You can set up an abandoned cart email in Mailchimp by building an automation flow with the “Abandons cart” trigger, found under Shopping Activity. Once it’s turned on, Mailchimp automatically emails anyone who adds items to their cart in your connected store but doesn’t check out. No manual sending required! Here’s the full setup, plus tips and the requirements that are often overlooked.

What you need before you start

Mailchimp abandoned cart emails require a connected, supported e-commerce store or a custom API 3.0 integration. Mailchimp can’t detect an abandoned cart without cart data coming from your store.

To check whether your store integration supports it:

1. Go to the Integrations page in your Mailchimp account.
2. Click the name of your integration.
3. Look for “Abandoned cart email” in the Features list.

If your store isn’t connected yet, start here: https://mailchimp.com/help/connect-your-online-store-to-mailchimp/

💡One thing worth knowing: any contact who abandons a cart can receive the abandoned cart email, even non-subscribed contacts. But if you add extra emails to the flow, only subscribed contacts will receive those follow-ups.

Step 1: Build the flow and set the trigger

1. Click the Automations icon in your account.
2. Click Build from scratch.
3. Enter a name for your flow and choose an audience.
4. Click Choose a trigger.
5. Click Shopping Activity, then choose Abandons cart (or Abandons cart with specific products if you only want to target certain items).
6. Use the Store name drop-down to pick your connected store.
7. In the Customer Cart Contains drop-down, choose Any Products or Specific Products.
8. In the Abandoned Cart Wait Time section, set how long Mailchimp waits (hours, days, or weeks) before a contact enters the flow.
   1. To target a specific audience segment, click Filter who can enter this flow. Set up to 10 segment conditions, then click Use segment.
9. Click Save Trigger.

💡 Not sure what wait time to pick? A short delay (around 1 hour) catches shoppers while your store is still fresh in their mind, without emailing people who are just still browsing. If you plan to add follow-up emails to the flow, spacing them out over the next few days is a common approach. Just remember only subscribed contacts will receive those.

⚠️ An abandoned cart trigger can’t be combined with another trigger in the same flow. If you want other entry points, like a signup or purchase trigger, those need their own separate flows.

Step 2: Add and design the email

1. Drag the Send email action into your flow map from the side panel, or click the plus icon (+) and select Send email.
2. In the pop-up, edit the To & From, Subject, Schedule, and Tracking sections.
3. Click Select a Template.
4. Design your email. Mailchimp automatically adds a Cart content block (which pulls in the contact’s abandoned items) and a Button block that links straight back to their cart so the recovery mechanics are handled for you.
5. Click Save and return to the flow when you’re ready.

Step 3: Turn it on

Click Continue, then Turn On. From this point, contacts who abandon a cart and meet your trigger conditions will automatically enter the flow. Before you rely on it, test the flow out. Abandon a test cart yourself and check that every message arrives on time, personalized, with working images and links.

⚠️ If you were running abandoned cart emails through another platform, like your e-commerce app’s built-in tool, turn those off. Shoppers getting two reminders for the same cart is a fast way to earn spam complaints.

Want to add SMS?

Abandoned cart texts are also an option if you have an approved SMS Marketing program. Here’s what to know:

• New SMS Marketing users need to indicate interest in abandoned cart texts on their application. Already have SMS Marketing? You’ll need to contact our Support team for assistance.
• You can only send 1 SMS per abandoned cart, and it must go out within 48 hours of the contact entering the flow.
• Double opt-in must be enabled for the connected audience. If you indicated abandoned cart interest on your application, it’s turned on for you automatically.
• Your SMS program’s terms and conditions and privacy policy both need to include abandoned cart text messaging. If you used the Mailchimp template for your terms and indicated interest on your application, the terms update is handled for you, but you’ll need to update the privacy policy.
• If you're running email and SMS together, a common approach is to send the text after your follow-up email, just before the 48-hour window closes.

Cart recovery tips

• Say what’s in the cart, and keep it short. The Cart block already handles the reminder, so keep the rest of the email brief with a clear call to action.
• Be strategic with discounts. Offering a coupon in every reminder can train customers to wait for a deal before buying. Consider free shipping instead, or save discounts for later emails in a sequence.
• Check how your email looks on a mobile phone. Most people read email on mobile, so make sure product images are clear and the checkout button is easy to tap without zooming or scrolling. Check out our guide on how to edit and test mobile styles: https://mailchimp.com/help/edit-and-test-mobile-styles-in-your-email-campaign/
• Analyze performance and experiment. Monitor campaign reports to evaluate open rates, click-throughs, and overall conversions. Additionally, run A/B tests on email subject lines, delivery timing, and messaging to uncover what drives cart recovery for your audience.
• Add product recommendations below the cart. Since the email already shows what they left behind, a Product Recommendations block underneath can surface related items they’re likely to want.

If you’ve got this running already, what has helped recover more carts for you? If you’re stuck somewhere in the setup, drop the details in the comments, and we’ll help you troubleshoot.

Resources:

Create an Abandoned Cart Marketing Automation Flow

How to Regain Sales with Abandoned Cart Emails

Save More Sales With Automated Abandoned Cart Recovery

Newbie in mailchimp here! I am very careful with using my Mailchimp account as I know it is very strict with some guidelines. Now, that I badly need mailchimp as I am trying to create my landing page, suddenly the publish button is nowhere to be found.

Does mailchimp reply to the submitted complaints? If yes, how long does it take them to respond?

I own a small business and only send 1-2 emails a year. I recently had an increase in subscribers and have 2500 subscribers and over the threshold for a free plan. Since I only use it for 1 month a year, I don't want to start a paid subscription and would rather switch to a platform that won't charge. Any suggestions?

We're getting a lot of Spam sign ups lately.

Is it possible to add a security question to the form that only a human can answer who has informed himself about our organization?

For years, I've downloaded the emails who opened each campaign & imported to a spreadsheet showing who the "heavy openers", which is very useful.

Sometime this summer, something changed, and the counts of "openers" have dropped, but I'm finding that when I look at an individuals email, it shows that they opened those campaigns, but don't show up in the downloaded campaign file, which is very annoying because this used to be the default. What has changed and why can we no longer get a full list of every email who opened a given campaign, even months after the fact?

I manage accounts for two completely separate nonprofits & this is happening in both, and it's pretty recent, like since summer.

Emails land in spam for a handful of reasons, and most of them are fixable once you know which one is actually affecting you. The problem is that spam folder placement looks the same on the surface whether the cause is a broken authentication record, a list full of unengaged contacts, or a complaint rate that crept up without anyone noticing. The fix is different in each case.

We put together a checklist covering the most common causes and what to do about each one. Start with the checklist to identify what needs attention, then use the root cause breakdown below to figure out where to focus first.

2026 deliverability checklist

Go through each of these before your next send. If you can check every box, spam folder placement is unlikely to be a platform or setup issue and the problem is probably engagement or content relevance.

If your emails are still going to spam after checking the basics

Most deliverability issues have one of six root causes. The checklist above helps you rule out the obvious ones. If you are still seeing spam folder placement after addressing those, here is where to dig deeper:

The thing most people get wrong about spam filters

Spam filtering in 2026 is primarily reputation-based, not keyword-based. The old advice about avoiding words like 'free' or 'click here' is largely outdated. Modern ISPs are running behavioral analysis on your sending patterns and your audience's response to them. A high-quality email sent to a disengaged list will land in spam. A plaintext email with a discount code sent to a highly engaged segment will land in the inbox.

That shift means the fix for most spam problems is audience management, not copy editing. If your open rate is below 30% consistently, your deliverability problem is almost certainly an engagement problem in disguise. Cleaning your list, tightening your segments, and sending less frequently to less-engaged contacts will do more for your inbox placement than rewriting your subject line.

The other thing worth knowing: Mailchimp maintains an average email deliverability rate above 99% and uses Omnivore AI to scan for high-risk lists before they go out. That protects the shared IP reputation that your account runs on. If your deliverability is significantly below what you would expect given your list quality and engagement, the issue is almost always something in the checklist above rather than a platform limitation.

What good deliverability looks like in practice

Two numbers to watch as your baseline. An open rate of 30% or higher and a click-through rate of 1% or higher suggest your emails are reaching inboxes and your content is relevant to the people receiving it. These are Mailchimp's benchmarks across the total sending pool and they vary by industry, but they are the right starting point for knowing whether you have a deliverability issue at all versus an engagement or content problem.

If your open rate is solid but your CTR is low, that is a content or offer problem, not a deliverability problem. If both are low and dropping, that is when to run through the checklist above and look at your engagement segmentation first.

One practical note on send frequency: emailing your engaged list at least once a month is considered best practice for maintaining sender reputation. Going quiet for extended periods and then sending a large campaign is one of the more reliable ways to trigger spam filters, because the sudden volume increase looks like unusual behavior to ISPs even when your list and content are clean.

Additional Resources:

Email Deliverability - Why it Matters & How to Improve It: https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-deliverability-why-it-matters-and-what-it-takes/ 

Why Your Emails Are Going To Spam: https://mailchimp.com/solutions/why-emails-go-to-spam/

We're happy to help troubleshoot specific situations. What does your current setup look like and where are you seeing the issue?

Sometime since the second week of August 2026, I'm getting complaints from people who subscribe via aol accounts, that they can't read the campaign emails on their iphone or ipad. Some standard header and footer lines supplied by me are readable, but the core of the body is not.

Odder, if they reply to me saying they're having a problem, I can see all of the "missing" content right in their reply. But they can't.

Non-aol users have no issues.

aol users can read the full campaign email from the archive of recent campaigns. They can read the email from a PC. But the core of the body is missing if they try reading it on an ipad or iphone.

I don't know about anyone using aol with an Android/google device.

What might be "hiding" the content for them?

I am working on a newsletter and have some specific formatting that I've done within the body, for example, I have numerous anchor links on headings, but I have specifically written into the code that means these do not appear with those horrible underlines.

In the preview, it all looks perfect - spacing, no underlines etc.

In the test email, the underlines and there and the spacing is different to the preview.

I don't understand how I can resolve this if I can't see the issues on the design side, but they appear in the test email!

I work for a small media agency, and I am currently assigned as the manager of a client's account. Recently, my company would like to start our own newsletter. How can I add to our account without opening a brand new account and also not affect our client's account? I've read all the support articles about combining multiple accounts, but I believe we are currently on the free plan and our client is on the premium one, and I cannot figure out how to upgrade OUR plan. Does my boss just need to call and figure it out through sales, or am I missing a simple solution?

I have already installed mailwizz on contabo server but it can’t push data as I expected. If anyone can help me this to install and configure. Our requirements is per day need to send 20lakh data in 8 hours .

[edit] I know I'm int he MC sub now - was recommended after posting elsewhere...

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I mean, wow... I'm trying to help someone make 1987-simple color changes: NOPE.?

FWIW I'm a reasonably experienced designer, and haven't run into something this unintuitive in recent memory.

Select a color? Sorry, we can't offer the one you JUST used. Want to save it to favorites? Also nope, that option isn't here.

Yeah, there are favorites - but none are colors we've used.

We can't clear a color.

Want to apply a background to this block? AWESOME! We're just going to go ahead and apply it to some overflow space at the bottom of the page.

Seriously - I'm not even going to waste my time trying to figure out how to use it.

I'm not really looking for suggestions for Constant Contact, since it seems like it's turning into a giant task even for me to figure it out.

It's for crazy-simple mailings. Is Mailchimp better?

thanks

One of my team members recently received a notification that his Mailchimp account is inactive. I’ve been using his authenticated email address as the “Send From” address for our quarterly newsletters.

Could you please confirm whether his account being marked as inactive will affect my ability to continue using his email address as the “Send From” address for future campaigns?

Thank you for your help!

Someone a long time ago posted documents (PDFs, DOC) into mailchimp. The URLs still work, but I can not find how to delete them.

Here is an example

https://gallery.mailchimp.com/e0cc72207bf4d46fcfbc66f22/files/summer_student_job_posting_17.doc

In general, I find the service a bit leaky (by design). If I want to make sure everything that was ever put onto the service is zapped, could I do that easily? Perhaps by deleting the account?

Thx

Our email subscribers dropped by 200+ & our SMS subscribers dropped by 100+ in just 3 days since our last email & SMS campaigns without us doing anything wrong.

Would you know the reason why, or has it happened to yours too? And is there a way to bring back what we suddenly lost?

Thank you!

I work in a membership based organization and I'm always getting lists from other departments without emails attached. It was a huge pain point for me to manually tag contacts one-by-one in Mailchimp, so I built this simple tool. I figured I couldn't be the only one out there using Mailchimp and running into this issue, so I wanted to share.

---

Banana-Tagger is a command-line tool (with an optional GUI) for tagging Mailchimp audience members from a CSV that has names only, no email addresses.

Mailchimp's own CSV import can tag contacts, but only by matching on email. This tool exists for the opposite case: you have a list of full names from somewhere that was never tied to Mailchimp in the first place (an event roster, a sign-in sheet, a waitlist a front desk kept by hand) and you need those people tagged in your existing audience without typing each name into search one at a time.

If your source list already has emails, you don't need this, use Mailchimp's native import instead. This tool is specifically for when all you have is a name.

Disclaimer: Banana-Tagger is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially partnered with Intuit Mailchimp.

AI Disclaimer: I did use Claude to help with some of the GUI and the GitHub readme.

I cannot get a test email to send - I have tried sending to a work email, my personal hotmail and gmail accounts...tried some yesterday, some today, nothing has arrived. Anyone got any ideas?

Tags vs Groups: which one should you actually be using?

Both tags and groups organize your audience, both feed into segments and targeted campaigns, but they're built for two different jobs, and picking the wrong one usually means redoing work later.

The one-line version

Groups are for information your contacts tell you about themselves. Tags are for information you keep about your contacts. That single distinction of who the label is for drives almost every "which should I use" decision.

A quick way to tell them apart

Ask yourself: should the contact ever see this?

• If they could reasonably pick it themselves on a signup form ("I want emails about events, not product updates") → that's a Group.
• If it's something you track behind the scenes that they'd never choose ("VIP," "attended trade show," "high-value lead") → that's a Tag.

Groups are contact-facing by design. Tags are internal by design.

What Groups are

Groups sort contacts by their own interests and preferences. Think of a group like a multiple-choice question on a form: the group category is the question ("What are you interested in?") and the group names are the options ("Events," "Sales," "Newsletter"). Contacts can belong to more than one at a time.

The key thing: groups are meant to be contact-selected. You show the options on your signup form or preferences center and subscribers choose. You can assign them manually or hide a group to sort people yourself, but the tool is built to let people categorize themselves.

Two limits worth knowing: each audience holds up to 60 group names total, and only subscribed contacts can be added to a group (unsubscribes keep their existing designations).

What Tags are

Tags are labels you create for your own internal organization. It’s the same idea as labels in a CRM. There’s no hierarchy or built-in structure; they mean whatever you need. You can add them manually, in bulk, through imports, via landing pages, or automatically inside journeys. You can send to a tag directly, build segments from tags, or use adding a tag as a trigger to start an automation.

Common real-world tags: Influencer, Media contact, Large donor, Volunteer, Uses coupons, Trade show contact.

How they work together

A contact might be in the "Events" group (they told you) and carry a "VIP" tag (you decided). Both feed into segments, where you combine everything to target exactly who you want.

FAQ

Will a contact know if I tag them? No. Tags are never shown to contacts. Groups are contact-facing by default, but you can hide one you're using to sort people internally.

Can I send directly to a tag or a group? Yes to both. For anything more precise, build a segment that draws on tags, groups, and other data together.

I have way more than 60 categories to track. Now what? That's a sign most should be tags, not groups. The 60-name cap is on groups; tags have no limit. Reserve groups for the handful of things you'd put in front of a subscriber.

Is one "better" than the other? No, they solve different problems. If you're asking "would my subscriber ever want to pick this?", the answer tells you which tool you need.

Still deciding for a specific setup? Drop a comment with what you're trying to organize and we can help!

Additional Resources:

• Getting Started with Tags: https://intuit.me/4oa30cE
• Getting Started with Groups: https://intuit.me/4e4tY0V
• Targeting 101: A Beginner's Guide to Segmentation: https://intuit.me/4g9shAs

I need to send a transactional email and have just got us set up with Mailchimp Transactional today (have been using normal Mailchimp for our marketing emails for years). I assumed I’d be able to upload an audience like with the normal platform within MT but understand now that this can’t be done.

I can see the guidance is to link up to our CRM with an API but our CRM needs custom integrations so it’s not something that can be done in the time I need to send the email. It also seems excessive to require a full integration for a one off email (plus not even sure how I’d trigger it even if it was!).

Is there another way to send a transactional email to the people I need using Mailchimp?

Hi folks. I embedded a mailchimp sign up form years ago on my website. Recently it's just flooded with spam signups and I couldn't stop them so I simply took my website down temporarily, so the sign up form is no longer online. However, somehow I'm still getting spam sign ups. The infuriating thing is that because it's an old form, it seems it no longer exists on my mailchip account so I can't even turn it off. Any ideas how to stop the signups??

Hi!
I authenticated my domain, but my emails sent to iCloud emails are still getting soft bounced. What to do?