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In the dynamic world of eCommerce, where customer relationships are paramount, email marketing for WooCommerce is a fruitful avenue to stand out from the competition and foster lasting connections with customers.
Don't just take our word for it. A staggering 80% of marketers consider email the best marketing channel for customer acquisition, while 81% vouch for its prowess in customer retention.
With its potential to drive sales, foster customer loyalty, and enhance brand visibility, mastering email marketing can transform your online business's success.
So, to empower you in achieving that, we're delving into a few practical best practices for executing effective email marketing. We'll also unveil some of the top WooCommerce email plugins to equip you with the tools you need to take your marketing to the next level.
Interested? Good! Let's dive in.
Email marketing goes beyond sending sporadic promotional emails to your subscribers.
Instead, effective eCommerce email marketing focuses on building customer relationships.
This involves sending valuable information to subscribers with messaging tailored to their specific stage of the buyer's journey.
This begs the question: What are the buyer's journey stages, and which emails should you send at each stage?
Let's take a look:
The earliest stage of the buyer's journey is the onboarding stage (also sometimes known as the awareness stage).
This is when a potential customer expresses interest in learning more about your brand. At this point, the shopper may not be ready to purchase, but they might have a clue that your product is the right fit for them.
So, your email content should focus on building brand awareness; such emails could include:
Pro Tip: If you have information like the subscriber's name, always customize your emails using merge tags to make them more personal.
During this stage, your leads are usually researching and considering different solutions to their problem.
So, your emails need to further educate prospective customers about your brand, providing them with all the information they need to purchase.
For example, your email content should highlight your products' benefits and how said benefits address customers' needs; this could be via product demos, case studies, testimonials, comparison guides, etc.
Now, your hard work starts to pay off because, at this point, the prospect should know enough about your brand and its products to decide whether or not to make a purchase.
However, they might need a final push. So, think of emails sent to prospects at this stage of the buyer's journey as catalysts; such content could include discounts, coupons, a free gift, or a free trial or consultation.
Congratulations! Your prospect has now become a customer! When this occurs, you should send automated transactional emails to confirm their order, forward tracking information, or even cross/upsell other relevant products.
Aptly named, 'behavioral' emails are triggered when a customer completes a pre-defined action within a particular time frame.
For example, if someone pops an item into their shopping cart but leaves your store without buying it, this could trigger an abandoned cart email campaign.
Here are a few pointers for writing killer abandoned cart campaigns:
Pro Tip: Include product images in your abandoned cart emails to help the recipient make the connection faster and, hopefully, reignite their interest in the items they were considering.
Similarly, you could create an automated WordPress email campaign to reward customer loyalty. For example, after a customer has spent a certain amount with you or made a specific number of purchases, you could reward them with a freebie or a discount.
Other ways to nurture loyalty include offering loyal customers early bird surprises and asking for their suggestions — being asked for opinions always makes people feel appreciated.
Now we have a better idea of the different steps comprising the buyer's journey (and the kind of emails you should send at each stage), let's take a look at some of the best email marketing for WooCommerce practices:
We've hinted at the importance of WooCommerce email marketing automation already, but it's worth stressing that automation is key to ensuring emails reach the right people at the right time.
In a nutshell, automated email campaigns involve using an email marketing platform to send a pre-set flow of emails according to the conditions you define. This makes it possible to send personalized emails at the right time without manually sending individual messages.
If you send promotional emails, ensure they're relevant to the recipient.
Don't just send random sales messages.
Personalized product recommendations resonate more with prospects, enhancing their shopping experience and leading to a boost in engagement.
After all, it stands to reason that customers feel valued when they receive recommendations catered to their preferences. So invest in a recommendation engine that automatically provides customers with relevant suggestions based on products they've bought or viewed on your WooCommerce store.
The average email list has 60% inactive subscribers. Send an automated email series to your inactive users to re-engage them. The first email could remind them they haven’t purchased from your site in a while and that you miss them! Then, a couple of weeks later, you could offer a perk like free shipping, a product discount, a free gift, etc.
So, now, let's put what we've learned into practice and start sending some emails!
WooCommerce's in-built email functionality is limited to transactional emails, which, as we've explored above, neglects a massive chunk of the customer journey.
If you want more flexibility with your WooCommerce email marketing, don't worry; below, we'll list a few platforms that empower you to create customized, automated campaigns for different customer journey stages.
However, before we do that, if you want to modify WooCommerce's native transactional eCommerce email campaigns, follow the steps below:
From here, you can manage the following emails:
To edit the above templates, click the 'Manage' button to the right. You can then customize the email subject line, heading, content, and email type.
To tinker with the email's aesthetics, scroll below the list of email templates, and you’ll see a few global customization options.
Please note: These update all of your email templates in one go, including your email's:
Suppose you find that WooCommerce's in-built email tool to be too restricting (both in terms of design and only being able to send transactional emails).
In that case, you'll consider using WooCommerce email marketing plugins. MailPoet, AutomateWoo, and Mailchimp are just a few of the many WordPress email marketing plugins you can integrate with your store to create customized, automated email campaigns.
To install such tools for email marketing, follow the steps below:
You'll then need to follow the plugin's instructions to hit the ground running with it.
To inspire your email marketing for WordPress/WooCommerce, we've listed a few best-in-class examples to help get your creative juices flowing:
After reading this blog post, we hope you have a better idea of how to leverage email marketing to increase your WooCommerce sales.
In this guide, we've briefly touched on the customer sales journey and how you should tailor your email marketing campaigns to meet your recipients' needs at different stages of that journey.
We've also demonstrated that email marketing with WordPress doesn't have to be difficult so long as you have the right tools. If you want to break free of the restrictions of WooCommerce's in-built transactional email functionality, there are tons of WooCommerce email plugins, like MailPoet and Mailchimp, to help you level up your email marketing game.
That's everything from us! Have you had much success using email marketing to promote your WooCommerce store? Tell us all about your experiences in the comments box below!
We hope our guide sheds some light on how to make the most of your email marketing for WooCommerce.
However, to help plug any gaps, we'll quickly answer a few frequently asked questions about the best eCommerce email automation strategies. We'll also spend a bit more time looking at the best email marketing plugins for WordPress:
The best email marketing platforms for eCommerce, are:
Suppose you're looking for an expert to assist you with your WordPress email marketing automation, email copywriting, or even designing the aesthetics of your campaigns. In that case, consider hiring a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork. Alternatively, if you wish to work with the top 3% of freelancers on the market, Toptal is also worth considering.
There are tons of free email marketing WordPress plugins out there. However, to help narrow your search, we've listed a few platforms that boast consistently glowing reviews:
There are several ways to analyze the success of your email marketing campaign. However, if we were to boil this process down to monitoring three key metrics, they would be:
The rule of three entails sending three successive emails to maximize engagement and response rates. Each email has a distinct purpose: to move the recipient through the customer journey:
The five Ts of email marketing are as follows:
Rosie Greaves is a professional content strategist specializing in all things digital marketing, B2B, and lifestyle. In addition to Spocket, you can find her published on Reader's Digest, E-commerce Platforms, and Judicious Inc.