How to prompt ChatGPT to write abandoned cart emails

• Use these AI prompts to recover carts and convert abandoned carts to customers
• For conversion copywriters, ecommerce marketers, CROs
• Takes no more than 5 minutes

Sending cart-abandonment (aka cart recovery) emails is a must, unless you want to leave money on the table. The problem is every ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brand is sending them too! So how do you stand out in your shopper’s inbox? Especially on Black Friday or Cyber Monday!

We’ve all seen the tired, overused subject lines:

• “You’ve got good taste!”
• “Forgot something?”
• “Your cart is about to expire!”

Eyeroll. My mother could have sent that.

And that’s just it. Most abandoned-cart email subject lines are so generic. They sound like any retailer could have sent them.

If you want to grab your online shoppers’ attention, your subject lines should be (1) original, (2) specific to your brand or industry and (3) customer-centric. Plus, you need a touch of personality and tone. 💅🏼

And that’s exactly what we’re going to get ChatGPT 4 to do for us.

Here’s what to do: Prompt ChatGPT 4 to write email copy to help shoppers pick up where they left off. (And make your cart go cha-ching!) This is just a snippet of what ChatGPT 4 created for a snowboard/surf/skate shop when I used the AI copywriting prompts I’m about to teach you:

Here’s how to use ChatGPT 4 to get similar results for your business or client.

Step 1: Be ready to describe the business in 3 or 4 sentences.

To write original email subject lines, you’ll need a few specifics about the retailer you’re writing for. But don’t worry – you don’t need to write a tome about the brand or anything like that. 😉

Remember to include the website’s URL.

I love to snowboard, and one one of my favorite snowboard shops is Pacific Boarder in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. So I decided to use Pacific Boarder as one of my guinea pigs for this prompt.

All I wrote was this:

• Pacific Boarder is a Canadian west coast snowboard, surf and skate retailer known for their wide selection and decent sales and promos.
• Their website is https://pacificboarder.com/

Yup, that’s it. Because with the way I structured the prompt I’m about to teach you, ChatGPT 4 will know how to tap into brand-specific themes that’ll resonate with shoppers of those products.

(Note: At the time of writing, ChatGPT 4 includes web browsing capabilities by default. You no longer have to go out of your way to select the “Browse with Bing” native plugin.) This is what it looks like on my dashboard:

Step 2: Enter just one, single prompt.

Next, you’re going to copy and paste the following prompt into ChatGPT 4. Notice there’s hardly any work for you to do here, other than add that little bit of brand info from Step 1.

I’ve structured this prompt based on Trust Insights’ RACE formula for AI prompting. RACE stands for Role, Action, Context and Execute.

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Copy paste this prompt:

You are a conversion copywriter. You understand human emotions, behavior, and language. You are an expert in decision making, persuasion, buyer psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, sales, UX design, customer experience, branding, and conversion rate optimization. Pretend you are also highly empathetic and understand how people think and what makes them tick. 

Your job is to write write email copy for abandoned carts. But you will not write boring, generic, overused email copy like "You have great taste" or "Forgot something?" You must write specific email copy that reflects either the retailer, industry, or brand—but in a customer-centric way that resonates with buyers. In other words, the email copy you write shouldn't be something any retailer of any industry can copy.

To help you do that, here is some context about the company:
[ In a bullet list, paste your info about the brand, its products and the URL here. ]

Create a table with the following columns: (1) "Subject Line", (2) "Body Copy", (3) "CTA", (4) "Rationale". (In the Rationale column, you will explain your thinking.)

Generate 25 different outputs organized in the rows of the table.

Here are additional instructions about the email copy:
- You may use emojis in the subject line
- Mix up your approach with different humor techniques (quicky, sarcastic, understatement, tongue-in-cheek)
- Use casual, conversational language as if you're talking to a friend
- Don't sound like you're trying too hard
- Don't sound insecure or desperate or like a stalker
- Evoke curiosity in the reader

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Within only 3 minutes, AI had generated the following for me:

This prompt turns your bot into a busy bee as it generates a table of 25 ideas for you!

Please note, by about the 13th or 14th row, ChatGPT may ask you how you’re liking the output so far and whether you want it to continue generating. When that happens, just click “Continue generating” and let it do its thing. This happened to me every time I used this prompt to generate 25 rows. However, when I reduced my request from 25 ideas to 20, ChatGPT continued filling out all the rows without pausing midway. Something to play around with!

I tried this AI prompt for a nerdy critical-thinking nonprofit and my favorite vitamin store. Here’s what happened.

OK, so you’ve got to check this out.

The Thinking Shop is a cool initiative of The School of Thought. They’re on a mission to “make the world a more rational place.” They do that with fun, beautifully designed card decks and posters that educate people about critical thinking, logical fallacies and biases. (And yes, they’ve got a bone to pick with conspiracy theories.)

I used the very same prompt and included 4 bullet points about the company.

This is what ChatGPT 4 spat out for me. So clever!

Next, I also tried the same prompt on Vitasave, my favorite health supplement retailer in Vancouver, B.C.

The 3 rows below are my favorites from the table ChatGPT 4 generated.

I was pleasantly surprised by ChatGPT’s creativity and originality in these outputs. It goes to show you the magic really is in the prompt. Again, you can check out Trust Insights’ framework here.

Now that you’ve got your subject lines and email body copy, remember to include risk- and friction-reducing copy related to your offer. Learn more about writing high-converting abandoned-cart emails in this Copyhackers article.