Of all the Ecommerce email marketing automations and Klaviyo flows, Browse Abandonment emails are one of the most overlooked strategies. We’re always shocked at how many brands and Ecommerce marketers don’t have a browse abandonment strategy!
Many online store owners are still not sure what setting up these automations effectively actually involves, or just dismiss the as a strategy because it does not have the same buyer intent as cart recovery. This is a huge mistake.
In this full guide will show you some great Browse Abandonment email examples you can use for inspiration in your own campaigns, and tell you everything you need to know about getting them up and running correctly.

A well timed product page abandonment email campaign can be an absolutely goldmine for your store – running in the background on autopilot converting window shoppers to new customers and bringing you incremental sales every day.
Today we’re taking a deep dive into this key email automation, showing you exactly how to set one up following best practices, which subject lines to use, personalizing emails using customer data, and some high converting Browse Abandonment email examples you can use as inspiration for your own Ecommerce site. These are the strategies we use every day here at the Ecommerce Intelligence email marketing agency.
And if you like this in-depth guide after reading through it, be sure to take a look at our Klaviyo email marketing course which as detailed videos on browse abandonment along with all the top Klaviyo flows you need to build a world class email program for your brand.
Here is everything we’ll be covering in this guide if you want to skip to specific sections:
What Are Browse Abandonment Emails?
These email automations target users on your website who view a product but do not add to cart or make a purchase. You can think of this like product page re-targeting but via the email marketing channel instead of using digital ads or search re-targeting.
You’re recognizing that someone has viewed a product on your website, then inviting them to come back and take another look with a highly personalized email.
Browse abandonment emails work for your existing email subscribers only. You must already have a user in one of your email lists or segments to use this strategy.
Different Types of Browse Abandonment Email Campaigns
- Homepage abandonment – A user visits only the homepage then leaves
- Site search abandonment – A user searches your site then leaves
- Category abandonment – A user browses a category page then leaves
- Product page abandonment – A user looks at specific product pages then leaves
In all of these situations a visitor lands on your Ecommerce store, browses a little even if it is just on the homepage, then leaves without making a purchasing or adding anything to the cart.
As you can imagine, a lot of people are doing this even for stores with high conversion rates. This is one reason the strategy can be so valuable when done right.

Browse Abandonment vs. Cart Abandonment: What is The Difference?
Let’s clarify this first and discuss why browse abandonment messages still have huge potential value even if your cart abandonment strategy is firing on all cylinders already.
Many brand owners and marketers group these two strategies together, thinking that as long as Cart Abandonment emails are doing their thing then there isn’t much to be gained from Browse Abandonment messaging, as they’re essentially in the same category of recovering lost sales.
This is faulty thinking though as these two campaigns target people in completely different stages of the customer purchase journey. Both are needed to effective turn window shoppers into buyers and increase sales with personalized follow up emails
The main difference between Cart Abandonment emails and Browse Abandonment emails is that people who trigger a Cart flow are much deeper in your conversion funnel, and have shown more purchase intent than someone who triggers a Browse Abandonment flow.
Cart Abandoners have actually reached the checkout process, input their email address, but then left without finishing the purchase.
Browse Abandoners are simply window shopping.
They are email subscribers already in your database who have simply returned to your store and viewed one or more pages – usually a specific category or product – showing at least some level of intent to purchase.
They could be existing customers already, or potential customers for the future. They have not however added anything to their cart in the most recent session so it is not clear if purchase intent is present or not right now.
People in a cart recovery flow are definitely more valuable for Ecommerce sites because of the obvious purchase intent so it is common to not set up Browse abandonment emails thinking they’re not worth it.
This however can be a costly assumption.
Why?
Because even though people in your Browse Abandonment email flows show much less intent to purchase than people in the Cart Abandonment flow, there are going to be a lot more Browse Abandoners than Cart Abandoners.
Browse Abandon is definitely a higher volume play with moderate purchase intent, but it gives you a lot of people you’re able to target who are somewhat interested. You’re still using valuable first party data to send these campaigns, so don’t overlook them.
Just think about how many website visitors browse one or more category pages or product pages in your store, then leave. Every single day.
Compare this to the number of people who add something to their cart and put an email address into your checkout page. Product page abandonment emails can target at least 5-10x more people than cart abandonment in many online stores.
The casual browsers or window shoppers are just so prevalent in any Ecommerce business, and all of these people are potentials for your Browse Abandonment email flow.
Cart Abandonment Email flow:
Less volume, but highly targeted with a lot of consumer buying intent. These emails are generally the lowest hanging fruit in any Ecommerce email marketing strategy but you don’t have the ability to send many of them.
Browse Abandonment Email flow:
Much higher volume, but lower consumer buying intent. You will always have more potential targets for these emails than for people in the cart recovery stage.
Each flow is valuable for different reasons. And they both play their part in a complete abandonment recovery strategy to capture both window shoppers through Browse Abandonment emails, and lost carts through regular cart recovery automations.
Still don’t believe it? Klaviyo did a study of over 1 Million Browse Abandonment emails sent by various brands1.
The stats looked like this:
- 52.79% email open rate was the average
- The click through rate on average was 10.87%
- Each recipient on average generated $2.88 in revenue
So the Browse Abandonment email automation is definitely one worth implementing for any Ecommerce brand whether you’re selling direct to consumer or operating in a B2B market.
Our Own Klaviyo Browse Abandonment Results
Below you can see one of the abandonment campaigns we’ve been running in Klaviyo for over a year now. This email automation performs very consistently each and every month, generating around $1600 in sales monthly. The emails have a huge revenue-per-recipient of over $8.

It is normal for this flow to be a top performer in a well optimize Klaviyo account, often the number 3, 4, or 5 measured by total monthly revenue. The settings and triggers we use follow the examples and recommendations we make later in this article, and are generally similar for most of the brands we implement this for in Klaviyo.
So don’t sleep on this form of marketing to your email subscribers. It always works well and we consider it very low hanging fruit for Ecommerce marketers to drive more sales and online revenue in any situation where these automated emails are not set up.
Browse Abandonment Best Practices & Timing Setup in Klaviyo
Here are some Klaviyo Browse Abandonment best practices for effective triggers, timing, suppression, and filters. These will help you get the best possible results also ensure your customers and subscribers don’t get too many emails. This is especially important with Browse Abandonment messages as it can be a high volume flow.
Currently we do not use text messages or SMS marketing for this type of automation, just email.
Of course Klaviyo is not the only email platform that can build this automation so feel free to replicate these settings in your platform of choice if you use something else.
Segmentation & Targeting For Browse Abandonment Automations
Generic product page abandonment emails can work well, even if they’re the same for all website browsers and just dynamically show the products based on the shopper’s interest with no other customization or targeting.
However, targeting your abandonment emails to a specific category or even a specific bestselling product can increase conversions due to better personalization.
We recommend setting up specific flows for at least three of your top selling categories with relevant content and copy. After this you can use a generic template to target browsers of all other product categories.
Of course if you have a hero product that’s responsible for a larger amount of your overall revenue, it would make sense to run a specific product campaign for anyone who abandons the product page. Then you can all out the individual benefits of that product, and include your best reviews. Including this kind of user generated content can be great for the overall conversion rate.
What is the Best Browse Abandonment Email Timing?
The timing settings for these automations apply for all email subscriber and customer groups. Everyone from casual browsers to loyal customers. We’re tailoring the messaging solely on someones on site behavior here.
For timing your Browse Abandonment emails we recommend sending a timely email with a two hour delay after someone views a product, before you send the triggered abandonment email. We’ve even seen a longer delay of four or six hours work well too.
Abandonment Email Exclusions – Who to Leave Out
Always exclude people from Browse Abandonment emails if they have started the checkout process. These users will instead trigger your checkout abandonment emails which will be better targeted to their stage in the buying process.
Of course exclude people who have already ordered in the last few hours. If you are using a two hour trigger delay, you want to exclude all purchasers from within the last two hours as they’ve already been tracked making a purchase recently.
We do also recommend excluding people who have recently been in any of the flows you have running for Browse Abandonment emails. The default setting for this exclusion window is 30 days is in Klaviyo, which is very conservative. We often use a 7-14 day window depending on how aggressive a brand wants to be.
This time-based filtering is important. If you personally visited an Ecommerce site for three or four days in a row to chec kout different products, we as digital marketers would not want to receive browse abandonment messaging for each of those sessions, constantly asking you to come back and purchase every day. That would be bad practice.
We try to use filters in a way that means any one user will not receive more than one Browse Abandonment email in a week. Two emails per week at the very most.
Klaviyo Smart Sending for Browse Abandonment Flows
Keep Smart Sending turned on for Browse Abandonment messages in Klaviyo. This flow can be a very high volume one if you don’t use the correct filters. If someone receives one of your promotional emails as part of a sale campaign, visits your website and leaves without purchasing, you likely don’t want them to receive another email two hours later for Browse Abandonment.
Klaviyo Smart Sending solves this and will filter out anyone who has received anything via email from you within the last few hours, depending on how you’re configured your Smart Send settings.
Also if you’ve made some other filtering error while setting up how you send Browse Abandonment emails, activating Smart Sending will prevent a situation where someone visits your site and then receives four separate emails later that day because they looked at four different product pages.
This is one of the email marketing strategies that definitely requires a lighter touch. So make sure your triggers and filters are in order before setting any Browse Abandonment automated messages live.

Specific Product Page and Category Page Browse Abandonment
Another option which can work well is creating product-specific Browse Abandonment emails for the top sellers on your Ecommerce site or some other particular product you really want to push.
You can really hone in on the benefits related to the specific product someone has shown interest in. Then use a more general email for all other products. Category abandonment is also good and can increase conversion rates over and above what a generic template for everything would get.
We generally don’t use any kind of homepage abandonment emails as this would be too generic and there is not much available customer data available around what people were really interested in. Our clients have a lot of different email automations running at once and most of the time for us targeting homepage abandoners seems a little overkill.
At the time of writing Klaviyo does not support specific site search abandonment emails so we do not run those.
Best Browse Abandonment Email Subject Lines & Ideas
Below are 20 different subject line examples you can use for inspiration in your own Browse Abandonment messaging.
These are real-world subject lines taken from the same Klaviyo study mentioned above, each of the examples performed well for the brand that used them, so try and adapt them to your business to convert window shoppers to buyers.
Email Subject Line Tip
Remember that these subject lines were featured in a well publicized Klaviyo Browse Abandonment email study. That means a lot of brands would of just copied and used each subject line example verbatim. Some of them are even set as the default subject line options when using Klaviyo flow templates.
With that in mind we recommend using these for inspiration only, and customizing each subject line for your own Ecommerce brand. They’ve likely been overused by hundreds of stores so be sure to make them your own or come up with original ideas which your customers are likely to respond too.
Of course you can test the more generic “Did you see something you liked?” style, but we personally see this being used everywhere by brands in many different markets. This style may not be as effective as it used to be.
Email Open Rate Tip
We often find that adding emojis sparingly in the subject line of any email can boost the open rates.
Be sure to A/B test this for your market, especially on a high volume flow which Browse Abandonment emails are likely to be.

Best Browse Abandonment Email Examples, Templates & Content
Most browse abandonment flows that see success follow a similar and fairly simple formula with straight forward messaging and a clear call to action.
This is not an email strategy you need to be particularly creative with in order to see a good conversion rate, however customizing templates and email marketing copy to your market and customers is of course always a good idea.
Don’t overthink this one though.
The general best practice when creating Browse Abandonment email templates is to call out the fact you noticed someone was browsing your site but left without making a purchase. You want to do this without being intrusive or making a user feel like they’re being too heavily tracked from the moment a visitor lands on your site though. Stay away from intrusive copy!
Simply remind someone of the products or categories they were looking at, then give them a soft call to action as a reminder to come back and purchase what they were interested in. Most of the best Browse Abandonment email examples do very well without using discounts.
This can be a high volume email automation for online stores. Using discounting here could prove to be too liberal and result in a lot of lost margin. We prefer to save discounting strategies for cart recovery flows, and usually only in emails two or three in the sequence.
If you can add a little humor or brand personality into your Browse Abandonment emails this is always a great idea either in the subject line, the email body, or both.
Try and personalize the structure mentioned above in a way that makes sense for how you like to communicate with your customers elsewhere in your marketing and on your online store for the best conversion rate.
Abandonment Email Example #1
In terms of the actual layout, here is a fairly standard Browse Abandonment email template from ILoveUgly.com. We would expect this to perform well and it is a great example.
The product recommendations in this Browse Abandonment template are dynamically populated. So each of the automated emails would be personalized based on what an individual browser was most interested in during their most recent session on your website.
In this example the website is also using my first name to personalize the template, which they’ve pulled from my customer data stored in their email platform of choice. Good job!

Abandonment Email Example #2
This is an example from Unique Photo. We like it because of the clean design, eye catching hero email and headline, plus the witty copy that’s perfectly suited to the niche.
The banner towards the bottom invited people to come back and browse other bestsellers is a great addition for people who don’t want to buy the camera they were already looking at.
The CTA of “find the perfect gear” is a strong. As is the primary “Treat Yourself” CTA.

Abandonment Email Example #3
This template from Reebok is great example as it dynamically shows multiple products. This could either be six different items the user had looked at, bestsellers from the category they showed most interest in, or a combination of both.
One other thing to note about this abandonment email is that it doesn’t reference the fact that Reebok know what the user has been looking at. The copy appears just like a product recommendation email, without giving the impressed you’re being tracked.
This is a great approach for any brand wanting to be conservative with the email copy, with very little risk of seeming intrusive.

Final Thoughts on Browse Abandonment Emails
Hopefully you now have a better understand of how the Browse Abandonment email flow works in Klaviyo or any other email software tool, why it is valuable for converting potential Ecommerce customers who showed some interest, what high open rate subject lines looks like, and how to start implementing with basic targeting for your own brand.
Partnering With A Klaviyo Email Marketing Agency
Putting a complete email strategy together for your brand where everything works in sync without too much overlap can be difficult. Automated emails such as Browse Abandonment emails are easy to setup incorrectly, and often they’ll overlap and cancel out other email automations if you’re not careful with the settings, targeting, and filters.
Speak with our team if you’d like to get started with a personalized strategy for your Ecommerce brand and see a nice boost in online transactions attributed to digital marketing and the email channel specifically.
Also if you’d like to learn more about the power of the Klaviyo platform and it’s advanced email marketing automations including Browse Abandonment emails and much more, be sure to read our in-depth review of the Klaviyo platform here and our complete pricing guide for Klaviyo email and SMS here.
Thanks for reading.