Abandoned cart SMS automation guide: tips, examples, and how to get started

Abandoned carts are one of the most common obstacles that e-commerce businesses face. According to Dynamic Yield’s data, the average shopping cart abandonment rate across the world was 80.56% in September 2025.

When you’re operating at a smaller scale, sending manual cart abandonment SMS messages is manageable for a while. But once you start seeing hundreds or thousands of e-commerce shoppers per day, it’s time to think about SMS automation to capture those abandoned carts.

Once you set up your automated abandoned cart SMS, you can leave the hard work to your automation software. This guide will walk you through the basics of this automation to get you started.

Before you can build a high-performing automation, you’ll need to understand how to craft a compelling message to go with it. The most successful abandoned cart messages address the reasons why customers abandon their carts and include the elements needed to bring them back to their carts.

You can build trust and address objections with these key elements of an SMS for cart recovery:

• Compliance and deliverability: Before you even compose your text, make sure it meets compliance and deliverability requirements. Only send abandoned cart texts to customers who opted in to your marketing messages at the cadence you agreed to in your opt-in message.

• Personalization: Use personalization fields to include details like the recipient’s name or the product they intended to buy to build trust and catch attention.

• A solution the reason for the abandoned cart: While you might not be able to attribute the exact cause of abandonment to each person, you can experiment with different campaigns. Offer a discount for customers who left due to unexpected costs, or ask for feedback from customers whose abandonment comes down to issues with your site.

• Language to direct the recipient back to their cart: Consider how the tone of your message will bring your customer back to their cart. Add a sense of urgency for time-limited products, or offer a friendly nudge to establish trust.

• A clear call-to-action: Tie everything together with a call-to-action that directs the customer back to their cart. Here, you can even use a custom link to their cart that adds a discount.

• Smart timing: The ideal timing for an abandoned cart SMS is 60 minutes after abandonment. Automation ensures the success of all the elements on this list by delivering them at just the right time.

The exact steps that go into building an SMS cart abandonment automation depend on the text message service you use. Generally, you can use one of three methods:

• Integrations: If your text messaging app integrates with your e-commerce store, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce, you can set up automations using the software you already have.

• Third-party apps: When your services don’t have built-in automations, you can use a third-party service like Zapier, Workato, or HubSpot to connect your apps.

• API: You can also develop a custom solution using your text message service’s API code.

Sinch Engage allows you to use any or all of these options to build the exact abandoned cart SMS sequences you like.

You can break an automation down into its workflow, which consists of a trigger that starts the workflow and an action that happens in response to the trigger. For example, a basic cart abandonment workflow would look like:

But you can add extra steps and modifiers to create some of the most popular workflows for automated abandoned cart messages. Let’s look closer at them.

As we explored earlier, the most successful abandoned cart texts have a slight delay. Depending on what type of automation you use, this delay could look like an extra setting or an additional step for your workflow.

In Sinch Engage’s Shopify integration, for example, you can set a delay using an additional modifier in your cart abandonment automation.

From here, you can also add follow-up texts that send after another delay, such as one hour or one day. But keep to one follow-up at most – sending too many can deter customers.

You can also design workflows based on audience segments. For example, you can send specialized text messages to people in segments like:

• High cart value

• Customers with extensive purchase history (VIP customers)

• Carts containing certain products or product categories

With these segmenting strategies, you can focus on recovering large carts, build loyalty with VIP customers, or push urgency for limited-time products. And those are just a few angles to try.

A workflow with product-based segmentation could look like:

Some automation services also let you add branching logic based on the recipient’s behavior that changes your follow-up message. If the customer clicks on your initial abandoned cart message’s link but still doesn’t check out, for instance, you could follow up with a message including a discount. The resulting workflow would be:

Using the segmentation technique we explained earlier, you could also add some cross-selling and upselling techniques to your automated SMS campaign. You could offer a bundled product or upgrade for one of the products in the customer’s cart. However, keep in mind that since the customer already left their cart behind due to some sort of disincentive, you’ll need to make your cross-sell or upsell appealing with a discount.

Test an automation such as:

It can take some experimentation to come up with the right SMS copy for your automated campaigns. Here are some abandoned cart SMS examples for you to use as templates as you build your first workflows:

Incentives such as discounts, free items, and shipping offers are some of the most common tactics for encouraging cart abandoners to come back.

You can also use your text to give the recipient a quick reminder of their cart to see if they’ll reconsider.

If your recipient’s cart includes an item that will sell out soon, try leaning into the urgency of the situation in your text.

If you suspect that some of your abandoned carts are related to your website’s checkout experience, consider sending a text to get feedback.

As you build the above elements of an automated abandoned cart campaign, follow these best practices for successful marketing SMS:

When you design your abandoned cart campaign, remember two cadences to follow:

• The texting schedule you promise your customers: Your opt-in language already establishes a schedule on which you send marketing messages to your customers. Make sure your abandoned cart texts keep your total texts in line with that schedule.

• The ideal texting cadence for abandoned carts: While keeping the above cadence in mind, also be mindful of the number of texts you send for each abandoned cart campaign. Since customers are sensitive to receiving too many texts, we suggest one initial text and one follow-up text at most.

Make a habit of removing invalid numbers from your texting list and check that your e-commerce contacts sync with your texting contacts. These measures help you avoid sending abandoned cart messages to invalid numbers and people who no longer want to receive your messages.

Do you remember how suboptimal checkout experiences can lead to abandoned carts? Your text messages’ cart link is part of that experience for your customers. Test it on desktop and mobile for appearance and usability.

After you set up your abandoned cart automations, monitor their performance and adjust accordingly. Get familiar with the benchmarks for your industry, such as for clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR), and use them as guidelines for your goal metrics. Here are some metrics to watch:

• Cart recovery rate: In abandoned cart campaigns, cart recovery rates are equivalent to your CVR. You may need to set up custom reports or add a third-party app to your e-commerce store to get access to this metric.

• Click-through rate (CTR) on your message links: Use short trackable links in your messages to track their click-through rates.

• Opt-out rate: Watch for any unsubscribes that could be related to your abandoned cart campaigns. An increased number of opt-outs in relation to your texts could indicate you need to change your message tone or reduce the number of messages you send.

• Revenue per message: Consider building custom reports to track the revenue you generate per text. Like cart recovery rate, this metric can take some work to track, but it shows the direct results of your campaigns.

Sinch Engage offers integrations, automations, and templates to help you start your first automated abandoned cart campaigns. It connects to the most popular e-commerce and automation apps to make the process easy.

Take Oz Hair and Beauty, a beauty retailer that uses Sinch Engage, as an example. Using Sinch Engage, they increased their ROI by 38 times thanks to campaigns like their abandoned cart messages.

See what Sinch Engage can do for your abandoned cart campaigns. Book a demo or try it for free today.