designing it again, you can just duplicate the new beautified email you just made. Clone the email you just made by clicking the three dots in the top right of the email block and selecting clone.
Drag the cloned email below the first and rename it to "Browse Abandonment Email 2". Add a time delay block between the two emails.
Edit each email with specific messages to remind your customers who have browsed your store to make the purchase.
Tip: add a discount code and mention an expiry, like “Expires in 48 hours”, to emphasise the urgency and scarcity of the product. To learn more about adding discounts to your emails, check out our blog on setting up dynamic unique discount codes in Klaviyo.
Now that the emails are designed, we’re ready to activate the flow. Go ahead and change the status of the emails from “Manual” to “Live”, and you’re all set! Your Klaviyo account will automatically send emails to customers with the products they viewed after browsing.
Learn more Email Marketing Automation tips from Email Experts
For more information about Klaviyo marketing, check out our other blogs in this series and the videos that go with them.
Check out our YouTube channel, where we have tutorials on how to build up your email marketing. Please subscribe to be notified when future content is released.
Author: Jared Chuah is an email implementation specialist at Email Experts. He has developed and implemented email strategies for iconic Australian brands, including Bulk Nutrients, Erstwilder, Rollie Nation and many more.
