One common mistake in setting up abandonment flow emails is not having enough lookback window to filter past purchasers. When your lookback window to filter past purchasers is same as delayed time, you may inadvertently include past purchasers in the next step of your flow.
Concretely, this means that customers who have placed an order may still end up receiving abandonment emails.
Few reasons why you should use lookback window at least a few hours greater than delayed window.
- Delayed flows may be executed 10 minutes later than expected. If user placed an order within 10 minutes after checkout started activity is generated, they may be included in next step of the flow.
- Executions of flow itself takes time.
Here's a timeline to describe the problem.
- Customer initiates checkout started activity at 7am.
- At 7am, OnVoard detects checkout started activity and starts flow. On Step 2, flow is set to be delayed for an hour.
- Customer placed order at 7.05am.
- At 8.07am, OnVoard automatically checks and execute delayed flow. On Step 3, flow lookback for last 1 hour (from 7.07am to 8.07am) to check if there are any placed order. Since customer placed order at 7.05am, we will continue to next step.
Increase Lookback Window to Exclude Past Purchasers
The easy way to resolve this is to increase lookback window to exclude past purchasers. We recommend looking back a few days to exclude past purchasers. This way, you can be sure that anyone who've purchased from your store won't be receiving any abandonment emails over the next few days.
This is how the config looks like for Filter (Step 3).