How to set up an Abandoned Cart Email

[dkonig]

I'm looking to set up an abandoned cart email using Marketo. We're using a few tools on our site. 

Acoustic Digital Analytics(Formerly IBM Digital Analytics, Formerly Coremetrics)

Acoustic Experience Analytics (Formerly Tealeaf)

Google Analytics

Google Tag Manager

Ideally, we would want a futureproof solution. That is probably going to involve focusing on Google Ananlytics and Google Tag Manager but I am open to solutions for the other platforms as well. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

There are some past Community threads on this. Did you check those out?

[Phillip_Wild · Accepted solution]

Hi @dkonig ,

A couple of ways to do this that spring to mind, broadly....

You can either:

1. Push abandoned cart data into a Marketo Custom Object via API, then trigger an email(s) referencing this information. This means you are calculating the send logic in Marketo (ensuring they haven't purchased yet, etc)

2. Trigger a fully dynamic email in Marketo, pushing in the info at time of send - again via API.

Number 2 is probably preferred since then you don't need to keep the cart information updated in Marketo, which is tricky - particularly if you want an email series. 

I would say best practice is to use a Customer Data Platform to log this activity via Google Tag Manager and then push the relevant info to Marketo, but that is complex. "Futureproofed" probably means something like this, since a CDP would be a core bit of architecture. Without that you can certainly do it, but it's integrating more systems I would assume.  

Sorry, I'm unsure how this comes together with the products you have listed, but since most of them are analytics platforms, I think you will need more in the stack. GTM can certainly be part of it, but there are just so many ways to do this, realistically. What is your ecommerce solution?

[dkonig]

Sorry for the delay. Doing a little more digging it looks like I can export out files out of Acoustics Digital Analytics with abandoned cart information to a STFP location and then import into Marketo. That way all of the logic can be maintained in the analytics platform and Marketo is simply leveraging a pre-generated list that we grab from the SFTP. I haven't thought through all the details around this yet so I am not sure where this process might fall down.