Imagine your eCommerce store as a traditional brick-and-mortar store. A customer enters. They spend a lot of time looking at a specific product and even ask some questions about it. Then they leave again. All the while, the person manning the store stood there with a blank smile instead of driving the sale. 

The browse abandonment sequence is the eCommerce equivalent of convincing that customer to buy.

Why they’re important

If you have an eCommerce store, you hopefully have some means of collecting email addresses and adding them to your list. This could be done in a variety of ways: a top bar email sign-up form, a footer widget form, a promo code popup, or even some type of landing page where you provide a guide, coupon code, free webinar, or something along those lines.

Browse abandonment sequences are crucial because they’re based on the site behavior of visitors to your site. For whatever reason, the prospect didn’t commit to buy, but they did show intent by giving you their email address.

The purpose: Transform a prospect into a paying customer by leveraging their site behavior.

The strategy: Send out tailored emails based on the last product they were looking at. Provide more information about the product and your brand, share social proof from other people who purchased that product, overcome any obstacles that prevent them from buying, and make product recommendations that are similar to what they were browsing.

This automation is one of the Six eCommerce Core Email Marketing Pillars. So, as long as somebody is on your email list and they take action on your site, those browse abandonment emails will fire off and bring in sales in the background without you having to actively pursue leads.