We’ve all been there - you go to book tickets, but before you finish purchasing, you get distracted: the doorbell rings, you need to check details with a friend, you decide to wait for payday… The intent is there, but you just don’t get to the point of checking out.
Across ecommerce as a whole, the average cart abandonment rate sits at just over 70% (Baymard). Ticketing has its own specificities, but the pattern is the same: a good number of people who move through your checkout journey may leave before they've paid.
Many of those customers will, however, return to book later. And a well-timed reminder to help them get to that point is often welcome - around 38% of shoppers say they appreciate being reminded of something they were looking at (Contentsquare). That's what you’ll be able to offer using our new Abandoned Cart Automation.
The automation is triggered when intent is clear, the customer is still able to check out, and they’re happy to hear from you. In practice: it only sends when the cart holds tickets for a future event that still has availability, the temporary hold on those seats has expired so the cart counts as abandoned, and the customer either logged in or has entered their details and opted in to hear from you.
How the automation looks beyond that is up to you:
You choose the length and timing of the flow: send a single reminder, or build a series of up to three emails. You decide how long to wait after a cart is abandoned before the first email goes out, and how long to leave between each follow-up.
Compliance is built in: abandoned cart emails count as marketing under GDPR, so the second and third emails carry a link for customers to update their contact preferences. The first is treated as a timely reminder under legitimate interest.
The copy can be amended as needed: each email comes with default subject lines and content you can rework to match your venue’s tone of voice. As with all transactional emails in Ticketsolve, templates are built in MJML and are locale aware, so customers can receive the reminder in their chosen language when you've set up a template for it.
Why not add an incentive? If you want to add an extra incentive, you can attach a promo code - we’d suggest adding this to the second and third emails, so your customers don’t learn to wait for a code before booking!
Tracking comes as standard: add UTM parameters when you set the automation up and you can measure engagement and attribute recovered sales, both in your Ticketsolve reports and in GA4.
A few suggestions based on what we’ve discovered through testing: send the first reminder within a couple of hours while the intent is still fresh, build urgency gradually across a sequence rather than leading with pressure, and keep the tone conversational. A friendly nudge tends to work better than a hard sell!
Between March and April this year, we tested the automation with five organisations across the UK and Ireland: Town Hall Theatre, Komedia Brighton, Ipswich Theatres, Forum Theatre Billingham and a folk festival. Their programmes, ticket prices and audiences were very different, but despite this, their results were consistent - which we found super interesting.
Across all five venues, between 25% and 31% of customers who abandoned a cart came back and booked when prompted. And the rate was about the same whether someone was ready to purchase a £30 single ticket or make a £85 group booking.
We also noted that a single, well-timed reminder converted at roughly the same rate as a three-email sequence, so a longer flow isn't essential to see results - useful to know if you're wary of over-emailing.
A note on how this is measured, because it matters for your own reporting. The 25% to 31% figure comes from full attribution: we matched customers who received a reminder against those who later booked for an event in their abandoned cart, whether or not they clicked the email. Ticketsolve's own reporting tracks UTM clicks only, so the conversion rate you see in your reports will be lower, closer to 6-15%.
You can read the full write-up in our case study.
Most of the customers who abandon a cart aren't gone for good. They got distracted, or they meant to finish later and never did. Our Abandoned Cart Automation gives them a straightforward way back, on your terms and in your voice.
If you'd like to set this up for your venue, the help centre walks through it step by step: Recover Lost Sales with an Abandoned Cart Automation. Or get in touch and we'll talk it through.