# How to Build a High Converting Abandoned Cart and Checkout Flow [Updated for 2026] Channel: Max Sturtevant Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSXLkDEb0Fk Duration: 26 min Language: English Words: 6319 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/fSXLkDEb0Fk --- [0:00] I got a haircut just for this video because it's going to be that much of a banger. If you're an e-commerce brand, I don't know if you know this, but 70% of customers who add an item to their cart end up abandoning that cart. These are people who are so close. If you do not have an optimized system to get these people back, you are losing out on sales that you pretty much already had. You're actively wasting money literally every single day that you don't have an optimized system set up to recover these. Because if you're anything like the brands that I work with, you're spending thousands and thousands of [0:24] dollars every single day on ads bringing people to the website, but then you're doing nothing when these people leave. That's why in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to get these sales back by having a hyper optimized abandoned cart and abandoned checkout sequence in Claio or any email marketing platform that you have. These are two of the most important automated sequences that we have used to help generate over $200 million in e-commerce sales for brands in just the past 24 [music] months. I'm going to take you through the entire setup step by step and show you exactly what's working in 2026. Not like those other abandoned cart YouTubes [0:52] from 2023. No, this is the updated that's working right now across over 100 different brands that I actively work on. This way, by the end, you are going to know exactly what to set up in the exact emails that you need to have in place to make more money that you already should be making with your site, but people are just leaving behind. Now, before we jump into Claio, you need to actually understand what an abandoned cart flow actually is because most people think that it's the same thing as an abandoned checkout flow, but it's not. This is the biggest mistake on accounts that I audit. I audit five to [1:19] 10 different 7 to9 figure brands every single week. If you want me to audit your account, let you know exactly where the holes in your account are, then there's a link below to book a call. But about like 80% of the brands I audit have this set up the wrong way, and they're leaving thousands and thousands of dollars every single month on the table. You see, the abandoned cart flow triggers when somebody actually goes to the website and they add an item to cart and then leave. Most brands do not have that flow active. Most brands only have the abandoned checkout flow. And this flow triggers if somebody actually takes [1:44] it a step further and they go to checkout and then leave. But statistically, more people are abandoning carts than checkouts. And so it's a huge opportunity to make sure that you have the abandoned cart flow set up correctly and actually having emails in there in place. This is the easiest win that I'm able to bring seven [1:57] to nine figure brands that I work with. Here is the perfect example of the issue that I see on most accounts I review. You see this flow is labeled as abandoned cart. But actually if you look at the trigger it's a checkout started trigger. When you click into this you can see the trigger is if somebody starts checkout. And so if I was on Nike store I liked this shoe right here. Say I added to bag right here. That's essentially the cart. So right now I wouldn't be getting sent an added to cart trigger right here. I'm still not getting anything because I am on the [2:25] cart page. I have not triggered the checkout started trigger. What triggers this flow is if you actually click checkout and you go then into this checkout page. This is then what's going to trigger that flow. So most brands are missing out on a ton of revenue by not having the abandoned cart emails. And that's because that trigger isn't in every single Claio account cuz this is a new update that Claio rolled out last year, a new integration with Shopify that actually tracks these abandoned carts. So, if I were to go to metrics right here for this brand, I'd look and there's no added to cart metric. But if [2:52] I go to this account right here, we can see the Shopify added to cart metric. That's what we want. This is what we want to trigger our abandoned cart flow. We can see how many people are abandoning carts. We can see right here for this brand, the abandoned cart flow is actually making more money than the checkout abandoned flow. $10,000 in the past 30 days compared to checkout abandoned at 7.6K. This brand did not have this set up beforehand. If you do not see the added to cart metric in your account, it is super simple. All you have to do is go into your Shopify, disable your Clavion Shopify [3:23] integration, and then reenable it. It's super simple. You can just look up tutorial on Google. I'm not going to go over it in this video. It's literally just like flip a switch off and then flip it back on. I think you're smart enough to figure it out. And so again, the setup that we need is we need to have a cart abandoned flow. We need to have a checkout abandoned flow. These can be like the same content or very similar content, but essentially just [3:43] different flows with different triggers. Okay? And so now that we know what the triggers for our flow are going to be, now we can actually build out the strategy. And then we're going to go into actually building these emails, writing and designing them, and then uploading them here in Claio to be sent. Let's get to the email sequence and the strategy within itself. And this is where then most people mess up because you can't just set up some random emails, expect to make sales, and recover all your abandonments. These [4:05] people abandon their order for a reason. Sure, the people who add it to their cart have some sort of interest in buying from you, but that doesn't mean getting them to come back and buy and change their mind is going to be easy to do. You need to understand why exactly they didn't go through that purchase. And then address each one of those possible objections within your emails that you follow up with people. Emails are the key here. Over 80% of Americans check their email every single day. It's the number one form of communication in the world. And so that's how we want to retarget these people. The strategy that [4:33] we are going to do consists of just four simple emails. The first email is all about reminding what the person left behind. You don't want to put any crazy pressure, offer a discount right now because you might be able to get the sale just by giving them a light nudge with some education. At this point, they might have just gotten distracted. So, we just want to give them an easy way to pick up where they left off. And so, I actually have this graphic right here in terms of what we want for a cart and checkout abandoned strategy. You can see right here for this email one, we like [4:59] to wait 30 minutes before waiting one day and going to email two. Wait another day for email three, and then wait another day for email four. You might be wondering, an email every single day. Holy cow, that's crazy. It's not. Every single day that you don't send an email, you run the risk of that customer going to another one of your competitors and just buying from them. In every single test that I've ever done, sending an email every single day, the higher the frequency, the better the conversions on your abandonments. The longer you wait, the colder the customer gets. So, let's [5:25] break down this welcome email one then. I have a couple of abandonment flows here from a couple of random brands here that I was able to pull off the internet and then kind of just like reconstruct. And so let's take a look at this one right here. We can see this is a clean graphic-based email and those are typically what perform really really well for these abandonments. And these emails do exactly as it says. A simple reminder, some dynamic Clavio block showing the actual product that the customer left behind. And I'm going to [5:51] show you how to set this up in a second. Then some brief product intro. And so for this email, it's just like, hey, let's pick up where you left off. And so it's just super simple. You're one step away from the good stuff. We're going to actually show exactly what the customer left behind. And so this is going to be dynamic, pulled from Claio, a simple return to cart button, and then we're going to go into some product info right here. And so this brand, if I had to assume, they probably get a lot of objections about price. So they add this section. Hey, it's just $2 a night and [6:15] you get a better night's sleep. How is that not worth it? So they overcome that objection and then they go into the product education, proving that this is legit. They add some risk reversal icons right here and why we do this, kind of like how the product is made and what how it's different before having another return to cart section. And then a product image. Perfect. Simple. nudges people in the right direction. Now, let's go to this one. Same sort of setup right here, which you can see with a simple section right up here. Hey, just one click away, finish my order. Going to have that dynamic section. And then a [6:42] little bit of product education right here. How we're different and how we stand out. A nice infographic. And then even a support section right here. That brings us to this last one. Again, right here, we saved your cart. Get 10% off your first order. And then the dynamic section right here. And then a little bit of information again about the product and the brand as well as some social proof. This is perfect. This is all you need. I don't recommend doing a discount right off the bat. However, if this is customized for non- buyers and you give 10% off the first order, then absolutely you could do something like [7:10] this. But that's sort of the anatomy of that initial email that we want. That brings us then to our email two. We wait one day and then we go with a textbased email, a personal reminder from the founder and try to mix in some social proof. Now, you're probably like, "What the heck, a textbased email? What is the point of having this?" Well, I've actually found that these are some of the highest converting emails that you can send because it comes from a real person. And if you send an email like this, it's going to show up like native in the platform that the person is [7:37] receiving your email. Like take a look at this one from Breeze. It's from Corbin from Breeze. Do you think you're more likely to respond to an email that says Breeze or are you going to click on this one that comes from a real person? Looks like it's coming from a friend. It ends with much love, Corbin from Breeze. It's just so simple right here. It's just a nice note that really personifies your brand and makes it not seem like it's this massive corporation just trying to make sales. And so we can go back to these just a super simple section just like this. Hey, looks like [8:02] you found something good. And then maybe life got busy. I get it. yada yada yada. It's super friendly. And then in this one, the brand decided to give a discount. You can wait to give the discount. You could have this discount only send to non- buyers. It's completely up to you. Then mix in just a couple of points. Offer support and then [8:18] a finish my order section right there. Let's go over to this next one right here. Hey, was everything okay? Wanted to check in and make sure that all is well. We're holding on to your scrubs and remember you free shipping and then offering support. And this one actually doesn't come up from a person. Comes from the medical team has a similar effect, but I would always recommend putting a person. But again, just super simple. This sort of nudge works really, really well. And again, this simple [8:39] reminder right here from this brand. Same sort of function. You don't need to go too crazy. But if you feel like your product needs a ton of education, you can go this route of like some sort of long form textbased email like this. Now, this sort of textbased email where it has like the brand logo and pictures and like a footer is going to be different than sort of like this one right here or this example from the same brand, but it's actually showing up like in the Gmail layout. They're going to be a little bit different. So, you should test the results of them, but you can go [9:07] crazy with this long form sort of stuff if you feel like your product needs it. This is a great AB test to run and I've seen these convert really well as well. Just answering all the FAQ questions and then going into the product section. But I always like to go with that personal touch textbased email number two. I see it be some of the best converting emails. And then that brings us to email three where I like to then give a discount. You can give a discount, you can try to not give a discount. It's completely up to you. But this is where then I want to be sure that I include a [9:34] lot more education. I want to mix in some more social proof and I want to have some FAQs. And so like if you want to like have some sort of template, have a top section with the discount and then a dynamic clavio block and then have some sort of social proof or FAQ block section. We can go right here to this one. They actually didn't go with an email this one, but essentially how we would change it is just put a discount just right at the top. Create a discount code. You have the dynamic section and then there here's just like a how it works for like their point system. So [9:58] this one's going to be a little bit unique to this brand, but I think that this right here is the perfect example for like an optimized abandoned cart email 3. It's hey, are you still thinking about these scrubs? Here's 15% off just for you. Finish my order. So top section with the discount. There's a ton of urgency and then it goes into the dynamic block. And then we've got some social proof. We got a testimonial here from a customer and then a little bit of education as well. You can never have too much education, but I love how they mixed in the social proof. And then for [10:24] this one, this brand is this is another variation for this. You can do some sort of like infographic again on education that also like overcomes some frequently asked questions. So this right here, infographic on the product, reminding of the discount up at the top, then the dynamic section, and then just like a final call to action. Pretty straightforward on this one. If I were to go off of a template, I would definitely recommend this one if you have just like the discount up at the [10:45] top and then you go into social proof. This is sort of like the winning layout that I like. And then finally for email four, what I would recommend is another textbased email just because they work that well. A personal discount reminder from the founder and then of course offering support in case a customer needs it because at this point they might have some questions and there [11:01] might be something holding them back. And so to run over some examples, here's this one for this brand. Just a heads up, 15% off is about to expire at midnight. So we have a ton of urgency on this discount right here. If something in your cart sparked curiosity, now it's your time to give a shot. This might be the formula that helps you feel a little more like you again naturally. Tons of built-in urgency into there, which I love. And then just like, hey, we're keeping it warm for now, but it's not going to hold much longer. Lots of urgency. And then to finish my order, [11:25] big discount reminder. Bold it. Boom. Offer support. Amazing. Same one for this one right here. Friendly reminder, your discount expires tonight. Super straightforward, straight to the point. Hey, use this code to claim 15% off. Finish my order. And again, these aren't just like set templates. You can just like mess around with this. It's going to be custom for your brand. Like this brand right here, this brand is huge on saving the environment. And so it's like, hey, your impact spreads beyond the incredible work you do during your shifts. You're contributing to a healthy your planet for years to come, one pair of scrubs at a time, because their [11:52] products are actually good for the environment, unlike other scrubs. And so, I think that that is a nice little addition. These are the sort of things that you can AB test in your abandonment emails. Then we also have this one right here. Hey, if you're ready to get ahead of rodent issues or finally solve one for good, this is your last chance and save 10%. Super straightforward on this one. Again, coming from the founders, very effective. I highly recommend this layout of graphic, textbased, graphic, textbased, and introduce that discount on email 3. That's the strategy. That's what's working in 2026. Not some crazy 12 email long email abandonment [12:23] sequence. You don't need that many emails because you're also hopefully sending email campaigns three to four times per week. And that'll naturally remind people to come back and place an order. I just like to have a few very intentional, high impact emails like this. So now that we have this strategy, let's get to creating some emails and implementing them into Claio. So going into Claio, we need to make sure that we have the abandoned cart flow and the abandoned checkout flow. Now, if you're short on time, like a lot of founders and business owners out there, then I would recommend just using the same [12:51] emails exactly within these flows. They're very similar and they use the same wording. If you have time, I would highly recommend making them slightly different. at least changing out imagery to make it like be different and so that a customer doesn't get like multiple different emails. Maybe like a month later if one month they abandon a cart and then the next month they abandon checkout. We like to make them custom and that's what we do for the clients that we work with, but you don't necessarily have to. Now these strategies are great in theory, but you actually have to put in hours and hours on creating these emails, doing the [13:15] creatives, finding what's right for your brand, and it's more than just slapping together some emails and hoping that they work. My team and I have generated over $200 million in email revenue for our clients in the past 24 [music] months. And we can do this for your brand completely for you. I have a link below to book a call. And also something super exciting is we just opened a 90-day email accelerator mentorship. If you have the bandwidth yourself or you have a team who can execute on emails, but you just want expert strategies, daily support, exclusive access to live mastermind calls with me once a week and [13:40] daily office hours with your own strategic coach with daily calls that you can join and ask questions. You can learn more about the mentorship. Again, click the link below. Limited spots, invite only. Fill out the quick application and we'll reach out. But okay, let's get to building these in Clavio. All right, so first let's start with the cart abandoned flow since it's lower in the funnel. We are going to create a flow inside of Claio. And I recommend going off of one [music] of their templates. We can see right here they have abandoned cart reminder with Shopify added to cart trigger. And then for checkout abandoned, they're going to [14:06] have abandoned checkout. And we're going to say like standard right here. So let's go to the cart abandoned one. The reason I like to use the template from Claio is that they are going to automatically populate in the correct dynamic sections that we need, which is going to pull the products from Shopify or whatever platform you're on into the email so the customer sees exactly what they left behind. So this is what the editor looks like. We have all these actions on the left side and then we have the trigger which they've already set up with added to cart and they have these filters set up as well. And then [14:35] they automatically put in a 4-hour delay, one email and you can click onto this. They have this subject line for getting something. And then we have this right here with the abandonment email. And there's a dynamic section in there. Then they wait 20 hours. Then they do this next one of your cart's about to [14:49] expire. And then a simple setup again. And we'll update this, but I just want to show you the infrastructure. Now, if we go to our flow setup over here, you're going to see that we want to wait 30 minutes, email, 1 day, email, 1 day, email, one day, email, and then we end the flow. So, I'm going to add that in. I'm going to add in this time delay [15:06] right here. I'm going to add an email. Then we're going to need one more of each. So once we have this, let's go ahead and edit the time delays. This one should be just 30 minutes. And then this next one, we just want it to be 1 day. And then same for the other ones right here. And so now we have the structure all set up. Let's just double check that the trigger is set up and our filters are set up correctly. What you're going [15:31] to see here is this re-entry criteria. It's going to say like, hey, do you want people to re-enter this? And so I'm going to say yes, allow re-entry. And so if anybody abandons a cart at any time, they're going to re-enter this flow. You have trigger filters. This is where like if you want to filter people out based on like something specific that happened in the trigger. So the cart, you only want to filter it or you only want this flow to fire for certain items, you can absolutely add that, but typically I just like to keep it as standard. And then we have these profile filters, [15:58] which are really important. You can see they've already put in checkout started zero times since starting this flow, placed order zero times since starting this flow, and added to cart zero times since starting this flow. Essentially, how these filters operate is if at any point in this flow, somebody doesn't meet these requirements, then it's going to kick them out of the flow. So, if somebody were to go into here, they receive this email, and after this [16:18] email, they end up going to checkout. Then the filter, when the person's about to receive this email, it's going to look at that profile. Checkout started zero times since starting this flow. and it's going to see, oh, they checkout started yesterday. So, I'm going to remove this from this flow and they're not going to receive the rest of these emails. Same thing for placed order and then added to cart because we want to show just like the last time somebody added a cart. And then placed order. If somebody places an order, of course, we don't want to send abandoned cart emails [16:42] to them. So, that's the structure. Everything here is set up correctly. The last little call out I want to make is this smart sending. It looks like they automatically added smart sending, which is this setting right down here that says skip recently emailed profiles. It's going to skip anybody who's received an email from who has received an email in the last 16 hours. Highly recommend removing that because this abandoned cart email is very very important. It's a very high revenue generating email. And say somebody received an email campaign. You sent a blast about some sort of sale and then [17:08] that person added to cart and then left. Of course, you'd want to send a cart abandoned email. But with that setting ticked on, Clavio is going to look at that and be like, "That person received an email earlier today and so we're skipping them." And we obviously don't want that. So boom, that's what we have. Now we can get to actually creating the content and following these sorts of layouts which I had laid out before. Now we got a couple options for how we can build this. We can do it directly within Clavio or we can design in another platform like Figma which is where this [17:34] is right here. You can see when we get into the editor we have this dynamic section right here which Clavio has already put together. These are all formulas based on what the person has left behind. And so it is going to look at exactly what the person left behind. It's going to pull the correct information including like the event name. And so if I were to preview this, you can see it's pulled in an image and [17:55] then also the title. So that's perfect. That's what we want. You can adjust like the formatting and whatnot in there as well, but I won't really talk about that too much. I want to get to like the actual regular content. So if you've never used Claio's editor, it's very simple. We can just use text boxes if [18:09] you don't want to design on your own. Completely fine to do it in Claio. Obviously, I recommend working with a professional to make sure your emails are clean, on brand, and high converting. But if you need to do it in here, that's completely fine. And so if we go off of these examples right here, [18:21] let's just like kind of like copy this. And so I'd want to put the logo here at the top. So I'm just going to drag in just like a Nike logo. So just upload it in here. You can adjust the sizing to how you want. Guys, when you're creating emails, just literally copy what other brands are doing. It's just you don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Just copy what others are doing. So I'm going [18:40] to do this. And this looks pretty fine. Now, let's go into our next section. Let's just start off with our headline. I'll do something like, "Hey, you're just one click away. You're just one click." Change it to you're just a couple clicks away. And then change the sizing of it. Maybe make this a nice [18:58] bold headline. Maybe center right here. And then do something like that. Add some sort of sub headline below. And then we can get into just like an actual text section down here with like our social proof, whatever information that we want. Something that's important to bring up as well is going to be on your buttons. You want to use this link address, which you can see Clavio already brought in. And so for any sort of like button or where anybody's going to click, you want to make sure you have this dynamic section, which is then [19:25] going to take the person to their cart. But I like to design these within Figma. You can literally copy these. Again, this isn't a design video. If you want to see how to do effective email design, I have a video on my channel. You can check it out here. But essentially what you do within Clavia when you have a design and you are ready to upload it into your platform, all that you do is you use this simple slice tool just like this. And what you're able [snorts] to do is then you're able to export your image back into Clavio. So if I were to do this and this is my top section. I'm [19:55] going to delete these. I'm going to drag in a new image. And I'm just going to upload the slice that I had just made. And so we can just click upload right here. And boom, we have this. This has a button. So, I would just want to make sure that I add the link here for the button like this. We have the dynamic section. And then I'd want to get the rest of the email. You want to make sure your slices aren't too big because they can take up a lot of space and load slowly for the customer. So, maybe I'll just do this. And then I will do I'm [20:25] just going to type in random stuff and then get the rest of this. I'm just going to take this and then the footer you'd be able to add in later. Just showing you guys how you can export these and then how it's supposed to look like when you get into Claia. Going to duplicate this, delete you, and then replace this. We're going to go with you. And then we're going to duplicate one last image for our final image, which is like the customer support [20:50] section. Just like this. And then boom. Let's upload this. You can see right here we have this full email. Amazing. And then if I were to preview this, it's going to show the dynamic item that the customer left behind. Right here, you can see super clean, well-designed, and these are all just images. The only thing again, we need to make sure that the links are all correct throughout this. Yep. We'd want to then link this bottom section to whatever the support link is, support page link, and then we are all set. You might be wondering, can I do a ton of images in my emails? Yes, [21:22] of course you can. It is 2026, okay? Every brand out there uses full image-based emails and I myself generate millions and millions of dollars every single month for brands by using image- based emails. So I think I would know if it doesn't work. We can go to snow whitening right here. This is a 9 figureure brand. We can tell that these are images based on this in this section. It doesn't let me highlight these words. And that just proves that this is an image-based email. And they do this for all of their emails. These are just all images. So trust me, you can do it. And so that's how we're going [21:50] to do our graphic based emails. And then we need to get to our textbased emails because there's a little bit of nuance here for doing a plain textbased email. Let's go to email two right here. Instead of using the regular template, we need to click these three buttons right here. And we need to click change template. Once we're in this change template section right here, we need to go back into change template. And then we click this section right here, text only. [music] And then we get taken into this textbased editor where then again I can just copy and paste whatever the copy is for this email. So I can say [22:19] like, "Hey there, you left your item behind. Click here to finish your order." Whatever sort of copy that you want. And then we just want to make sure that we use the link from the prior email. And so you can just go back into the prior email and then just copy and paste whatever the link was. Just like this. Then I'm going to go into here and [22:41] then I am going to put the link in. Oops, I messed up there. Put the link in right here. And then it turns into a button. And now that person will be taken dynamically to their product. And then we just do the same. We create our creatives within Figma or within Claio, however you want. Follow this exact strategy. Use these examples to guide you and then just upload them into Claio. And that is it for the card abandoned flow. Now, I'm not going to walk your hand through every single email right here. I think that you get the gist and you know how it should operate. If you need help with design, [23:09] again, watch the video that I linked before. Just look up Max Duran email design. I have a ton of videos on design. It's very important. So, you want to make sure you nail that. But again, remember this is just the abandoned cart flow. We also need the abandoned checkout. What we need to do here is we need to go to create flow and then we need to create the checkout abandoned flow, which again we're going to go off of a template. We can see the abandoned checkout reminders. Let's just go with this standard one. It says it has email and SMS. And so we're just going to want to remove SMS. Of course, [23:36] add SMS. Very important. SMS is wonderful, but not every brand runs it. And so I'm just going to be talking about email. I'm going to delete this SMSF SMS path on the yes path right here. Then you'll see again it's the same sort of setup. We just need to copy exactly what we did for our cart abandoned flow and then edit the content. What you'll notice here is that the trigger is checkout started and so it's different than the added to cart trigger that we had. Then you can see that also the filter is just placed order zero times because if somebody places an order then we want them to [24:02] leave this flow. You can leave this exactly how it is. You can allow re-entry or not allow re-entry. I usually just allow it or I set a delay just in case somebody like does like messes up like maybe just add like one day but it's really not a big deal and it's very rare. Essentially again what we want to do change the time delays and really the only difference here is the trigger is going to be different and then if you go into the emails it's going to look different and the dynamic sections are different. That's the key thing. You cannot just duplicate your card abandoned flow to checkout [24:28] abandoned because the dynamic sections are different. They have different links and they have different properties. Like you can see the link right here is event.extra.checkout URL whereas for cart flow it was a different one. So, it's super important to make sure that you update this and you have just like you you can use the same content. The dynamic sections need to be different. This is how the dynamic [24:48] section should look like right here. Just copy this exactly. Just use the Claio templates and it's going to pull it in correctly for you. We can preview this and it shows correctly. It shows the product for the customer. Just chooses a random customer and you're all set. You just need to add in the content. Same exact stuff, just different triggers, different dynamic sections in different lengths. Now you know exactly how to build a high-converting abandoned cart and abandoned checkout email flow within Clavio. You saw the exact strategies that we use and exactly how to set this [25:15] up into Clavio to be high converting. But did you know that there are a ton of other abandonment flows that you need? An abandonment flow like the browse abandonment flow. If somebody views a product page but they don't add to cart and they don't add to check out and then leave. I actually have a video for that very important flow. I'll see you over [25:29] there. What started? --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts. Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt