Abandoned Cart Recovery with Recapture for Paid Memberships Pro

Set up Recapture to tackle cart recovery in your Paid Memberships Pro-powered site through their integration plugin available in the WordPress.org plugins repository.

In this guide, we explore the topic of abandoned carts, and how you, too, can set up Recapture to start recovering lost sales on memberships.

Why should you recover abandoned carts?

If you’re not familiar with what abandoned carts are and why you need to address them, here’s the short version:

Naturally, people who browse membership sites don’t always end up purchasing. You’ve probably done this yourself. You might be researching, comparing prices, thinking about if the course or site is worth it, etc. And suddenly, you’ve left the checkout page of the site.

That’s an abandoned cart for memberships.

Like other ecommerce sites, Baymard Institute estimates that 69.80% of all shopping carts are abandoned across all verticals.  This is definitely a huge problem for everyone.

Do membership sites even have abandoned carts?

The short answer is yes, they do.

While the reasons aren’t the same as say, a store like Amazon, the customer’s behavior is. Customers come, start to check out, get frustrated or confused, and then don’t complete their purchase.

There are a number of reasons why.

• Some shoppers get discouraged at checkout because the form is too long, complicated, or is asking for too much information they consider personal.
• Others get confused by your pricing options or plans.
• Many simply get distracted while finishing their purchase and forget to come back.

All of these are avoidable in some form, but regardless of why they left, the question becomes: what can you do about it?

For these folks, assuming they’ve already entered their email at some point, you can help them complete their checkout process by sending reminder emails in the form of an abandoned cart email campaign.

And—(maybe a more compelling consideration)—if your membership site offers a free level, some of these users are logged in. When a logged in member browses your checkout page for an upgrade level—the user doesn’t even have to enter their email address for their cart to be considered recoverable.

How much can you recover?

Suppose your site has 100 signups per month at $50 per member. That comes to a total of $5,000 per month in sales.

Let’s also assume your site has an average abandonment rate of 70% (meaning for every 10 customers that visit your site, 7 of them leave and never purchase).

If you converted 100 signups, this means that over 330 people came to your site and considered buying your membership (330 * 30% = 99 signups).

The worst part of this math is that you’re missing out on 230 sales from lost customers (which amounts to $11,500 in lost sales). That’s a lot of missed opportunities. And on top of that, for most membership sites the lifetime value of a member is much more than just their initial checkout payment.

So what’s really at stake here?

Let’s say that of this $11,500 abandoned, you then manage to recover 5% of these sales. If we take 5% of $11,500, that comes out to an extra $575 per month. If we double that recovery rate (which is definitely attainable) to 10%, suddenly that’s an extra $1,150 per month. With no additional work or traffic to your site required. It’s like free money that you’re missing out on. In Recapture’s experience, it is not uncommon for a membership site to be recovering between 15-20% or more.

At the time of this post, there are many membership sites getting on average more than 10% a month added to their bottom line. Here’s a screenshot showing actual numbers from a membership site (not ours 🙂) in Recapture to show you what’s possible:

How Recapture Works

After installing and activating their free plugin, Recapture connects to your Paid Memberships Pro site to start tracking carts on your site and associates email addresses to those carts.

Recapture can detect when someone enters an email anywhere on your site—whether it’s a sidebar, header, footer, toaster widget, popup, or the checkout page. Once they have the email and the cart, the optimized recovery process begins.

At the proper time, Recapture sends a predefined email campaign including a link with their “shopping cart” saved. For Paid Memberships Pro sites, the email includes a link to the membership checkout page for the level they were considering.

The email can be updated with your personalized membership details to help people on the fence about joining. You can even offer them a discount code. Your customers will likely click on these emails, return to your site and complete the sale.

That’s the power of Recapture—simple reminders that increase sales. Recapture gives you default content to get started (with proven results). You can always customize the email content, design, and timing to your liking.

Setting Up Recapture

Although Recapture offers their abandoned cart recovery service for other platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and more, they have a specific WordPress plugin for connecting to Paid Memberships Pro.  

In order to get started, you can search for the “Recapture for Paid Memberships Pro” plugin in your WordPress plugin admin area for new plugins, or download from the WordPress plugin repository.

To get Recapture working with your Paid Memberships Pro site, navigate to Downloads > Settings > Recapture in your WordPress admin. Then, click Connect with Recapture.

Once your account is set up, you’ll want to activate the default email campaigns. Of course you can customize these as much as you want now or anytime later down the road. Refer to the Recapture for Paid Memberships Pro setup guide for additional documentation.

Additional Recapture Features

Besides personalized, responsive emails, Recapture also includes these additional features:

• Abandoned cart recovery. Automatically send personalized, responsive emails to customers who abandon their shopping cart. Every email includes links that regenerate the customers exact session on your site, regardless of the device they are on.
• Broadcast email campaigns. Send promotional emails, newsletters or site updates via Recapture’s broadcast campaign option.  No need to connect yet another email service just to keep your subscribers informed..
• SMS messages for abandoned carts and order notifications. Recapture now supports SMS messages to do cart recovery and order/shipping updates. Recapture lets you use the right channel to reach your customers.
• Segmented, targeted campaigns. Build segments for each campaign to send highly relevant and targeted emails to each customer. Sending relevant emails will result in higher open rates and more conversions.
• Email collectors, Add to Cart popup & exit intent popups. Deploy a fully responsive email collector popup to build your email list and help identify more carts. Choose from their customizable templates or provide your own, then decide exactly when and where to show a popup to each customer.
• Analytics for all campaigns. Know exactly how your campaigns perform, down to the email.  Stay in the loop with daily, weekly, or monthly email reports. All the numbers you care about, delivered right to your inbox.
• Watch your customers, LIVE. Recapture has a Live Cart Feed, letting you watch your customers in real time.
• Ease of use for everyone. Drag-and-drop email editor built with non-technical folks in mind. And they support custom HTML too, if you want to get fancy.
• All the heavy lifting with delivery. Fully responsive emails, pre-tested on all major email clients. Mail delivery issues are a thing of the past (Recapture handles DKIM, SPF, blocklists, reply-to, etc). And they support custom sender domains, too.
• Integrations you can use. Automatic sync to your Mailchimp lists. Connect to Zapier, too, which opens thousands of triggered actions all supported from Recapture.
• Reliable to the core. Built on Amazon Web Services for reliability and speed and battle tested against high-volume sending stores.
• Painless setup and excellent support. 5-minute setup, no joke — that’s all it takes. And if you run into issues, they have responsive live chat and email support.

We trust Recapture as they are backed by a team with a long history of ecommerce success—they’ve recovered over $176,000,000 for all kinds of sites since 2015. As your site grows, their reliable platform will scale with you.

Recapture’s pricing is value-based on the additional revenue they recover for you each month, plus you can recover up to $500 on their platform at no cost to your site. They also offer a 15-day free trial and even a demo connected to a real, live site. Recapture is simple abandoned cart recovery for your Paid Memberships Pro site.

Stop missing out on lost cart revenue and add an abandoned cart campaign (or three) to your Paid Memberships Pro site today.

Learn more about Recapture for Paid Memberships Pro