Retainful Review: Abandoned Cart Recovery for WooCommerce and Shopify

69.57% – if you have an eCommerce store, that’s the average percentage of your visitors who add something to their carts only to disappear without buying.

You do all that hard work to get people to your site and convince them to browse your products…but then two-thirds of them go away without completing their purchases.

If you want to reduce that number, you need a way to reach out to those customers and bring them back to your store.

In our Retainful review, we’ll take a look at a tool that can do just that for your WooCommerce or Shopify store. We’ll focus on WooCommerce, though.

Retainful helps you recover abandoned shopping carts by sending a series of cart recovery emails. It can also help you turn one-time customers into repeat customers by sending out unique coupons for future purchases.

Keep reading for a hands-on look at everything Retainful can do and how it works…

Retainful Review: The Feature List

At a high level, Retainful aims to help you grow your store’s revenue.

The main way that Retainful accomplishes this is with abandoned cart emails. You can create your own automatic sequences that include some or all of the following features:

A summary of the abandoned cart
Automatic one-click cart recovery links
A coupon to entice people to finish their orders

To design your emails, Retainful gives you a visual, drag-and-drop editor, including an option to dynamically insert information with merge tags.

Beyond that, you’ll also be able to track how much revenue you’re losing to abandoned carts and how effective your efforts are at recovering abandoned carts.

On WooCommerce, Retainful also includes tools to help you gather email addresses from anonymous visitors so that you have a chance to recover every single cart. For example, you can display a popup after an anonymous shopper adds an item to their cart or when it looks like they’re leaving your site.

While abandoned cart recovery is Retainful’s forte, that’s not the only thing it helps you with.

To drive repeat purchases, Retainful can also help you send next order coupons to shoppers who do complete their purchases. This helps you bring them back to your store for another purchase.

Again, Retainful works for both WooCommerce and Shopify. The developer is also working on a BigCommerce integration, as well as plans for Magento and Volusion. Those last three are not available at the time that we’re writing this Retainful review, though.

Retainful Pricing

Retainful has a permanent free plan that lets you have up to 300 contacts.

However, the free tier lacks access to the Premium WooCommerce add-ons, which are what you need for the following features:

Add to cart email collection popup – ensures you get an email address even for anonymous shoppers.
Countdown timer – create urgency with a countdown timer.
Exit intent popup – offer a coupon code and/or collect a shopper’s email address if it looks like they’re about to leave your store.

To increase the contact limit and get access to all of the WooCommerce features, paid plans start at just $9 per month. You’ll also get a 20% discount if you opt to pay annually.

An Example of Retainful In Action

Before showing you the backend, let me give you an example of how Retainful will work for your shoppers.

When an anonymous shopper adds an item to their cart, you can ask them for their email address right away using a popup (this is 100% optional). For logged-in users, you would already have their email address, so there’s no need to ask:

If a shopper abandons their cart, they’ll then receive an email like this. If they click the button in the email, Retainful will automatically recover their cart for them – all they need to do is check out:

Retainful review of abandoned cart email

Hands-On With Retainful

Now, let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you how Retainful works on WooCommerce.

While I’m using WooCommerce for this example, most of these features will be the same for a Shopify store because you use the Retainful website to create and manage your email campaigns.

Connecting Retainful to Your WooCommerce Store

To get started with Retainful on your WooCommerce store, you’ll need to do two things:

Sign up for a Retainful account (either the free plan or one of the paid plans).
Install the Retainful integration plugin on your store (it’s available at WordPress.org).

Once you’ve done that, you can connect your WooCommerce store to your Retainful account by adding the API keys from your Retainful account to the plugin’s settings in your WordPress dashboard.

You can configure a few settings from your WooCommerce dashboard, but you’ll do most of your work in the Retainful dashboard.

Settings

In the plugin’s Settings tab in your WordPress dashboard, you can configure several options for how to track carts. For example, whether or not you want to consider “On-Hold” orders as abandoned or if you want to exclude certain IP addresses from being tracked:

Next order coupon

In the Next order coupon tab, you can choose whether or not to enable this feature. Again, the “next order coupon” feature lets you send people who did complete their order a coupon for their next order. The goal is to turn one-time customers into repeat customers.

If you want to enable the feature, you’ll be able to configure how it works and customize the message that gets included in a shopper’s order confirmation email.

That is, after someone completes their order, Retainful will include the coupon in the regular WooCommerce order confirmation email:

Premium WooCommerce Add-ons

For WooCommerce stores, Retainful also comes with the three premium add-ons that we detailed above.

To enable/configure these add-ons, you can use the Premium Features tab.

You’ll perform everything else from the Retainful website/dashboard, so let’s jump over to that.

Creating Your Abandoned Cart Email Sequence

While Retainful does let you send a single abandoned cart reminder, most experts recommend sending a sequence of emails.

Typically, you’ll want to send one email almost instantly. Then, you’ll also want to send additional emails later on.

To help you get up and running, Retainful comes with a pre-built sequence template that follows optimal timing.

You can either use these pre-built emails by clicking Go Live or you can click the Add Email button to create your own from scratch. You can also edit the pre-built template emails.

In the email editor, you can first enter the email subject and choose when to send it:

Note – the time in this setting refers to how long after a cart is abandoned to send the email. Retainful also lets you control when to consider a cart as abandoned.

For example, if you tell Retainful to mark a cart as abandoned after 15 minutes and send your email 15 minutes after a cart is abandoned, the sequence will look like this:

A shopper adds an item to their cart
15 minutes later – Retainful classifies the cart as abandoned because the shopper hasn’t checked out
15 minutes later (30 minutes total) – Retainful sends the first email in your sequence.

Once you’ve set the timing, you can click the Customize button to edit the email’s content.

There, you’ll get a visual, drag-and-drop email builder, which is quite convenient.

Retainful review of drag-and-drop email builder

You can:

Edit text by clicking and typing.
Include dynamic information with merge tags.
Rearrange elements by dragging and dropping.
Add new elements from the Blocks list in the sidebar. For example, you can include a coupon with the Coupon block.
Style each element from the Styles tab.

And that’s it! Once you create one or more abandoned cart emails in your sequence, your customers will start receiving them.

Viewing Analytics and Customer Information

To help you see how much money you’re losing and how effective your efforts are, Retainful includes its own analytics area:

You can even see the abandoned items inside shoppers’ carts by clicking on the Cart-ID link:

You can also view a list of all of your customers, as well as a log of all your outbound emails to analyze open and click rates:

If you’re using next order coupons, you’ll also be able to track all the coupons that you’ve sent and the conversion rates of your coupons.

Final Thoughts on Retainful

You’ll never be able to recover all of the ~70% of shoppers who abandon their carts. But even if you only recover a small percentage, that’s still going to be a big boost to your store’s bottom line.

Basically, if you’re not implementing strategies to reduce cart abandonment at your store, you’re leaving money on the table.

Retainful makes it easy to start sending cart abandonment reminders on WooCommerce (or Shopify). You’ll be able to design your emails using a visual, drag-and-drop editor. And you can also set up automated sequences, which is how most experts recommend implementing abandoned cart emails.

Once you convert someone into a one-time customer, you can also send those next order coupons to turn them into a repeat shopper.

The nice thing is that, because you get detailed analytics, you can clearly see whether or not Retainful pays for itself. If you recover more revenue than it costs to use Retainful, you’re in the black!

If you have a small store, you might be fine with the limited free tier. Otherwise, you can try out the premium tiers with a free trial.

To get started, click below to visit Retainful:

About Colin Newcomer

Colin Newcomer is a freelance blogger for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing, WordPress, and B2B topics.