Create a Browse Abandonment Automation Flow

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Important: Browse abandonment text messages can only be sent to individuals who have compliantly opted in to your store's SMS program. Learn more about growing your subscriber list here.

With a browse abandonment automation, you can easily re-engage shoppers who have browsed items in your shop but never put an item in their cart or started the checkout process.

How Browse Abandonment Benefits You

Re-engage a potential sale, remind subscribers of their initial interest, and link them back to your shop!
Provide shoppers with important information about a particular product to help nudge them closer to that sale.
Invite shoppers to interact with your shop via text. Answer questions they might have and create a virtual personalized shopping experience.

What You Need to Know

Browse abandonment flows send after a cookied subscriber browses your shop.
Due to how cookied sessions are captured, it may take a shopper up to 30 minutes to enter your automation flow after they've abandoned their browsing session.
Subscribers can only enter a browse abandonment flow once every 72 hours. This guardrail is put in place to protect your subscribers from an excess of messages and keep your unsubscribe rates low.
The Browse Abandonment automation will not be triggered for products that are out of stock. However, Browse Abandonment works at the product level. This means if a product has multiple variants, and one or more variants are in stock, the automation will still be triggered for a subscriber that viewed an out-of-stock variant.
At this time, browse abandonment automations follow the same guidelines as abandoned cart automation flows:
- Subscribers can only receive one message after abandonment.
- This message should send within 48 hours of the browsing session.

Get Started Set Automation Properties Build Your Flow

Select Messaging in the side menu of your Postscript dashboard, then select Flow Builder.
Select Create Flow in the top-right corner of the page.
Select Use a template or select Create a new flow.
Choose Automation as your flow type. Then click Create Flow.
Name the automation. Choose a name that will allow you to easily identify and track your Browse Abandonment flow in the future.

Define the automation trigger. A trigger is an action that will begin the automation flow. In the example above, the flow will send to a subscriber who viewed a product.
Add trigger filters. Trigger filters can help you fine-tune when an automation is triggered. The example above will only send to a subscriber who viewed a product that costs over $20.
Add a subscriber frequency filter. The subscriber frequency filter allows you to choose how often a subscriber can enter a given automation flow for a certain period of time. While we have guardrails in place that will only allow a subscriber to enter a Browse Abandonment flow once every 72 hours, you can increase that timeframe. The example above will only allow subscribers to enter this flow every 30 days.
Add a cancellation trigger. The cancellation trigger tells Postscript when to remove a subscriber from an automation flow. In the example above, a subscriber will be removed from receiving this automation if they begin checkout after viewing a product.
Save. Select Save in the bottom right corner of the properties editor.

Want to keep it simple? No worries! Adding trigger filters, subscriber filters, a subscriber frequency filter, or a cancellation trigger are all optional ways to customize your automation flow.

1. Add actions to your flow. You can begin building your flow by dragging and dropping a Send Message action, a Delay (remember: this delay needs to be within 48 hours of the browse abandonment), or an A/B Split.
2. When adding a Send Message action to your automation flow, you may consider using some of our message enhancements located in the bottom right corner of the Message Editor to spruce things up.
  - Add emojis by clicking the square smiley face icon.
  - Add merge tags like subscriber first name, your shop link, or your shop name by clicking the overlapping tags icon.
  - Add a Postscript-generated coupon by clicking the percentage icon.
  - Add a Shopify-generated coupon and discount link by clicking the hyperlink icon. Note: Links and tags are trigger-specific. Not all link or tag options will be visible for all trigger types. For example, an abandoned cart link can only be added if the automation flow trigger is Checkout Started.
3. If you're ready to send your flow, select Schedule or Activate in the top-right corner of the page. You have two options when sending a flow:
  - Activate immediately: This option will immediately begin the flow allowing subscribers to enter the automation based on the selected properties.
  - Activate at a scheduled time and date: Choose when you'd like the flow to begin allowing subscribers to enter.

FAQs

How long is a browsing session? Browsing sessions are captured in 30-minute intervals. In other words, it can take up to 30 minutes for a subscriber to enter a browse abandonment automation. You may wish to take this into consideration when setting message wait delays. For example, if you wish for a subscriber to receive their automation 2 hours after initiating a browsing session, then you would set the Delay to 90 minutes instead of 2 hours.
Why does my test message not contain a live link? Unlike other test messages, a browse abandonment test message will not include a live link. This is because your test message wasn't triggered by a browsing session. Messages sent to your subscribers, however, will contain a live link based on their browsing session.
Are Browse Abandonment flows required to adhere to quiet hours? Yes. Postscript adheres to TCPA-defined quiet hours for flows. Flow messages scheduled to send outside these quiet hours will send during the next waking hours window. Learn more about quiet hours here.
How can I copy or clone an existing flow? In the Flows view, find the flow you'd like to clone. Select the three-dot icon to the far right of an activated or drafted flow and select copy flow from the options listed.

Get Support

Have questions? Please feel free to reach out to our wonderful Support team at support@postscript.io or via live chat. You can also submit a support request here!

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