Funnel Design Library · Playbook #7
Recovery Funnel
Clicked, didn’t buy — resume the decision, never restart the pitch.
Playbook #7 — The Recovery Funnel
Clicked, didn't buy → capture → cart/checkout recovery → retargeting sequence · runs alongside #1–#5
Thesis: the visitor who clicked and didn't buy isn't lost — they're mid-decision, interrupted. Recovery's job is to re-enter the conversation exactly where it stopped. It never restarts the pitch.
WHAT: The playbook that owns the gap between the acquisition funnels (#1–#5, click → purchase) and the Second Sale (#6, post-purchase): browse abandonment, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, and the retargeting sequences that follow all three. Like #6, it doesn't get routed by traffic type — it runs alongside whichever funnel acquired the click.
WHEN: Any funnel with meaningful paid traffic and a way to re-reach the visitor — an owned channel (captured email/SMS) or a pixel. If you're buying clicks and only monetizing the first visit, you're pricing every CAC upstream against a single at-bat.
WHY: Abandonment is the norm, not the exception — Baymard Institute maintains the canonical long-running cart-abandonment aggregate [1], and it has never been a small number. The economics: the click is already paid for; every recovered purchase re-prices upstream CAC. The psychology: an abandonment is information — WHERE the visitor stopped tells you WHICH doubt stopped them. Recovery is objection handling with a timestamp.
KPIs (by stage — and read the honesty rule below before trusting any of them):
| Stage | Job | Watch |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | Earn the re-contact | Capture rate at natural moments (not exit-intent begging), opt-in quality |
| Recovery flows | Resume the decision | Flow CVR by abandonment stage, time-to-return, revenue per send |
| Retargeting | Answer the open objection | Sequence completion, frequency vs. fatigue, CPA of recovered vs. cold |
| Whole flow | — | Incremental completed purchases vs. a holdout — never platform-attributed revenue alone |
The honesty rule: retargeting takes credit for buyers who would have returned anyway — platform attribution flatters recovery more than any other surface. Run holdout groups; the metric is incremental purchases, not attributed ROAS. No benchmarks are quoted in this playbook because recovery numbers depend entirely on why people abandoned — measure your own.
Cheat sheet
- Clicked-didn't-buy is mid-decision, not lost. Where they stopped is the diagnosis.
- Resume, don't restart: their cart, their stopping point, the one open objection.
- Ladder: reminder → answer → incentive. Discount last, always — what you reward, you teach.
- Retargeting sequences objections; it never re-runs the ad. Cap frequency.
- Owned channels first, captured at value moments. The pixel covers the rest.
- Judge on holdout incrementality, never attributed revenue. Fix the checkout leak before scaling the bucket.
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