3 Abandoned Cart Email Templates to Recover Lost Sales

Quick question: If you own an Ecommerce brand, do abandoned carts haunt your dreams, too? Then you must be tired of creating and recreating emails by now. Nothing an abandoned cart email template can’t fix!

But first, let’s get to the root of the problem. According to Statista, nearly 40% of US shoppers abandoned their shopping carts in 2025 due to high shipping costs and taxes. Add to that other factors like slow delivery, a long-winding checkout process, website crashes, limited payment methods, or mandatory account creation, and the total abandonment percentage would be a lot higher.

A simple and understanding cart abandonment email is the perfect way to win over these customers. It’s your chance to restore your brand’s lost revenue. And an email template makes the process a whole lot easier.

In this blog post, we’ll cover a few template examples, what makes up these templates, and what email template best practices can help your cart abandonment email campaigns hit the mark.

 

What is an Abandoned Cart Email Template?

An abandoned cart email template is a pre-built, editable and reusable structure and layout that works as the foundation for a cart abandonment email. It is made up of a header (with a hero image and a headline), body (with blocks of text, images, videos, GIFs, and links) and calls-to-action (CTAs).

The beauty of these email marketing templates is that you don’t have to recreate an email from scratch for every cart abandonment campaign. Just add text, images, and links to a pre-designed template as per your needs, and you’re good to go.

Apart from reducing effort and saving time, using a cart abandonment email template ensures your emails are on-brand without exception. Can you imagine having to figure out where to place your brand logo in every abandoned cart email? The horror!

 

5 Essential Components of Abandoned Cart Email Templates

There are some things that make an abandoned cart email template, well, a template. Every such template should have these 5 things:

1. Subject Line: The first thing that catches the customer’s attention in their inbox and makes them open your email is the subject line (these subject lines are the best). Following subject line best practices, personalize the subject line based on the customer’s profile and the products in their shopping cart. Something direct like ‘Your Tote’s Waiting, Xiomara’ or ‘PSST: You Left This Wall Art In Your Cart’ always works. Or a final nudge can be ‘Still Not Sure? Here’s 10% Off’.
2. Brand Logo: Your customers should recognize your brand the moment they open your cart abandonment email. Your logo helps them remember where they’d been shopping before. In turn, it might remind them of what they’d decided to buy.
3. Product Details and Image: The abandoned product and its details, such as the name, price, color, image, and size specifications, should cover most of the space in the email template. Never leave out the product’s image from the template, especially if it’s a physical product.
4. Call-to-Action: Your CTAs should clearly state what you want the customer to do in the email. Add action-oriented CTAs like ‘Complete Your Order’ or ‘Finish Shopping’ to lead the customer back to their shopping cart on your website or app.
5. Unsubscribe Option: Customers have every right to opt out of receiving your emails for any reason whatsoever, including cart abandonment emails. That’s why your email should always have an unsubscribe link. Showing them the door is painful, we know, but look on the bright side — it’s a way of cleaning your email list when your content doesn’t fit some of the subscribers anyway. (Don’t worry, there are other ways of growing your email list.)

Now, let’s see what some abandoned cart email templates can actually look like.

 

3 Best Cart Abandonment Email Template Examples

Using pre-built templates will save your team from having to create emails instantly after a customer leaves items behind in their cart. That’s why you need an email marketing automation platform like MoEngage.

MoEngage’s pre-designed abandoned cart email templates can help you build impactful emails fast. All of the templates use simple but eye-catching designs and are easy to customize based on your needs and goals.

Here are a few examples of email templates in MoEngage that you can use and reuse for your cart abandonment campaigns.

1. The Deal-Sweetening Cart Abandonment Email Template

Overpriced items or high shipping fees often kill the shopping vibe for some customers. This template is meant to nudge customers who looked at the final checkout price after adding items to their cart and said, “Nope, not today.”

With the discount offer section taking up the second fold of the email template, customers would no longer hesitate to complete checkout. Because they were already willing to buy the items before, a discount code is an incentive for them to finish the purchase.

The template doesn’t overdo the discount by repeating it, either. Nor does it mention separate discounts for separate items, so customers don’t get overwhelmed. One discount is impactful enough to do the trick.

Also, the template doesn’t rule out the possibility that technical issues might have been at the root of the abandoned cart. In that case, the text ‘Trouble with checkout? We’re here to help!’ followed by the CTA ‘Contact Us’ feels like a friendly way to reassure them that they can rely on you for resolving the issue. Brownie points for empathy and customer care! The more valued they feel, the more likely they are to trust you and finish the order.

Note: Offer one-off discounts to specific cart abandoners, like high-value cart owners. If you keep offering discounts every time a customer leaves items behind, they’ll grow to expect it forever, causing whopping losses for your brand.

2. The Laser-Focused Email Template

What’s best about this template is that it has zero distractions. Just the product name, image, price, and a super-clear CTA button. By stripping away unnecessary elements, it’s meant to reduce cognitive load and get the customers to complete their purchase immediately.

See how they use a friendly tone while specifying free shipping? It feels personal without being pushy, being laser-focused on sealing the deal. They’ve highlighted the offer at the top, too, so there’s no objection regarding shipping costs.

That’s the strategy behind this abandoned cart email template — silently nudging the customer to do something they’d already been on the verge of doing.

3. The Memory-Refreshing Email Template

What if your customers bailed on their cart, not because of pricing or doubt about whether the item would be useful, but because they simply forgot to finish the order? They might’ve got distracted after loading their cart. Maybe it was a rich push notification that led them to some other website.

Maybe it was their baby uttering, “Mama!” for the first time. Who knows?

Regardless of the reason, you’re responsible for reminding them why they’d added those items in their cart in the first place. That’s the number one priority of this abandoned cart email template.

It includes all the essential details — the name, category, pricing, color, quantity, and a snapshot of each abandoned product. So that scanning the email would make the customer go, “Oh, right, I was going to get this.”

So no discounts, no urgency. This strategy works because it keeps things simple by not overwhelming the customer with too much information.

 

5 Best Practices for Abandoned Cart Email Retargeting

Take a look at some best practices you should keep in mind when using cart abandonment email templates for your campaigns.

1. Build Different Templates for Different Scenarios

Sometimes, even your best-crafted abandoned cart email templates can’t get the job done in one go, which is why cart abandonment campaigns should contain a series of such emails.

Typically, the abandoned cart workflow should contain three emails with the following email cadence after you send the first cart abandonment email:

• A reminder: within 24 hours
• A follow-up email: a few days later
• An incentive (like a discount): a few days after the follow-up email

Why not build a separate template for each of these emails in the sequence? Use email marketing software to maintain this email sequence with templates and recover abandoned carts like a pro.

2. Ensure the Abandoned Cart Email Templates are Customizable

What’s the use of creating an email template for abandoned cart if you can’t use it multiple times for different goals? If you can’t update the text and product images in the template for different products, for example, the efforts in building the template aren’t worth it.

An editable cart abandonment email template can speed up the production of those email campaigns. It basically puts a stop to creating such emails from scratch every time, so the entire process gets faster. From colors and fonts to alignments and URLs, all the components of the template should be editable.

Plus, a drag-and-drop email template builder makes your life easier. You just need to select the components of the template you want to change, and modify or replace them with other elements as needed.

3. Prioritize Visual Hierarchy

Do you think customers who’ve left products behind in their carts have time to read wordy emails? N-O.

Sure, they can skim through the emails. Which is why your cart abandonment email templates must be skimmable, too.

This is where visual hierarchy comes into play. It’s one of the standard email design best practices, you know. The idea is to make the important elements in the template pop to grab the customer’s attention, while guiding them toward the action you want them to take, that is, buying the products in their cart. Here’s how to execute it in the template:

• Put the Product Front and Center: Place the abandoned product near the top of the template, so customers can’t miss it.
• Heading Comes Next: Write compelling copy like ‘Your [product] is right where you left it’ or ‘Finish What You Carted’ using a big and bold font.
• CTAs that Drive Action: Place the primary CTA in the first fold of the template. You can also add secondary CTAs further down the template for extra nudging.
• Other Content Lies Low: Your social media links, customer testimonials, and any supporting content are valuable, no doubt. But they shouldn’t distract the customer from the goal you want to achieve with the cart abandonment email. So, all that content should be toward the bottom of the email template.

4. Ensure Your Templates are Mobile-Responsive

Mobile-responsive email templates adjust their layout and content to different devices and screens. When that happens, the template dynamically changes its structure to look great on all devices.

Think about it — pinching and zooming in and out of an email on a smartphone to read the tiny text would be frustrating, wouldn’t it? Which could lead to less email engagement and even more unsubscribes. Yikes!

So, make sure your email templates are readable and clickable on laptops, smartphones, desktops, and tablets without zooming. Logically speaking, if your abandoned cart email templates are mobile-responsive, so would be the emails built using those templates.

5. Preview and Test Your Templates

We really do seem to sing the same old song, don’t we? Sprinkle cool patience, pray!

Let’s say you own a pet food store. You’ve followed all the best practices for using abandoned cart email templates and sent the emails to customers who left pet food products in their shopping carts. So you open an email to soak up the glory.

BAM! One of the product descriptions renders so tiny on your smartphone, it hurts your eyes. And oh boy, does clicking the CTA button take you to some random gaming website you’d meant to visit later?

Yeah, your boss isn’t going to crack up. And neither will your customers.

To avoid disasters like this at work, always fire off test emails to yourself and your team members. Double-check if the templates and their components look and function as expected on all devices.

 

How to Set Up Cart Abandonment Email Templates in MoEngage

MoEngage’s email template library houses 118 pre-built templates and counting. You can also set up completely new ones for your automated cart abandonment campaigns. Here’s how to go about it in just 3 steps:

1. Create an Event-Triggered Email Campaign

Navigate to the MoEngage dashboard, then click Create new > Campaign > Email > Event Triggered. Enter your campaign name.

Next, you need to include those customers in the campaign who have added products in their cart. In the ‘Select condition’ section, under ‘If user performs’, choose the ‘added to Cart’ option from the dropdown list corresponding to ‘Has Executed’.

Click ‘Filter’, then select ‘Has Not Executed’ and ‘Order successful’ from the two corresponding dropdown lists. This ensures that your audience consists of customers who have added items to their carts, but haven’t completed their purchase.

Choose when you want to send the campaign and select ‘All users’ in the ‘Select audience’ section, then click ‘Next’.

2. Build an Email Template for Abandoned Cart in the Drag-and-Drop Editor

Select any template with a two, three or four-column layout, or pick a blank template.

Enter the email details, such as the subject line, sender name, and ‘From’ and ‘Reply-to’ email addresses.

Now this is the fun part. Drag and drop content elements from the properties panel on the right onto the canvas on the left. From lists, images, videos, and buttons to spacers, GIFs, stickers, and dynamic content, MoEngage’s drag-and-drop editor is your playground for building cart abandonment email templates!

To change an image’s properties, for example, click the image and change its alignment, alt text, padding in the Image properties panel on the right.

Want to edit it further? Click ‘Apply effects’ to crop or resize the image, or add stickers, frames, corners, and filters to it. You can even draw on the image or add text to it.

3. Preview and Save the Template

Done creating the template? Toggle between the desktop and mobile options to preview it on these devices. For example, check if all the elements in the template are stacked in the proper order on a mobile screen.

Everything look okay? Cool, it’s time to save the abandoned cart recovery email template so you can reuse it for future campaigns. Above the properties panel on the right, click the ‘Template actions’ dropdown menu and select ‘Save template’.

Yay, you did it! The next time you’re setting up an abandoned cart recovery campaign, you can access this template from the ‘My saved templates’ tab on the ‘Drag and drop editor’ page after entering the campaign details. Easy-peasy!

Build Email Templates That Make Customers Complete Checkouts

Sending cart abandonment emails doesn’t guarantee customers will buy the products in their shopping cart. The least you can do is build the best abandoned cart email templates to recover lost revenue and reduce manual effort.

We’re all for helping you save your time, effort, and bucks. With MoEngage, you can not only build strategic email templates, but also customize and improve them, based on how your cart abandonment emails are performing. Schedule a quick demo of MoEngage’s cross-channel marketing platform to see how you can uplevel your automated email campaigns today.