Managing Browse Abandonment & Abandoned Checkout Flow – Best Practices?

Hi ​@Stephaniew 

Thank you for posting your question in the community, and great question. The set up that you have sounds fairly common in that you have a discount in your browse abandon and checkout abandon flows. 

For your Browse Abandon flow, I wasn’t 100% clear based on your description if the “Checkout Started Filter” is a conditional split at the top or if you are using a flow filter. If you are using a conditional split at the top, I would recommend removing this, and updated the flow trigger to include the flow filters below:

User has started checkout zero times since starting this flow AND

User has placed order zero times since starting this flow.

The biggest difference here is that the conditional split only checks the status of the user at the time they reach that conditional split. Whereas the flow filter checks this status at each step. So, if any any point while someone is in your Browse Abandon flow, if they trigger the Checkout Started event or the Placed Order event, they will be removed from receiving any additional messages from that flow.

This is out side of your question, but you consider also having a flow filter to limit the number of times someone is entered into the Browse Abandon flow. If this is based on a Viewed Product event, it will fire and someone will be entered into the flow for each product they view. Maybe set this to only enter the flow every 5-7 days, for example. If you already have this… great, you can ignore this!!

For your Checkout Started flow, using the Checkout Started event as a filter in your Browse Abandon, essentially gives this flow priority based on the most recent activity by your user. And similarly, you’d want to add a Placed Order flow filter on the Checkout Started flow to suppress anyone from receiving any checkout started messages at the time they place the order. The placed order is ONLY since starting that flow. 

Using this setup, users can be entered into both flows, but like I mentioned above, the flow filters give priority to the most recent event (using closer to the purchase) and suppresses someone from receiving emails from the other flows. 

For your welcome flow, you could set up the same logic but can keep it simple. Use a Flow Filter to suppress anyone from continuing to receive welcome emails if they have placed an order (this would be over all time, not since starting the flow like the other examples above). This way, people will continue to receive your nurturing content in the welcome series, regardless of browse and checkout emails, up until the point they place an order.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions. 

Best,

​@In the Inbox 

​@Stephaniew you didn’t specify if the welcome flow also has filters to exclude folks that entered other flows like  Browse Abandonment and Abandoned Checkout.  Are you also offering a coupon code in the welcome flow?  Moreover are you leveraging the Smart Send Time feature?