How to Recover More Abandoned Carts in Klaviyo

Abandoned cart flows are one of the first automations most ecommerce businesses set up in Klaviyo. And when they want to generate more revenue from them, the usual advice is predictable: send another email, change the timing, improve the subject line, add urgency, offer a discount or test the creative.

All of those things might improve performance. But they all optimise the same thing: what happens after somebody enters your abandoned cart flow.

There is another question worth asking first:

How many of the people abandoning carts can Klaviyo actually reach?

Because even the best abandoned cart flow in the world can’t recover a customer who never enters it.

The abandoned cart opportunity you can’t see

When somebody adds a product to their cart, that doesn’t necessarily mean Klaviyo knows who they are. Some visitors will already be identifiable because they have previously subscribed, logged into their account, clicked through from an email or otherwise become associated with a Klaviyo profile.

Others remain anonymous. They can browse products, add products to their cart and show considerable purchase intent, but unless Klaviyo can associate that activity with an identifiable profile, you can’t send them an abandoned cart email.

That creates an important distinction: abandoned carts aren’t necessarily the same thing as reachable abandoned carts. And that distinction can put a ceiling on what conventional abandoned cart optimisation can achieve.

You can optimise conversion — or increase the opportunity

Imagine 1,000 shoppers abandon carts during a month, but only 300 of those shoppers can be identified and contacted. Your abandoned cart flow has an addressable audience of 300 — not 1,000.

You could optimise those emails relentlessly and perhaps improve the recovery rate from 10% to 12%. Instead of recovering 30 carts, you’d recover 36.

But what if you could increase the number of reachable carts from 300 to 500? Even at the original 10% recovery rate, you’d recover 50 carts.

The numbers are illustrative, but the principle matters:

Optimisation isn’t just about making an existing process perform better. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is changing the size of the opportunity itself.

That’s a different way of thinking about what abandoned cart optimisation actually means. Instead of asking only “How can I make my abandoned cart emails perform better?”, we can also ask “How can I make more abandoned carts reachable in the first place?”

Why shoppers often become identifiable too late

For many ecommerce stores, checkout is the point at which an anonymous shopper finally provides an email address. That’s useful for abandoned checkout recovery, but there’s a substantial part of the shopping journey before checkout.

A visitor might browse several products, add something to their cart, reconsider, compare alternatives and leave the website without ever starting checkout. There’s clearly purchase intent and clearly a cart, but if there’s no identifiable customer attached to it, there may be nobody Klaviyo can email.

One way to tackle that problem is to give shoppers a useful reason to identify themselves before checkout. And that’s where CartSave gets interesting.

CartSave changes where identification happens

CartSave adds a Save Cart option to the shopping journey. Instead of asking somebody to provide their email address simply because you want to market to them, you’re offering something useful in return: the ability to save their cart and return to it later.

Once the shopper provides their email address, the cart can be associated with them and passed into Klaviyo. Previously anonymous shopping activity can therefore become an identifiable cart that can potentially be followed up.

The important point isn’t simply that you’ve added another abandoned cart technology. You’ve potentially increased the number of abandoned carts your existing Klaviyo ecosystem can reach.

That’s the opportunity.

More reachable carts doesn’t automatically mean more revenue

This is where we need to be careful. Suppose CartSave identifies significantly more carts, your CartSave-triggered recovery flow starts generating orders and Klaviyo reports thousands of dollars in attributed revenue. Has it worked?

Possibly. But attributed revenue isn’t necessarily additional revenue. Some of those customers may have purchased anyway, while others might previously have entered another recovery flow. Introducing a new CartSave-triggered flow can also change which message — and therefore which flow — receives attribution for a purchase.

So if revenue attributed to the new flow increases while revenue attributed elsewhere decreases, some of the apparent gain may simply have moved between attribution buckets.

That’s why I wouldn’t judge the success of CartSave simply by opening Klaviyo and looking at the revenue attributed to the CartSave flow. The better question is:

Did it move the needle?

Measure the whole recovery ecosystem

If the objective is to recover more abandoned carts, that’s what we need to measure. I’d want to understand what happened to the number of identifiable or reachable carts, the number of customers entering recovery flows, total recovered orders and revenue across all relevant cart and checkout flows, recovery rates, overall orders and ecommerce revenue, and ultimately the cost of generating any additional revenue.

Those results also need context. Traffic, demand, average order values, promotions and seasonality can all change between periods.

A store generating more attributed cart recovery revenue during a month when it received 40% more traffic hasn’t necessarily improved its recovery performance at all. Conversely, recovery revenue remaining flat while traffic falls substantially might represent a meaningful improvement.

Looking at the whole ecosystem won’t provide perfect proof of causation without a properly controlled experiment, but it gives us a much better basis for judging whether something genuinely improved than simply pointing at a larger attributed-revenue number.

What about improving the abandoned cart flow itself?

Absolutely do it. Reachability isn’t a substitute for good lifecycle marketing.

If your abandoned cart emails are irrelevant, badly timed, excessively promotional or simply annoying, expanding the audience merely gives you more people to annoy. There are still plenty of legitimate optimisation questions around timing, frequency, incentives, creative, segmentation and when somebody should stop receiving recovery messages.

Those decisions can all affect performance. The point is simply that flow optimisation and opportunity expansion are different levers.

If you’re already squeezing harder and harder on the first one, it might be worth investigating the second.

So, how do you recover more abandoned carts in Klaviyo?

Don’t start by assuming you need another email. Start by understanding the funnel: how many shoppers are adding products to carts, how many of those carts Klaviyo can associate with identifiable customers, how many enter your recovery flows, and how many subsequently order. That helps identify where the real constraint lies.

If plenty of customers enter the flow but relatively few purchase, improving the flow itself may be the priority. But if a large proportion of cart activity never becomes reachable, endlessly tweaking email #2 isn’t going to solve the bigger problem. Technology such as CartSave can potentially help close that gap by giving shoppers a useful reason to identify themselves earlier.

The objective isn’t simply to squeeze a little more performance from the abandoned carts you can already reach. It’s to understand where the real constraint lies — and whether you can do something about it.

Sometimes that means improving the flow. Sometimes it means making more shoppers identifiable earlier, so more abandoned carts become reachable in the first place.

Don’t just optimise the opportunity you already have. Look for ways to make the opportunity bigger.