For almost any business, you want your first-time customers to become repeat customers, because it’s a lot easier to sell to them again than it is to get new ones to buy for the first time. And the best way to engage customers after their first purchase is to follow up with post-purchase emails.

Why post-purchase emails work

Repeat business is the surest path to long-term growth and stable profits. 

After a new customer makes a purchase, you’ve met their need and they’re satisfied, for now. But they’re going to have new needs that your other products, or the same one they just bought, can meet in the future. 

The problem is, with online businesses, it’s easy to be forgotten. It’s not like a brick-and-mortar store, where the store itself can serve as a reminder, assuming the customer drives by it now and then. 

Online, the more competition, the harder it is to be found, even by a repeat customer. So, you might assume that, to market to existing customers, you have to go back to PPC ads, display ads, SEO, paid social media, and all the other strategies for getting found online.

But once someone has made a purchase, you can bypass all of those expensive tactics and just market to new subscribers directly via email. 

Post-purchase emails work because they keep your business and its products on the minds of your new customers long after their initial purchase. Following up after a purchase makes it much more likely the new customer won’t forget about you.

When to send post-purchase emails

The kinds of emails we’re talking about are not just purchase confirmations and other automated transactional emails like shipping updates. Those matter, but don’t always engage and deepen your relationship with the customer long-term. Once the processing of an order is complete, they’re no longer relevant, and ongoing email marketing to customers who’ve become subscribers should now take over.

Effective post-purchase emails are sent out consistently, starting within a day or two of the initial purchase, and continue weekly, twice a month, or some other interval that is appropriate for your business. And they should continue indefinitely. 

Post-purchase email ideas you can use today

You can divide your array of email follow-up ideas into two categories: Emails with offers and emails that nurture the customer relationship. 

Follow-up emails with offers

Before you even send your first post-purchase email offer, you should include an upsell right on the Checkout page, or on the thank you page. You can offer a product that complements the one that they’re buying, such as a carrying case, or a different flavor or color. 

In other scenarios, you can just offer more of what they already bought. For example, if they’re buying one, offer them two for under twice the price. 

Upsell emails

Whether you offer upsells at the point of purchase or not, you can include them again in a post-purchase upsell email. Since this email is being sent after the purchase, you could offer the same complementary product at its normal price or at a slight discount. Or, if you do a checkout upsell like this, promote a different complementary product in the email.

If the upsell is featuring more of what they already bought, since the email will reach them after the purchase, offer at least two more of the same item for a slight discount. In other words, “Since you already have one, why not stock up and save money?”

Friends and family discount offers

For some businesses, you can get customers to bring in friends and family and give them a discount. You’ll be winning more new customers, while encouraging a second purchase from the first one. You can do all this with just one email. 

Referral emails

Offer a reward to customers who refer someone else to your business, and include instructions in the email for how your process works. First-time customers can be offered this opportunity very soon after buying.

Loyalty program emails

If your business has a loyalty program, post-purchase emails are a great way to get people signed up. If you include links in the email, they can sign up right away, and now they’re incentivized to make repeat purchases.

Thank you emails

Sending a simple and sincere thank you email is about the easiest thing to do, and a no-strings-attached thank you email will be received well by just about anyone. To measure engagement, you could also include a link to a video with a message of gratitude, or a link to something funny or entertaining on your site or on your social media accounts.

MailPoet has a dedicated feature for setting up and deploying personalized, automated thank you emails for a customer’s first purchase. After a one-time set up, it goes to work for you time and time again. 

Emails with thank you discounts

If you want to do a bit more and make your gratitude for your customers’ business a little stronger, you could include a discount on their next purchase. Once you win that second purchase, it’s easier to get the third. So, offering a thank you discount might be a great strategy to try.

Follow-up nurturing emails

Nurturing emails don’t attempt to make an additional sale. They’re focused more on giving value to the customer, so the new buyer develops a positive feeling about your company. 

You want to send these out consistently, as discussed earlier. No single nurturing email is going to win a customer for life. It’s about staying in front of them and delivering relevant, valuable, desired content, over time.

Emails with valuable content

Probably the most common type of nurturing email is one that just sends pure content. It might include a link to a blog post, a video, or a podcast. It could include a special report, insider information, helpful content related to their purchase or product category such as a how-to video, and many other types of content. 

If this email includes a link to the content, it must “sell” that content, even though it’s free. People won’t just automatically click on your links. 

Product surveys

Surveys are a great way to engage new customers and show that you value their opinions, experiences, and input. To increase the chances of them filling out your survey, you can also include an incentive for completion. 

Review emails

You can also send emails that ask for reviews. To make it easy to leave reviews and to get more new customers to fill them out, include a link that takes them straight to wherever they will leave the review.

Emails with customer success stories

Testimonials and success stories work after the sale just as well as before. After the sale, they reassure your new customer that they’ve made a smart purchase and are working with a good company. Plus, your success stories might give them ideas for other things to buy.

Again, you can send nearly all of these nurturing emails over and over again. Each good customer success story you have in your records can become its own email. And it should be — don’t cram multiple stories in one email. So if you have ten of them, you have ten emails you can send out. If you did one success story per month, that’s almost a full year’s worth of messaging. 

Introduction emails

You can also send nurturing emails that introduce the customer to key employees or staff. You might introduce the owner, the manager, or the founder. You might introduce an all-star employee, or celebrate a recent employee of the month.

And don’t hold back on sharing a few personal details from the lives of these people, if they are okay with it. The more personal the connection between customer and business, the more likely they will buy again. So, if the owner’s kids are graduating high school, let your customers know about it. A new baby born to an employee? Share the good news via email. 

Social media emails

You can also deepen engagement by getting your new customers to follow you on your social media accounts.

It’s easy to include social buttons at the bottom of your emails. But you can also create entire emails that do nothing but “sell” your social media. And again, make each email about one thing. Suppose you have Facebook and Instagram accounts. Make a separate email to promote each one. In fact, make several, because not everyone will respond the first time.

When you post something on any of your social channels that you think your new customers might like to hear about, write up a quick email and send it out. You’ll stay in front of your new customers and give them another way to hear from you. 

Need a better way to manage your email marketing?

MailPoet offers everything an online business needs to run email marketing. The platform includes automation, templates, data tracking, and everything else required to execute an effective email marketing program, including post-purchase emails to your new customers.

Think about it: Just a few of the many tasks on your plate include marketing, customer service, communication, and nurturing leads and new prospects. Each of these can quickly monopolize your time and leave other critical aspects of your business unattended. Marketing automation software enables you to manage those tasks more effectively. 

And it works. The average ROI from marketing automation is $5.44 per dollar spent, according to Nucleus Research, and email is the most frequently utilized form of marketing automation, with 65% of marketers taking advantage of it in some form. 

Use this guide to learn all about email marketing automation – what it is, how it works, and the steps you can take to grow while opening up more time for other parts of your business and life.

What is email marketing automation?

In essence, email marketing automation tools allow you to send out messages without you needing to be involved each and every time. You create an email once, and through the use of triggers that fire when a visitor takes certain actions on your website or in response to other emails, your email automation software sends that message automatically. 

When you hear about people running businesses online in their sleep, email automation is part of what they’re talking about. You could be on vacation, out for dinner, or sleeping at 2:00 in the morning, and if a website visitor takes a particular action, they’ll receive an appropriate email from you right at that moment.

That’s email marketing automation. 

It’s a trigger-based approach to email that enables you to stay in touch and respond to customers across a vast array of situations, all without having to lift a finger – once your automation structure is in place. And that part does take some work on the front end. But once it’s set up, it just keeps running.

What is the difference between automated and broadcast emails?

Broadcast or batch emails are marketing emails that go out to your entire email list. They usually get sent out in batches, not all at once, to improve deliverability. Segmented emails go out to portions of your customer base. Both these types of emails are typically created by an email copywriter, and perhaps a larger marketing team. If you own a small business, you may do this yourself or hire a freelancer. 

Then, these broadcast-style emails are sent out or scheduled manually. If it’s to a segment of your email list, your team will have to identify and create that segment if it doesn’t already exist. 

These have their place in your email marketing strategy, but are separate from true email marketing automation – a person still has to do the work in order for that email to go out.

With automated emails, they go out even if no one is working at your entire business. They’ll go out even if the power is out, because your email servers aren’t located at your business, but through an email service provider such as MailPoet. 

Examples of automated emails

Here are a few of the most popular and effective types of automated emails that just about any business can use to nurture leads, engage customers, and make more sales.

Welcome emails 

When new customers visit your website and fill out a form to join your email list, what happens? In addition to being added to your list, they should receive a welcome email, or even better, a welcome series.

The welcome email introduces new leads and prospects to your business. It should offer them some type of reward for signing up, such as a coupon, a free guide, a video, or some other quick win. Your welcome series could also introduce your brand, products, and services, connect them with your social media accounts, send them helpful information such as popular blogs or useful web pages, and make them feel welcome and valued. 

A good email welcome series will make sales on the spot, or engage and nurture the new customer so they make purchases later. And it goes out automatically to anyone who joins your list.

Webinar registration emails 

When someone signs up for a webinar, they should receive an immediate confirmation email in their inbox. This reassures them you know what you’re doing, for one, and that their registration didn’t get lost in the abyss. More importantly, it increases the chances they will actually attend the webinar. 

The best webinar automated emails will again be a series, not just single emails. You will create a series of messages before the date of the webinar, and they will get sent out automatically, as the date gets closer, to everyone who registers. 

Free gift or download emails

One way to grow your email list is to offer something free that’s useful or desirable to your target audience, in exchange for their email address. While this might seem like just another version of a welcome email, it’s a little different because this automated email will be written specifically to ‘re-sell’ whatever free item they just requested. 

If it’s an eBook, a guide, a video, a podcast, or a report, you’ll want them to actually read, watch, or listen to it. So this email will promote the benefits of your content and get your new prospects excited to consume it.

If it’s a promotional offer like a first-time customer coupon or special deal, the email will encourage them to use it. Again, just because you send out a coupon doesn’t mean the recipient will buy something. You still need to make the sale. The automated email series motivates that purchase.

Quiz or survey completion emails

If you run a quiz or a survey on your website or through another service, everyone who takes your quiz should receive an email once they have finished. This email might share the results of the survey. It might include a reward of some sort for completing it, and should connect them to other resources on your website. 

It should also just say “thank you,” because they took time to participate.

Post-purchase follow-up emails

After a customer makes a purchase, they need to hear from you. You need to thank them. You also want to give them the chance to send feedback or write a review about the product, or about their customer service experience. For some products, you may include a tutorial PDF or video. 

You can create a post-purchase email that’s specific to every one of your products. 

Email automation like this can be set up to send follow-up emails if the customer doesn’t respond to the first one. This type of email series can also be used to promote a subsequent purchase by offering them new deals or informing them about other products related to what they just bought.

Emails to lapsed or inactive contacts

You can also set up email automation that attempts to engage customers after they have been inactive for a certain amount of time, such as a year. These pre-written emails will offer some kind of deal or opportunity for the customer to re-engage. This could be a free offer, such as a video, interview, new report, or something of that nature. Or, it could be a coupon or one-time promotional offer.

These types of emails accomplish more than just re-engaging lapsed customers. They also help you keep your email list clean. When customers don’t respond to these emails, you may want to remove them from your email list, as they may have abandoned that account.

Abandoned cart emails

This is one of the most profitable types of email marketing automation. According to Experian, customers who receive abandoned cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete their purchase than customers who hear nothing. 

These emails can be set to trigger automatically after a shopping cart gets left with items in it for a certain amount of time. Here’s more about how to use abandoned cart emails. 

Personalized automated emails

Customers appreciate personalized marketing because it’s relevant to them. You can personalize emails based on a number of factors, such as:

• Categories of products they’ve purchased
• Demographics like age, gender, or family status
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Past purchase dates

For example, you might have a couple of automated email campaigns built around each of your product categories. Each year, you can send out those campaigns to any customer who has made a purchase of something from that category. They’ll see this email as relevant to them, and be more likely to respond. See how to set up category-specific email automations.

Likewise, you can set up emails to go out automatically on birthdays, with special promotional messages and offers to make your customers feel special. 

Triggered automated emails

More complicated email automation systems may include workflows that involve a series of triggers that go out depending on what a customer does. 

For example, suppose you send out an email asking if a segment of your customers wants to receive a video that will be coming out soon. Each customer who clicks ‘yes’ will be added to an email sequence built around that video. And within that sequence, you could have another sequence that goes out to anyone who watches the whole video, and a separate one that goes to people who only watch the first few minutes. 

This sort of email marketing automation is much more complicated than most of the other types listed above. But once you have it set up, it can play a big role in growing your business. Not every email automation platform offers that level of complexity.

How email automation helps small businesses

What are the benefits of email automation? Here are a few of the biggest wins for small businesses that use email automation software.

Saves time

What you can achieve with email automation, you simply could not do any other way without abandoning all of your other important responsibilities. Imagine having to track all the shopping carts and send out emails to each customer manually, listing the items they left in their carts. That simply isn’t going to happen. 

Or imagine having to send out a welcome series every time someone joins your email list, or every time someone buys anything from your online store, if you have one. For businesses with consistent levels of traffic, you’d need a whole team of people to keep up with all this. 

Marketing automation software allows you to serve customers immediately in ways that matter to them, regardless of how small your business is or how much it grows. Scaling your business has little effect on how hard your email automation has to work.

Increases revenue

Back to the abandoned cart statistic we mentioned earlier – you make more sales by sending out automated emails. Welcome series and other emails that trigger when a customer requests something simply lead to more revenue. Promotional emails that go out based on product categories or other personalized information will help you make sales you would’ve otherwise missed.

You’ll be selling to more people, in more situations, and more frequently than you ever would if you tried to do all of this manually. 

Keeps customers engaged

Customers are bombarded with communications and marketing. You have to stay on top of their minds or they’ll eventually forget about you. Email is the single best way to do that because it costs so little to send messages out.

Automated email marketing enables you to keep existing customers engaged without you having to do all the work. They are reminded of your business and their past involvement, and you stay relevant to them.

Improves retention rate

Engaged customers are more likely to make second purchases. Email marketing automation thus increases your customer lifetime value. First-time customers become second-time customers. Members stay longer.

Encourages word of mouth

When customers feel well-treated, they’re more likely to write positive reviews and testimonials. With automated email campaigns, you can not only more consistently ask for reviews as part of your post-purchase email series, but you’ll get more good reviews because your customers feel important and valued.

How to get started with email automation

At this point, you’re probably pretty excited about adding email automation to your marketing strategy. Or if you already are using email automation, perhaps you’ve discovered a few new ideas to add to your existing efforts. 

Either way, here’s a step-by-step blueprint for how to create an automated email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Choose an email marketing automation platform

Lots of people wonder if you can automate emails in Gmail or Outlook. The short answer is “no.” Those aren’t designed for sending out mass emails for businesses, and you can’t set up triggers based on particular situations to individual customers. 

You need to use an email service provider that offers marketing automation, such as MailPoet. Different platforms offer different levels of automation, and you need to find one that has the capabilities that you’ll need. 

For example, for an online store using WooCommerce, MailPoet works very well because it fully integrates with the platform and offers many of the automated emails you’ll want to use. And even if you’re not an online store, MailPoet works seamlessly with any WordPress-based website. 

Other email marketing platforms may specialize in the more complicated automated workflows and trigger-based sequences that some businesses desire. The one you choose depends on the type of automated emails you want to send out, as well as cost, learning curve, and convenience. 

Step 2: Upload your email list

If you’re starting email marketing for the first time, you’ll need to upload your email list – whatever you have on hand at the time. The sooner you get your existing customers engaged with email, the sooner you can create automated email campaigns that will benefit them. 

What if I don’t have an email list?

That’s okay! Email automation actually makes it much easier to grow and maintain an email list. 

If you create some incentives for visitors to your website and social media pages to join your email list, you can use basic email automation like a welcome series to engage those new email subscribers and convert them into customers.

A study from VentureBeat found that automated emails produced 180% higher conversion rates than bulk or batch emails. Your welcome series, even if that’s the only email automation you use, will increase your conversion rate compared to what you’d achieve just by sending out regular marketing emails.

To grow your email list, start offering coupons, free guides or other valuable content, and various incentives that will make people want to join your list. Then, use a welcome series to engage and later convert them into customers.

MailPoet shines again here with easy-to-use email signup forms for WordPress. 

Step 3: Determine your campaign goal

The goal depends very much on the type of email automation and who will be receiving it. The goal of an abandoned cart email is obvious – to lead to a completed purchase.

But what is the goal of your welcome emails? It could be to get new email subscribers to follow you on social media. It could be to encourage clicks through to your website, blog readership, video views, requests for a free guide, sign ups for a free consultation, or demo or trial registrations. 

There are many more possible campaign goals for a welcome series. Decide what you want each of your automated campaigns to achieve.

Step 4: Create your email campaign assets

A successful email campaign of any sort, including automated emails, requires more than just the email itself. The assets for each email campaign may differ slightly, but here are the most common items you’ll need:

• Opt-in, registration, or other signup form on your website that triggers automated emails
• Landing page – the page you link to in your email
• Graphics – photos, charts, GIFs, other graphic design elements related to the campaign
• Free stuff like PDFs, eBooks, videos – whatever you promised that motivated the customer to trigger the automated email
• Call to action (CTA) text and buttons
• Coupon codes, if applicable

You have to think through what you’ll need for each campaign. When a customer or lead sees this email, what do you want them to do in response? What happens when they click on your links or buttons? Those are your campaign assets. 

And if anything on your website needs to happen in order to trigger an automated email, those are also campaign assets. 

Step 5: Outline your automated emails

Once your assets are in place, you can write the actual emails and subject lines. Some of these emails may be very short, such as last-minute webinar reminders or abandoned cart emails. 

But whatever you create, remember that once these are done, they are done and you don’t have to write them again. You may need to update them from time to time, but for the most part, automated emails are known as evergreen marketing assets, because they never expire or get old. 

Step 6: Create your emails

If you’re working with an email developer, they can custom code your messages and upload finished HTML emails into your email service provider (ESP).  

However, for the most part, you’ll work within your email service tool to design and create the emails using some type of drag-and-drop builder. MailPoet, for example, has a number of WordPress email templates you can use as a foundation to make this process much quicker. 

Depending on your ESP, you’ll likely be able to integrate shortcodes that automatically input information stores on their system – like the first name of a subscriber, the exact product the email recipient was looking at before they abandoned their cart, and more. 

Step 7: Create the triggers for each email

Each email service provider has its own method to create automated email workflows. There will be some sort of process for setting up triggers. 

For free downloads, registrations, opt-ins, and anything based on a button on your website, clicking that button must trigger email messages automatically. For automation based on something the customer clicks in the email itself, the trigger will fire based on that link or button. 

Abandoned cart emails get sent out based on how much time has elapsed since they put the items in their cart. So you’ll need an ESP that interacts with your WooCommerce platform. Same with emails based on categories purchased. 

Figure out the process for each automated email you create, and set up your triggers.

Step 8: Check your email automation setup and run a test

When possible, especially when you’re just getting started, run tests to ensure that your email automation is working. 

Use a personal email address and sign up for your newsletter. Does the welcome series arrive in your inbox? Does it show up in your spam or promotions folders, or in your main inbox? Do the graphics show up? Do the links work?

Put some items in a shopping cart on your online store, and leave them there. See if the abandoned cart email shows up when it’s supposed to. 

Category purchase emails and lapsed customer automated emails will be harder to test, but once you’re confident you’ve set up the simpler ones correctly, you’ll have more confidence you’ve done the other ones right, too.

Step 9: Sit back and watch it work

Every now and then, go in and monitor your automated emails to make sure they’re still working. You should see metrics such as opens and clicks associated with these emails over time, and that’s your best indication that they’re working.

If people start buying the things you’re selling through automated emails, using coupons, and returning to their abandoned carts, you’ll know it because the money will be in the bank. 

Plus, most platforms have an option to track metrics for email engagement performance. MailPoet even has a way to specifically track the real-world ROI of your campaigns. 

Get started with email marketing automation with MailPoet

According to the Direct Marketing Association, segmented, targeted, and automated emails account for 77% of the ROI from email marketing. So automated emails are one of the top three sources of revenue from email.

As you saw previously, some marketing automation platforms are very complex. Most small businesses and ecommerce stores aren’t going to need or want that, because those have steep learning curves and higher setup costs.

Sending out welcome series and abandoned cart emails doesn’t have to be that complicated. The faster you can start using email marketing automation, the sooner it will generate revenue that you’re missing out on right now. MailPoet blends seamlessly with WordPress and WooCommerce, is easy to learn, and you can have new email marketing campaigns working for your business fairly quickly. Want to try it? 

See MailPoet’s features

When your emails stop working, not only does it affect your customers (“Is my order on its way? I didn’t get a shipping confirmation!”) but it can also impact your ability to sell more stuff and your store’s reputation (“I won’t buy from them again because they were confusing to shop with last time…”).

WooCommerce email not sending can often be traced back to the fact most web hosts don’t provide email hosting. But there are some other common reasons why your emails have stopped working.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the most common reasons why WooCommerce email notifications stop working, how to test your WordPress site to determine what’s going on, and how you can fix your emails and get them sending again.

Note: Did you know MailPoet supports WooCommerce? Take a look at our features for WooCommerce.

What kinds of emails does WooCommerce send?

WooCommerce automates and sends a bunch of different transactional emails that ensure customers get all the key information they need related to their purchases.

These emails are usually triggered by a shopper’s interaction with your store, such as when they make a purchase, when their order is shipped, or when they ask for a refund.

Out of the box, WooCommerce has 10 transactional emails, which you can edit in the WooCommerce email settings:

• New order email– sent customers when a new order is received.
• Cancelled order – sent to customers when an order has been cancelled.
• Failed order – sent to customers when an order has failed.
• Order on-hold – sent to customers containing order details after an order is placed on-hold. 
• Processing order – sent to the customer after payment and contains the order details.
• Completed order – sent to the customer when the order is marked complete, and usually indicates that the order has been shipped.
• Refunded order – sent to customers when their orders are refunded.
• Customer note – sent to the customer when a customer note is added from the edit order admin.
• Reset password – sent when customers reset their password.
• New account – sent when a customer creates a new account.

If you’d like to customize the way these emails look, you can now do so within MailPoet! Our WooCommerce email template customizer will allow you to edit transactional email templates so that they match your brand identity.

How does WooCommerce send emails?

By default, WooCommerce sends emails using the wp_mail() function, a core WordPress function. To give you an idea of how it all works, here’s how the email lifecycle works:

1. WooCommerce uses wp_mail() to attempt to send the email.
2. Your hosting provider’s server receives the request and tries to use PHP mail to process the email.
3. Your host then uses Postfix or SendMail—both email routers that are used to route outgoing and incoming emails to their correct destination—to route and deliver the email.
4. The email is then accepted or rejected by the receiving host, i.e. your customer’s host.
5. Finally, if the email has been accepted, it’s filtered. It’s during this last step where the email could be filtered to a customer’s inbox, their spam folder, or a different location, like Gmail’s promotions tab.

What does this all mean? Well, according to WooCommerce Docs, if you’re having problems with WooCommerce email not sending, the issue is usually not with WooCommerce itself but with the core email function of your hosting provider. Which makes sense since most hosts don’t provide email hosting, or don’t have servers properly configured for sending emails.

So what can you do? Let’s take a look.

3 common reasons for WooCommerce email not sending—how to fix them

Before we get stuck into the nitty-gritty of what could be causing your WooCommerce email ending issues, there are two things in WooCommerce worth checking first.

1. Are there new orders pending?

If you have new orders with a “pending” status, it means your store hasn’t sent emails for those particular orders because they haven’t been confirmed yet. Pending orders occur when a customer abandons the payment page or their credit card is declined.

Alternatively, if you have pending orders but receive payment for them via a payment gateway like PayPal or Stripe, it means your store’s orders aren’t being updated. In that case, it means there could be a problem with the payment gateway, not your email.

2. Have you accidentally disabled transactional emails?

It’s possible that you’ve inadvertently disabled your emails from sending. To check, in the WordPress dashboard go to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails and for each of your transactional emails, click “Manage” and check that the “Enable this email notification” box is ticked before you save changes.

Still having issues with WooCommerce email not sending? Let’s go through the most common problems and how to test and fix them.

Problem #1: Deliverability

If your emails aren’t sending, the problem could be deliverability.

As I mentioned above, sending emails via the default WordPress sending method can be unreliable at best. The first step in confirming whether email deliverability is the problem is to test whether your emails are actually sending and being received.

How to test email deliverability

The simplest way to test WooCommerce email deliverability is using MailPoet’s WP Mail Logging plugin. This free plugin logs emails sent via WordPress and helps with debugging what’s going wrong. Once installed and activated, the plugin immediately starts logging all outgoing emails, which you can view and search.

To test whether your WooCommerce store’s transactional emails are working:

1. Install and activate WP Mail Logging.
2. Generate a test order in WooCommerce.
3. Go to WP Mail Logging and check if your test order generated emails and if there are any sending errors.

If WP Mail Logging displays email errors and you’ve confirmed that your store isn’t delivering emails, it’s time to think about setting up SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) provider.

How to fix email deliverability

SMTP is an industry-standard for sending email. Using SMTP can help improve email deliverability by using proper authentication methods that satisfy email service providers.

With SMTP, you can bypass your web host since the wp_mail() function will reroute email from PHP to your SMTP provider. From there, the SMTP provider receives the request and adds your email to the queue to be sent.

I highly recommend setting up an SMTP plugin and service for your WooCommerce site to improve the deliverability of your emails if you’re having problems with WooCommerce email not sending.

But even better—MailPoet now provides an option for sending all your site’s emails, including WooCommerce emails, using its email servers.

No need to set up any extra WooCommerce plugins or extensions because MailPoet takes care of it all for you.

If you would rather set up your own SMTP plugin, check out Top 3 SMTP Plugins for WordPress Compared (and How to Fix Emails Not Sending).

Problem #2: Spammyness

If your WooCommerce notification emails are sending but not showing up in your customers’ inboxes, there’s a strong chance you’ve been flagged as a spammer. Not only is this embarrassing for your brand, but it means customers who don’t check their spam folder will miss your store’s transactional emails.

Fortunately, there’s much you can do to improve your chances of landing in inboxes and fixing WooCommerce email not sending. But first, you need to confirm if your spam score is actually the problem.

How to test your spammyness

The simplest way to test the spammyness of your emails is with mail-tester. It’s a free and efficient tool MailPoet created to quickly test the quality of its own newsletters.

When you send a test email to mail-tester, it scores your email out of 10, taking into account its spammyness as well as other factors such as authentication, formatting, broken links, and whether you’ve been blacklisted (the most important factor).

mail-tester uses SpamAssassin, an open-source anti-spam platform, to analyze the spammyness of your email. It checks for things like DKIM, SPF, and looks at your email’s headers.

To send emails from your WordPress site to mail-tester, simply do so with the free plugin Check Email.

For more on email authentication, check out Get in Subscribers’ Inboxes with DKIM and SPF Email Authentication.

Other spam testing tools I’d recommend include:

• Email on Acid. This paid tool tests your email against 23 different spam filters and gives you an overall deliverability score out of 100%. It provides easy-to-read graphs with instant stats on deliverability.
• Litmus. Litmus scans your emails against 25+ different tests, identifies common issues that might be keeping you from the inbox, and provides actionable advice for how to fix them. It also validates your email is being properly authenticated using DKIM and SPF, and ensures your DMARC record is set up correctly.

How to fix spammyness

If you’ve determined that you’re being labeled a spammer, there are several things you can do to improve your chances of reaching inboxes.

First up, it’s important to understand what spam is. Read up on it here: How Spam and Phishing Filters Work.

Next, work your way through MailPoet’s in-depth blog post on the subject: WordPress Emails Going to Spam? Here Are 13 Ways to Improve Newsletter Delivery.

Lastly, find out How the MailPoet Sending Service Helps You Avoid the Spam Box.

Problem #3: Reputation

Have you neglected proper email list hygiene? Are you sending to bounced emails? Or… did you buy an email list…?

If you’ve engaged in any of these or other email no-noes, chances are your sending reputation has been tarnished or—worse—you’ve been placed on an industry blacklist.

Some inbox providers like Gmail also take these factors into account which you will never be able to measure, unfortunately:

• Domain reputation, e.g. yourdomain.com
• User engagement, like opens and clicks

Fortunately, not all is lost. The first step in repairing your reputation is finding out your IP reputation—also known as your IP score, sender score, or email sender reputation.

IP reputation refers to the reputation of your email sending IP address, which signals to email service providers whether or not you’re a spammer (it all comes back to spam!). It’s based on factors such as the quality of email content, quality of contacts, and engagement levels of previous emails sent from your IP address.

Email providers like Gmail use your IP reputation to determine whether or not your WooCommerce emails should be delivered to inboxes. 

How to test your email reputation

There are a variety of reputation testing tools you can use to find out your IP reputation and fix WooCommerce email not sending.

Email on Acid can test your IP and domain names against the most common blacklist services and let you know if you’ve been blacklisted.

Sender Score can tell you your IP reputation—just enter your IP address or domain and it will give you a score out of 100. The higher your score, the better your reputation, meaning your store’s notification emails are more likely to land in inboxes.

How to fix your email reputation

The first step is avoiding common mistakes that are damaging the reputation of your sending IP address. 

The simplest place to start is removing bounced emails from your general email list so as not to harm your other email lists, such as your WooCommerce customer list.

With MailPoet, you can use the “Stop sending to inactive subscribers” feature to automatically scrub inactive emails from your lists after 3, 6, or 12 months of inactivity. For more on how this works, check out Stop Sending Emails To Your Inactive Subscribers Now. Here’s Why.

If you’re sending to an email list you bought, stop! You should never, ever buy lists, as we covered in Should You Buy Email Lists? 

If your IP address has been blacklisted and you want to investigate, you’ll need to either:

• Change the sending method. For example, switch to sending with MailPoet’s Sending Service or SendGrid. This will change the IP address of your emails (recommended)
• Visit the blacklist’s website and do a lookup of your IP address. Most blacklist database will provide general listing reasons (arduous!)

If you’re able to find out why you were blacklisted, you can try to get it reversed following the site’s blacklist removal process. For example, security company Barracuda Networks, which runs the popular Barracuda blacklist, has a simple removal request form that you can fill out.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why you’re having problems with WooCommerce email not sending and how you can easily fix things.

Our main recommendation if your emails do get sent but never arrive: switch sending method now thanks to free plugins.

While I’ve focused on deliverability, spammyness, and reputation in this post, it’s also worth taking a look at your WooCommerce transactional emails from a marketing perspective if you want to further improve engagement. This includes:

• Subject lines,
• Quality of content, and
• Open rates and clickthroughs.

You can learn more about testing these metrics and others in 20 Best Tools for Testing Emails.

To accomplish this, I’ll explore:

• What a countdown campaign is + when to use one
• Examples of high-quality countdown emails
• How to structure your countdown email campaign
• The thing about countdown timers

When you’re finished reading, you’ll have everything you need except an occasion to count down to!

What is a countdown email campaign?

A countdown email campaign is a series of three or more emails counting down to a specific event. Each email builds on the last one, increasing the sense of urgency and sometimes also offering additional incentives to win over people who are debating a purchase. 

There are several occasions when you might use a countdown campaign:

• In the lead-up to a product release
• When a limited-time offer is about to run out
• When you’re selling tickets for an event happening on a specific date
• In the lead up to a holiday sale
• If you’re counting down the days until the end of a sale
• If you’re only accepting people into a specific program or course until a certain date
• When a product/service is going to stop being produced or sold after a specific date
• When a product/service is going to increase in price after a specific date

And these are just the opportunities I’ve thought of; countdown email campaigns can be used to promote anything happening on, before, or after a specific date.

Countdown email examples

1. Casper

This countdown email from Casper is great for a couple of reasons:

• The email is visual. The most important information, the amount that users can save, is in big, bold letters, and the call to action is placed in a large button. Subscribers can see all of the information they need, including how to take action, in a glance.
• The email is short. Subscribers don’t need to scroll or read large blocks of text to reach the call to action.
• The call to action is specific. The button asking you to “Shop the Mattresses” tells you exactly what Casper wants you to do.

The language and branding also reflect the company’s personality, ensuring that subscribers have a consistent experience when they engage with Casper marketing campaigns.

2. Distributed

This email works for similar reasons to the Restream email: the content is highly visual, the text is short, and the call to action is highly specific.

However, the full email is more like a landing page. There are multiple sections, each with its own information and call to action.

This approach works because there’s a lot to say about a conference like the Distributed 2021 event. You can highlight different panels, different guests, and other aspects of the event experience. A similar approach could also be used to highlight different uses for a specific product or multiple benefits provided by a specific service. I do recommend that you use this approach sparingly though; the average person receives over 125 emails per day, so they don’t want to spend a lot of time on any individual message.

3. Clearout

This Clearout countdown email is another email that uses striking visuals to direct users towards the spaces where they can take action. The coupon codes in particular are large and use contrasting colors to make them, and the information about each coupon, highly visible.

The size of the coupon codes does mean that the first buy button appears below the fold (after a user scrolls down), but in this case, the quality of the discounts is enough to convince people to scroll down.

How to create a countdown email campaign

1. Establish your goal

You probably already have a goal for your countdown campaign: to sell a specific product or service, make a specific number of sales in a store-wide clearance event, or get people to sign up for an event. For true success, however, you’ll want to get specific about the number of sales you want. This will help you create focused content and make it easier to measure the results when a campaign is finished.

Generally, I recommend setting the goal for a countdown campaign as a percentage. This means that your goal doesn’t become too small if you receive an influx of subscribers or become unachievable if you lose a bunch.

What is a reasonable goal?

According to Barilliance, the average conversion rate for email marketing campaigns was 15.22% in 2021. However, that doesn’t mean every business should aim for a 15% conversion rate. There are a few factors that can impact the conversion rate of a specific campaign:

• List hygiene. If you haven’t cleaned your list in a while, inactive and junk email addresses can reduce your engagement and conversion rates. You might also be wasting money by paying to keep contacts you don’t need, so if you haven’t cleaned your list in over 12 months, take a look at MailPoet’s list of compatible list cleaning tools.
• The value of your offer. People are more likely to take action when there’s a clear benefit, and a more significant benefit will win over more people. This means that you can expect a higher conversion rate on a 15% off sale than on a 10% sale. And increased value doesn’t always mean an increased discount, either. A new product sold at full price can net more sales than an old product offered at a steep discount.
• The cost of taking action. If you’re not a luxury brand that caters exclusively to the wealthy, cost will probably be a factor for your subscribers. And cost isn’t always money, either. If you’re selling tickets to a week-long event, people might not buy in because they’re not available for that long or during that particular week. In other words, people are less likely to take action if they need to commit significant resources to something.
• The quality of the campaign. If your campaign is difficult to read, doesn’t look good on mobile devices, or doesn’t present your offer in a clear and compelling way, people are more likely to delete your email without taking action.

If you’ve run similar sales before, you can also use your email analytics to get an idea of how well they perform with your unique audience.

2. Plan the structure of your countdown email campaign

Next, you’ll want to outline the overall structure of your campaign. This will help you know what to write in each email and ensure that your emails don’t become too repetitive.

Most countdown email campaigns should include at least three emails:

The “countdown begins” email

Your first email should announce what you’re counting down to and explain the basics: how long the countdown will be, why subscribers should take action, what action you want them to take, and how they can take that action. And you want to explain it all as quickly as possible, like this email from Everlane, which features a short introduction and one-sentence descriptions of the products available.

Pro tip: If you’re counting down to a product release or a sale, consider giving subscribers a secret link so they can take advantage of your offer before anyone else. This is a great way to reward subscribers for their devotion to your brand.

The “countdown is on” email

This email, or series of emails, goes out during the countdown itself. You can use this email as an opportunity to share more information about your offer, such as new images of your products in action.

If you do a multi-day countdown, you can send one of these emails every day, varying the emails by focusing on different aspects of the products/services on sale. For example, if you’re selling a six-week course, you might use each email to provide an overview of a specific lesson.

Running a multi-day countdown also means you can also use a different sales tactic in each email. For example, you might send one email that focuses on the discount itself, another that shows your products or services in use, and a third that shares reviews or testimonials.

The “last call” email

This email tells subscribers that they’re running out of time to take advantage of your offer, using words like “last call” and “final hours” to create an increased sense of urgency. If you’re running a multi-day sale, you might send this email on the morning of the last day; if you’re running a single-day sale, this email might go out in the final 4-5 hours.

3. Create your emails

With your plan in place, you’re ready to start creating the emails for your countdown campaign!

There are several guidelines you can follow to create effective countdown emails:

• Only use high-quality photos and illustrations.
• Use a single column layout to avoid visual clutter.
• Make sure your call to action is large and placed in a spot where subscribers will see it quickly.
• Use visual cues like arrows and people looking in a specific direction to direct subscribers’ attention to your call to action.
• Establish the details of your offer in the smallest possible number of words. People are more likely to read to the end if they can tell it will only take a minute.
• Use phrases like “buy now” and “don’t miss out” to increase the sense of urgency.
• Proofread everything, especially graphics! There’s nothing more embarrassing than misspelling a word in the banner at the top of your email.

You may also want to consider creating multiple personalized campaigns with segmentation. This is particularly useful if you sell a broad range of items since you can create targeted emails for people who have purchased similar items in the past.

4. Skip the countdown timer

A countdown timer is an animation displaying the amount of time until your offer runs out. These timers count down in real time so that subscribers will see the seconds ticking by as they read your offer. This adds a visual layer of urgency, as well as showing subscribers exactly how much time is left in your sale/event.

In the past, countdown timers were one of the most powerful tools email marketers had for time-sensitive promotions. Unfortunately, the Apple iOS 15 update means that countdown timers no longer work in emails sent to Apple devices. Considering that 34.2% of all emails being opened in Apple Mail, this means that countdown timers won’t work for a significant portion of your audience. And there’s nothing like a broken email to convince people to unsubscribe from your list.

So, to make sure your campaign works for everyone, skip the animated countdown.

5. Create a series of countdown images

Instead of an animated timer, you can create a series of countdown images to emphasize the urgency of your promotion. You won’t be able to tell users exactly how many minutes they have left to take action when they’re viewing the email, but you can share how many days there are between when you sent the email and when the promotion ends.

The easiest way to do this is to create a single image template, then save different versions of that image with different numbers. The image doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Something as simple as a black box with “2 days” written inside in white text can attract viewers’ attention and convey a sense of urgency.

Your other option is to create a wholly new image for each day of the countdown. This is a great choice if you’re promoting a sale on multiple products, since you can use an image of a different product in each countdown email.

Final thoughts on how to create a countdown email campaign

A countdown email campaign is one of the most powerful ways to create a sense of urgency and encourage sales within a specific time period.

To make the most of your countdown campaigns, remember four rules:

• Get specific about your goal. Make sure that your goal is ambitious but achievable by basing it on your stats from previous sales campaigns.
• Plan the structure of your email campaign. Make sure you have a “Countdown begins”, “Countdown is on”, and “Last call” email scheduled. Depending on the length of your campaign, you might want to create multiple “Countdown is on” emails, each focused on a different aspect of the sale/event you’re counting down to.
• Create your emails with care. Use only the highest quality images, write concise copy that emphasizes the value you’re offering your subscribers, and proofread everything, including graphics.
• Use a countdown timer. A countdown timer is a visual aid that increases the sense of urgency created by the campaign itself. There are many tools that let you create these timers for free.

So what are you waiting for? Start planning your first countdown email campaign today!

In this guide, we’ll explore the best practices for marketing your sale via email, with real-world examples. I’ll also show you how you can use MailPoet’s WooCommerce segmentation features to create even more effective email promotions for your sale.

Best practices for promoting your sale via email

1. Plan a series of emails to promote your sale

There are a few major benefits to sending multiple emails to promote your sale:

• Increase the number of people who see it. If they miss the first email for whatever reason, they’ll see the next one. 
• Have multiple points of contact. The more often someone sees your sale, the more likely they are to become curious about it.
• Build urgency. You can increase your emphasis on the limited-time nature of your sale with every email.

Personally, I recommend sending a minimum of five emails. 

The first email should be sent a few days ahead of the sale. This email should explain what the sale will be, how to take advantage of the sale, and when the sale will happen. This is your opportunity to get people excited in advance of your sale. 

Next, you’ll want to send an email on the opening day of your sale. This email will include a clear explanation of the discounts available and a highly visible call to action. You want to keep this email as short as possible. One or two sentences and a call to action button is often all you need. 

The third email will come out around the midway point of your sale. As you might expect, this email will be more time-focused, reminding people that the sale is halfway over and encouraging them to act now so they don’t miss it. You may also want to include some reviews and testimonials in this email to win over anyone who’s on the fence about making a purchase.

Your fourth email will be a warning email. This one will focus entirely on urgency, letting people know that they only have one or two days left to act. 

Finally, you want to send out an email on the last day of the sale, reminding people to act before the discount is gone.

Countdown campaigns

If you’re running a particularly long sale or a sale that provides an extreme discount, you may want to run a countdown campaign. This is a series of emails that goes out every day for either the days leading up to your sale or the final few days of the sale.

If you choose this route, remember to keep your emails short and direct, showing that you respect your audience’s time. 

2. Treat your subject lines like headlines

A subject line is to an email what a headline is to a blog post. If it doesn’t catch their eye, or if it gives away too much information, people won’t bother to read beyond it. With email, they might even delete it at a glance. 

There are several strategies you can use to create an effective subject line:

• Pitch your sale. Tell subscribers what they’ll find in your email. For example, you might use a subject line like “Take a look at spring discounts from (company name)” or “Get 10% off almost everything in our store (details inside)”.
• Emphasize the benefit of buying your products/services. For example, if you’re offering a video course on fitness, you might use a subject line like “Get into the best shape of your life – and save 20% doing it”.
• Focus on urgency. Use your subject line to remind people that your sale won’t go on forever using phrases like “Limited time discount” and “Last chance to get 10% off”.
• Keep it short. Remember that mobile devices have limited space for email subject lines. We suggest limiting your subject lines to 50 characters.
• Build continuity. Use a series of subject lines with increasing urgency to build interest as the sale goes on. You might also want to use similar language in each subject line to make the email series feel like a cohesive whole.

For more ideas on how to create an effective subject line, check out our list of the best email subject lines we’ve ever seen.

3. Put a call to action in your preview text

Next, you’ll want to work on your preview text. You don’t have a lot of space here, especially if you want to optimize your email for mobile devices. This means you need to focus on getting them to take action, specifically to open your email. And the best way to do that is to ask them.

The best way to create this call to action is to use language that mirrors your subject line. Make the subject line and preview text work together to give subscribers information and an incentive to act. For example, if the subject line is “Save big with our spring sale”, you might write preview text along the lines of “Look inside for savings of up to 40%”. 

You’ll note that this example also elaborates on the discounts promised by the spring sale. This further entices subscribers to open your email, since they’ve got a good idea of what they’ll find. 

4. Perfect your copy

I’ve already covered the types of content you should include in each part of your email series; now it’s time to discuss how you can optimize that content to drive sales. 

Namely, you’ll want to understand how to use the principles of persuasive writing: 

• Reciprocity. This principle states that if you help people in some way, they’ll want to return the favor. You can use this when marketing a sale by reminding subscribers of how your brand has helped them before. For example, if you offer an email course about graphic design as an opt-in bonus and you’re selling video courses, you might say something like “We taught you the basic principles of design. Now, you can learn to build powerful social media graphics with our video course and save 15%, too.”
• Scarcity. The less of something there is, the more people want it. You can take advantage of this principle by mentioning that you have a limited number of products, especially if you won’t be creating another run of those products.

• Authority. People are more likely to listen to you if they consider you an expert in your field. You can take advantage of this by talking about your educational background, the number of years you’ve spent in your current field of work, or anything else that demonstrates your authority.
• Commitment and consistency. People like to maintain a consistent sense of identity and self-image. If you can write your copy in such a way that it reinforces a person’s identity, they’re more likely to pay attention to what you’re saying. For example, if you sell books about how to write fiction, you might say something like “You love writing. Now we can help you master it.”
• Liking. This one comes as no surprise: people are more likely to listen to you if they like you. Since your subscribers liked your stuff enough to join your list, all you need to do to take advantage of this principle is remind them why they signed up.
• Consensus. Also known as social proof, this principle states that if people know other people trust and/or like you, they’re more likely to listen to you. You can demonstrate this by talking about the number of products you’ve sold or by adding reviews and testimonials to your emails.

Most of all, don’t just write your copy once and assume it’s going to drive sales. At the bare minimum, you want to edit it for grammar and spelling. For even better results, you’ll want to edit for clarity and consistency of brand voice. You might even want to ask a colleague or trusted employee for feedback on the copy for your email marketing campaign.

5. Use high-quality images

Of course, the text isn’t the only important aspect of your email marketing campaign. Images, especially product images, can also make a major difference in the success of your email campaign. If your images are grainy or poorly lit, that difference might not be a positive one.

There are a couple of ways to get high-quality visuals for your email campaign:

• Pay for professional photos. Sometimes your best solution is simply to pay a professional to do this for you. However, if you have a lot of products or you release new products on a regular basis, this gets expensive fast, which leads us to the next solution:
• Learn how to take professional product photos yourself. This will take a lot of trial and error, but there are many tutorials about DIY product photos that can guide the process. 

Most of all, remember that high-quality images aren’t optional if you want to grow your business. You can only choose whether you’ll invest money or time into getting them.

Visuals for service-based businesses

We’ve talked about product photos, but how can service-based businesses create high-quality visuals?
Well, you have three options:

• Stage photos of yourself and/or colleagues working. You can hire someone to take these photos or learn to do it yourself.
• Hire an illustrator to create branded imagery. For example, you might commission a piece that shows a cartoon version of you working on a computer.
• Turn your copy into imagery. Write your copy in a fancy font, throw it onto a colorful background, add a logo, and voila! You have a high-quality image you can use in your email campaign.

And these are only the ideas that came to mind at a moment’s notice. You may find other opportunities to create visuals that represent your brand.

6. Personalize your emails

Personalization isn’t just effective, it’s expected: 56% of consumers say they’ll look elsewhere if a company doesn’t personalize their emails. 

There are two main ways to personalize the email campaigns for your sales:

• Use a person’s name. One of the simplest, yet most powerful, ways to personalize an email is to address your subscriber by name. You can add a person’s first and/or last name to the subject line and main text of your email. In MailPoet, this is done with shortcodes.
• Send customized emails to different segments of your audience. Segmentation tools let you create sub-groups within your list based on things like how long they’ve been in your audience or products they’ve purchased. We’ll talk more about this, and specifically how to use WooCommerce segmentation to customize MailPoet campaigns, later on.

You shouldn’t just be personalizing emails when you’re promoting a sale, either. Personalization can be an effective way to improve engagement with all of your emails.

7. Use visual cues to make your call to action stand out

Your email as a whole should be designed to emphasize your call to action. You can do this in a few ways:

• Use contrasting colors. For example, if the background of your email is white, you might put your call to action in a vibrant or dark color. You can even use a black button with white text.

• Use directional imagery. Things like arrows or images of people with their eyes or hands pointing are a great way to direct viewers’ eyes at your call to action.
• Pay attention to size. Your call to action should be large enough to stand out from your copy. 

Remember, every part of your email should focus on directing people to your call to action.

8. Schedule promotions around your existing workflow

You want to send a series of emails to convince your audience that your sale is worthwhile, but you don’t want to overwhelm their inboxes. This makes it important to consider your existing email workflow when scheduling the email campaign for your sale. 

There are a couple of things to consider here. First, you’ll want to look at promoting your sale in regular emails. For example, if you send a biweekly newsletter and you’re having a month-long sale, you might mention the sale in both newsletters sent out during that month. These updates can be separate from your main marketing campaign.

You also want to limit the number of emails you send in any one day. Personally, I avoid sending more than one email per day. This means that if I have a newsletter going out on a specific day, you should avoid scheduling promotional emails for my sale on that day.

Level up your promotions with WooCommerce segmentation

WooCommerce segmentation options

As a MailPoet user, you can take advantage of our integration with WooCommerce to create personalized campaigns for users who have interacted with your store in a variety of ways.

• Ordered a specific number of products
• Purchased specific products
• Purchased products in a specific category
• Total spent in your store

If you have the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, you’ll also be able to access segments for each membership level on your site.

To send an email to a WooCommerce segment, create your email as normal. In the “Send” part of the process, click the “Lists” dropdown menu, then scroll down until you find the WooCommerce options.

After selecting one of these options, you’ll be asked to configure the details. For example, if you’ve chosen “# of orders”, you’ll be able to specify the precise number of orders someone must have made to be included. You can also segment groups who have made “up to” or “less than” a certain number of orders.

As you customize the segment, you’ll be able to see the number of people in it. Most companies don’t have time to create personalized copy for every user, so they can use this knowledge to determine what groups are most worth sending personalized emails to.

When you click “Save”, the segment will be permanently saved. This allows you to easily use the same segmentation settings for future campaigns.

How to personalize emails based on WooCommerce segmentation

The main way to use WooCommerce data to personalize campaigns is to create copy and imagery that emphasizes a customer’s existing relationship with you. 

Here are a few examples of how this might work:

• If someone has purchased a specific product, you might say something like “Save now on complimentary products”.
• If someone bought a product in a specific category, you can say something like “Since you enjoyed (product), we thought you might enjoy this sale on (product category)”.
• You can send early promotional emails to customers who have spent a significant amount (say, over $100) in your store, saying something like “As one of our best customers, we wanted you to be the first to know about these deals”.
• If someone has made at least one purchase in your WooCommerce store, you can send an email saying something like “Save 10% on your next purchase from us”. 

Remember that the most effective copy is often the most specific copy. For example, if you sell dresses, you might turn “Save 10% on your next purchase” into “Save 10% on your next summer dress”. 

Final thoughts on how to promote your sale with email marketing

Most of the principles for creating a successful series of promotional emails for your sale is the same rules you want to follow every time you send an email: 

• Treat your subject lines like headlines
• Use one or more principles of persuasive writing in your copy
• Use high-quality visuals
• Direct the subscriber’s gaze to your call to action with visual cues
• Personalize your emails with names and segmentation
• Schedule all promotional emails around your existing workflow

MailPoet users can also take advantage of advanced personalization through WooCommerce segments.

To learn more about how you can improve your WooCommerce marketing with MailPoet, check out the full list of our recently added WooCommerce features.

I’ll explore:

• How to use MailPoet to enhance the subscriber experience
• How to upsell and cross-sell to subscribers
• How to use email marketing to get reviews for your subscription business
• How to use email marketing to get referrals for your subscription business
• How to use the MailPoet integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions

By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll be ready to create an effective email marketing plan for your WooCommerce Subscriptions business. 

Enhance the subscriber experience

As always, you want to consider the customer experience first. What can you send them to supplement the materials they get through their subscription? How can your emails help subscribers make the most of the goods or services they’ve paid for?

Here are some ideas for using emails to enhance subscriptions:

• Provide sneak peeks. If you do a monthly subscription box where most of the items are a surprise, you can build excitement by showing one of the items inside the box. This lets users see some of what they’re getting while also building anticipation for the surprise items.
• Remind people about the goodies they have access to. This is particularly effective if some or all of your subscriber content is available on a limited time only basis, or if you host subscriber-only events. You can then remind people when things will become available and send another reminder before they lose access.
• Send bonus materials. For example, if you sell a subscription box of wine bottles, you might email customers a mini-book of recipes that go well with each month’s wines. 
• Add an email component to your subscription. You can also bundle a premium newsletter into your subscription business. This is a great way to share high-quality knowledge with your best customers.

The key to success here is to focus on content that provides a benefit directly connected to the subscription. You also want to make sure the materials are things you can reliably create at a high quality level. Remember, the best way to keep subscribers is to sustain a consistent quality level.

Upsell and cross-sell to subscribers

Another way to leverage your subscribers as an audience is to send them personalized marketing campaigns for higher subscription tiers and other products. 

You can personalize content for subscribers by emphasizing and rewarding their loyalty to your brand. For example, if you’re trying to get subscribers to your fitness membership site to buy your video course, you might write copy along these lines:

“Hi (Name),

You’ve enjoyed the fitness tips and community here at Fitness XTreme. Now you can take it up a notch with our 12-part video course, High Intensity Core Workouts! 

Think that’s awesome? Here’s some even better news: to thank you for your long term support, I want to offer you 20% off High Intensity Core Workouts! Simply click on the button below before (Date).

Thanks,

(Name)”

On the other hand, if the same fitness site offered access to video workouts as part of a higher membership level, the email might look like this:

“Hi (Name),

Now that you’ve had time to put your extreme fitness tips into action, why not kick it up a notch with our Workout Group membership? 

At this membership level, you’ll keep access to all of the content you love and gain access to our entire archive of video workouts. You’ll also get a new one-hour recorded video workout every month.

Even better, since you’re already a member, your first month’s subscription will be prorated to $15 instead of $20. 

Sign up today!

Thanks,

(Name)”

These emails share some key features: they remind people why they like the membership site, tell them a little bit about the video workout options, and thank customers for their loyalty before wrapping with a call to action. This shows customers that you recognize and appreciate their continued business.

Of course, remember to use other personalization techniques too, such as using subscribers’ names. 

Get reviews for your subscription business

Another great way to use MailPoet to enhance your subscription business is to ask your subscribers for reviews or testimonials. This content can then be used on your membership landing page and social media pages, as well as in your social media promotions and other marketing campaigns.

Here are some basic guidelines to follow when you create an email request for reviews:

• Remind customers of the benefits they’ve gotten from your brand. 
• Thank them for their continued support. You can take this a step further by sharing how that support has allowed your business to grow and change.
• Ask politely for a review or testimonial.
• Share how reviews and testimonials help your business and how they will be used in your marketing campaigns.
• Include some reviews or testimonials to give customers ideas on how to phrase their own reviews/testimonials.

You may also want to consider rewarding customers for reviews. For example, you might provide a discount on their next year of membership or a related product. 

Get referrals for your subscription business

You can also ask your subscribers to recommend your business directly to friends and family. This is a great way to get your business in front of more qualified leads without spending a lot of money on advertisements.

Referral requests must include a clear call to action, complete with an easy way to share your business, such as click-to-share buttons that make it easy for people to send your link via email or social media. Technically, this is all you need, but there are a few strategies you can use to make your request more compelling:

• Emphasize your customer’s relationship with your brand, either by thanking them or by reminding them of the benefits they’ve gotten from your products/services.
• Talk about how a shared love of your products/services can bring people closer together.
• If your business focuses on sustainability or social good, share how referrals can help you do more good.
• Give subscribers the ability to provide a discount with their referral. For example, you might create a referral link that automatically gives a 15% discount to new customers.
• Reward your subscribers for sending referrals. One great way to do this is by providing subscribers who make referrals with the same discount you give to the people they refer.

• Give subscribers the option to join an affiliate program. You can create one of these using a plugin like Easy Affiliate.
• Run a contest that people can enter by making referrals. This is most effective when every referral counts as a new entry to the contest. You can even make this an annual event, building it up as something for subscribers to get excited about.

Referrals are one of the best ways to get new long-term customers, so be sure to run these campaigns on a regular basis.

Email marketing for WooCommerce Subscriptions with MailPoet

Create segments for active WooCommerce Subscriptions customers in MailPoet

Now that you’ve got some ideas about email marketing for your WooCommerce subscription business, let’s take a look at how to create these segments. To do this, you’ll need to go to the “Lists” area of MailPoet and click the “+New Segment” button at the top of the screen.

This will open a page where you can configure basic details about the segment, including its name, description, and the group of people included in this segment.

Click on the “Segment” dropdown menu and scroll down until you see “WooCommerce Subscription > Has An Active Subscription”. 

Once you’ve set this up, a dropdown menu will allow you to choose the subscription tier you want to include in this segment. 

Send emails to your new segment

Next, head to the “Emails” area of MailPoet, select the type of email you want to send, and create it as you normally would. Note that you can send all email types, including WooCommerce emails, to your WooCommerce subscribers. 

When you’ve finished building the email, you’ll be directed to schedule it and set up sending details. Open the “Lists” dropdown menu and scroll until you see the appropriate segment.

After that, all you need to do is click “Send”! 

Final advice 

Email marketing for WooCommerce Subscriptions businesses is easier than ever with MailPoet. If you’re using the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, you can set up specialized segments for different subscription tiers and use them to enhance your business in a variety of ways:

• Add something to the subscriber experience, such as bonus content to help subscribers make better use of your products/services.
• Send personalized marketing campaigns to upsell or cross-sell products/services.
• Ask subscribers for reviews and testimonials.
• Encourage subscribers to tell their friends about your business.

And these are only the main ways you can use MailPoet to boost your WooCommerce subscription business! With a little creativity and the ability to send all types of emails to this segment, the sky is the limit.

According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who use segmentation in their campaigns have noted highs of a 760% increase in revenue. And the folks at HelpScout have reported that segmented email campaigns see 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than untargeted campaigns.

Those numbers certainly aren’t to be sniffed at, so if you aren’t already segmenting your email list, it’s well worth looking into! 

At MailPoet, we’ve recently introduced new and improved segmentation options so that you can tailor your email campaigns even further; creating a highly personalized and targetted experience for your subscribers. 

The segmentation options included in MailPoet are as follows:

Email

• Number of email opens
• Opened* 
• Not opened*
• Clicked (a specific link)*
• Not clicked (a specific link)*
• Clicked any email link

Subscriber

• Subscribe date
• MailPoet custom fields
• WordPress user role*

WooCommerce

• Number of orders
• Purchased in this category*
• Purchased this product *
• Total spent
• Customer country
• Has an active membership (using WooCommerce Memberships)

Subscriptions

• Has an active subscription (using WooCommerce Subscriptions)

* Existing segmentation options available prior to this update.

You can use these options individually, or combine them to create more complex segments of subscribers. Note that the ability to combine segments (multi-condition segmentation) is an advanced MailPoet feature that’s only available in our Business, Creator, and Agency plans.

To get started, head to your MailPoet plugin in your WordPress dashboard, navigate to ‘Lists’, and then select ‘+ New Segment’. You’ll then be able to start building your segmentation criteria.

In need of some inspiration on how to use these segments? Keep reading!

How to use the new segmentation options in MailPoet

There are a multitude of different ways you can use segmentation to create a personalized experience for your subscribers – especially when you start combining segments!

Every business will have a different use case for segmentation, but the following overview will hopefully get your creative juices flowing as to how you can use these options to start personalizing your email campaigns.

Number of email opens

Using this segment, you’ll be able to create email campaigns according to your subscribers’ engagement (or lack of) with your previous emails. 

Specify whether you want to segment by more or less than a set number of email opens within a specific time frame to start building your segment, and you’ll see a handy subscriber total to give you an indication of how many people fit that criteria. 

This option is perfect for re-engagement campaigns (send to those who have not opened many of your emails within the last few months with messaging enticing them to come back, or an offer to remove them from your list), rewarding loyal readers (try offering a coupon or an exclusive piece of content to those who have opened the vast majority of your emails as a thank you), or to remind/follow up on a specific action you were asking readers to take in one of your previous campaigns. 

Clicked on any email link

This email segment can be used in a similar way to ‘Number of email opens’, but enables you to drill down to those who are more actively engaged with your campaigns by segmenting subscribers who have clicked a content link in any of your previous emails. What do we mean by a content link? That’s any link you’ve actively added to your email campaigns, and not those that are added automatically (‘Unsubscribe’, ‘View in Browser’, or ‘Manage Subscription’).

You can combine with the ‘Number of email opens’ segment to send to the subscribers who have both opened and clicked a link in one or more of your emails. 

Subscribe date

This segment enables you to send to your subscribers according to when they joined your mailing list. Choose from before/after a specific date, or within / not within a set number of days. 

This is a really flexible segment that you can use in a lot of different ways. Maybe you’ve recently launched an additional newsletter that you’d like to make your early subscribers aware of? Or perhaps you’d like to share some existing content with those who have joined your mailing list more recently? The subscribe date segment will give you the power to do this!

Combining with other segments will enable you to get super specific with your targeting.

MailPoet custom fields

When you create a MailPoet signup form, you have the option to add custom form fields so that you can capture any additional information you require from your subscribers. The MailPoet custom fields segment enables you to tailor your emails according to the information your subscribers enter.

If you’d like to personalize your email communications according to where your subscribers are based, you might consider adding a ‘city’ or ‘country’ field to your form, and then use segmentation to deliver them relevant information according to their location.

If your email newsletter content covers a lot of different topics, another idea is to ask your subscribers what they’re most interested in hearing about, so that you can segment by interest. Deliver dedicated emails for each topic, and watch your engagement rates soar!

Number of orders (WooCommerce)

This segmentation option is perfect for rewarding loyal customers, and re-engaging those who have not yet made multiple purchases. 

Choose from ‘more than’, ‘equal to’, and ‘less than’ a set number of orders within a specific time frame to build a segment of customers you can create tailored messaging for. 

Reward those who keep coming back to your store with a discount or an exclusive look at an upcoming product range you’re launching. And for those who haven’t purchased again, reach out to them with a feedback request, or highlight any recent changes you’ve made to your stock or delivery costs, for example. 

Total spent (WooCommerce)

You can use this segment in a similar way to ‘number of orders’, but it’ll allow you to get way more specific with your targeting. Again you can specify ‘more than’, ‘equal to’, and ‘less than’ values within a specific time frame, but this time it’s centered around total customer spend.

Get even more targeted by combining with other segments such as ‘Number of orders’ or ‘Purchased in this category’ to drill down to specific customer behaviors.

Customer country (WooCommerce)

Deliver location-based emails to your customers using the Customer country segment. This option is perfect for promoting country-specific updates to your customers. 

For example, if you’re running a free shipping promotion that’s only available in Germany, you can use this option to only promote this offer to customers based in Germany – there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving details of a special offer to then find out you’re not eligible for it! 

Or why not combine with segments such as ‘Purchased this product’ or ‘Purchased in this category’ to let your customers know about country-specific offers or product launches based on their purchase history?

Has an active subscription (WooCommerce Subscriptions)

If you offer product subscriptions using WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can use this segmentation option to directly contact customers who have an active subscription with your store. 

This is a really handy way to let your subscribers know about new products, promote special offers, inform of changes to their subscription, and more. 

If your subscription model is based around offering digital goods, such as whitepapers, reports, or any other digital content, you could also use MailPoet to deliver this content to your subscribers. 

You could even start monetizing your email content by creating a paid newsletter subscription! These are a great way to earn monthly recurring revenue. For more information, check out our how-to guide. 

We hope you enjoy using the new segmentation options in MailPoet! Remember, if you’ve signed up for a plan with advanced functionality, you can combine segments to make your marketing messaging even more personal.

Let us know in the comments how you’ve been using segmentation to personalize your email marketing campaigns!

Jilt is a great tool for eCommerce email marketing. But the fact that the Jilt team is permanently shutting down the service at the beginning of 2022 means that you’re going to need to find a new solution to connect with your store’s customers.

If your store is powered by WooCommerce, MailPoet is a great Jilt alternative for WordPress that lets you use a lot of the same features that Jilt offers without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

In this post, we’re going to do two things:

1. Introduce you to MailPoet and explain why we think it makes a great Jilt alternative.
2. Show you step-by-step how to migrate from Jilt to MailPoet so that you can get up and running with no downtime in your store’s email marketing efforts.

Ready to learn more? Let’s dig in!

Note – MailPoet is a native WordPress plugin, so it’s not going to be a good Jilt alternative if you’re using Jilt’s Shopify integration.

Why Is MailPoet the Best Jilt Alternative?

If you’re a current Jilt customer, you probably loved Jilt because it made it so easy to create targeted segments and set up eCommerce-focused automations like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase sequences.

With MailPoet, you get all those same core features so that you can keep up your WooCommerce email marketing efforts without missing a beat. Let’s quickly run through them…

Visual Email Builder With Automation

Just like Jilt, MailPoet makes it super easy to send one-off email broadcasts or set up automations.

For automations, you can choose from various WooCommerce-specific sequences like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase sequences:

You can then choose a pre-built template or design an email from scratch. Either way, you’ll be able to use MailPoet’s visual, drag-and-drop builder – no technical knowledge needed. You’ll also be able to easily insert WooCommerce products and dynamic information via merge tags:

List Management and Segmentation

Another great Jilt feature is how easy it makes it to segment your customers. With MailPoet, you get those same detailed options, including the ability to segment by:

• Country
• # of orders
• Purchased items
• Total spent
• WordPress user role
• Signup date
• Active subscription using WooCommerce Subscriptions
• Past email behavior (clicks, opens, etc.)
• Etc.

Looking to create more complex workflows? Combining MailPoet and AutomateWoo makes a powerful Jilt alternative

Form Builder

Like Jilt, MailPoet lets you create your own email opt-in forms. You’ll even get more flexibility for building popups, slide-ins, notification bars, inline forms, and more. You can start from pre-built templates and customize everything using the native WordPress block editor:

You’ll also be able to add an opt-in checkbox to your checkout page.

Built-In Email Sending for Reliable Delivery

To help make sure your emails make it to your customers’ inboxes, MailPoet includes a built-in email sending service just like Jilt. This means you don’t need to mess around with SMTP services – you can just send emails and be confident that your subscribers will receive them.

Reports and Analytics

Finally, another strength of Jilt is the ability to clearly attribute revenue and purchases to your email marketing efforts. For example, if you send an email, you can see exactly how much revenue that email drove.

MailPoet gives you that same great depth of reporting, letting you not just see clicks and opens, but also see the actual revenue and purchases that come from your emails.

How to Migrate Jilt to MailPoet

Now that you know how MailPoet can pick up right where Jilt leaves off, let’s talk about how you can migrate from Jilt to MailPoet.

Before we get to the detailed step-by-step guide, let’s talk about what you…

1. Will be able to migrate.
2. Will need to manually recreate.
3. Won’t be able to migrate.

What you will be able to migrate:

• All of your contacts – MailPoet will automatically sync with your existing WooCommerce customers and you can also import your Jilt list directly to MailPoet to add any subscribers who aren’t registered customers.
• Third-party signup forms – if you’re using a third-party tool for opt-in forms such as OptinMonster or MailOptin, those tools also integrate with MailPoet. That means you can keep using the exact same forms – you just need to tell them to send data to MailPoet instead of Jilt.

What you will need to manually recreate:

• Email templates – MailPoet gives a visual, drag-and-drop builder to create templates, but you’ll need to rebuild them from scratch – you won’t be able to bring along your existing HTML templates from Jilt.
• Jilt signup forms – if you were using Jilt’s built-in form builder, you’ll need to recreate those forms using MailPoet’s form builder. 
• Automation flows – MailPoet includes built-in sequences that make it really easy to set up common emails like abandoned cart reminders and after-purchase messages, but you’ll need to manually set up your sequences again.

What you can’t migrate:

• Historical stats – unfortunately, you won’t be able to migrate your existing analytics and stats from Jilt. MailPoet can help you track this information going forward, but your historical data will be gone. Jilt does let you export some data on abandoned carts as a CSV, though.

How Does Migrating From Jilt to MailPoet Work?

To migrate from Jilt to MailPoet, you’ll basically need to do three things:

1. Set up your site to use MailPoet. This includes adding MailPoet forms, syncing MailPoet with WooCommerce, etc.
2. Disable existing Jilt features on your store, such as disabling your Jilt signup forms.
3. Migrate as much of your data as possible from Jilt to MailPoet (as we discussed above).

Let’s go through it…

1. Set Up MailPoet on Your Store

Before you start deactivating Jilt and migrating your data, you’ll first want to set up your store to use MailPoet to ensure a seamless transition. 

It’s best if you can do this on a staging site that you can then move live when the migration process is finished. By working on a staging site, you can ensure that your visitors won’t see any changes until you’re 100% ready to go live.

You can perform the migration on your live store if absolutely necessary, but we recommend taking a backup first (just in case – you shouldn’t have any issues) and making the changes during a low-traffic time (like later at night).

To get started, install and activate the free MailPoet plugin from WordPress.org.

Once you activate it, go to the new MailPoet tab in your WordPress dashboard to launch the setup wizard:

In this wizard, you’ll be prompted to sign up to the free MailPoet Starter plan to unlock the MailPoet Sending Service and all of the eCommerce features.

This account is 100% free for all core features, you can send up to 5,000 emails per month, and have up to 1,000 subscribers. Once you pass the 1,000 subscriber mark, or you require advanced functionality, the paid plans with the MailPoet Sending Service start at €9 per month:

At the end of the wizard, you’ll see another prompt to connect MailPoet to WooCommerce. Make sure to activate both of the options so that MailPoet can sync all the important data from your WooCommerce store:

If you need any help here, you can check out our full getting started guide.

2. Replace Jilt Signup Forms With MailPoet Signup Forms

Next, you want to replace any Jilt email signup forms with forms for MailPoet.

First, you’ll want to remove any Jilt email signup forms that you’re using.

To disable Jilt’s popup signup forms, go to the Signup Forms area in your Jilt dashboard and uncheck the box for Enable popup forms…

If you’re using any Jilt signup form shortcodes, you’ll need to manually remove those from your content and replace them with the MailPoet form shortcodes or blocks.

Speaking of, MailPoet also lets you create popup signup forms and inline forms that you display using a shortcode – plus a lot more.

To create forms, go to MailPoet → Forms → New Form. There, you can choose from a range of different form types and templates, including popups, slide-ins, notification bars, widgets, in-content forms, and more. You can also start with a blank form:

Once you choose your starting point, you’ll be able to fully customize your form’s content and design using the native WordPress block editor:

For popups and other targeted forms, you can target your form to specific content, like targeting certain types of content, categories, tags, etc. You can also use exit-intent targeting.

Or, you can manually place forms using shortcodes, which you could use to replace the Jilt shortcode forms if needed.

3. Adjust Any Third-Party Signup Forms (Optional)

In addition to Jilt’s signup forms, you also might be using opt-in forms from a third-party list building plugin such as OptinMonster, MailOptin, MailMunch, etc.

If you are, you’ll need to also edit those forms. But if you aren’t using any of these tools, you can just skip to the next step.

All of these providers will also integrate with MailPoet, so you can keep using the same form – you just need to change the backend integration so that your form adds subscribers to MailPoet instead of Jilt.

How you’ll do this depends on the service. For example, in OptinMonster, you can do it from the Integrations tab of the OptinMonster editor:

If you’re using any Zapier recipes or recipes from other webhook tools like Integromat, you’ll also want to update these to point at MailPoet instead of Jilt.

4. Enable Subscriber Sync At Checkout

As part of growing your email list, Jilt includes a feature that lets you show an opt-in form for marketing emails on your store’s checkout page.

If you’re using that feature on your WooCommerce store, the next step is to:

1. Disable that feature in Jilt.
2. Enable and configure that feature in MailPoet (MailPoet enables this by default but you might want to configure it).

To disable this feature in Jilt, go to Settings → Shop Settings → Storefront Settings and uncheck the box for Show an opt in at checkout…:

Then, to configure this setting in MailPoet, go to MailPoet → Settings → WooCommerce. Make sure that the Opt-in on checkout box is checked. Then, you can also:

• Choose one or more lists to add these people to. The default will be to just add them to the “WooCommerce Customers” list.
• Configure the checkbox opt-in message.

5. Set Up Your Welcome Email Autoresponder (and Disable in Jilt)

Next, you can set up a new welcome email/series for shoppers at your store.

To create a welcome email with MailPoet, go to MailPoet → Emails and choose the Set up option for the Welcome Email:

You can then configure who should receive the welcome email, choose a template, and customize it using the drag-and-drop MailPoet email builder (more on the email builder a little later on).

If you need some help, check out our guide on how to create a welcome email.

Once you’ve created your welcome email autoresponder in MailPoet, you’ll want to disable your welcome email in Jilt. Go to the Automations area in your Jilt dashboard and click Stop next to your welcome email:

When you stop the email, you probably want to choose to Keep scheduled emails to ensure that any recent signups aren’t lost in the cracks. Jilt will finish sending welcome emails to people who have already registered within the last hour but won’t send any new emails.

We’ll cover how to move the other automations later on.

6. Import Your Contact List from Jilt

Now, you’re ready to export your contact list from Jilt and import it to MailPoet.

At this point, MailPoet will have already synced all of your existing WooCommerce customers to your MailPoet lists. However, you might have people in your Jilt lists who haven’t registered on your store, so you’ll want to make sure to import your contact list to avoid missing anyone.

Don’t worry – MailPoet will not create a duplicate entry if the contact already exists (from having synced your WooCommerce store customer list). You can choose whether to overwrite the existing contact with the new data from Jilt or just skip any duplicates.

Export Contacts From Jilt

To begin, you need to export your contact list from Jilt. In your Jilt dashboard:

1. Go to the Contacts tab.
2. Use the checkbox to bulk select all contacts.
3. Under the Actions menu, choose Export contacts.

In the popup, make sure to choose All contacts and then click Start export:

Jilt will then email a .zip file that contains your store’s contact lists to the main email on your Jilt account.

If you start your export during a busy time, this might take up to a couple of hours.

Once you receive the .zip file, it will contain up to five CSV files (depending on your store’s data). The five files are:

• All contacts – every single contact from Jilt.
• Subscribed – only contacts that have opted in to receive marketing emails.
• Unsubscribed – contacts that have opted out, typically by clicking the unsubscribe link on an email.
• Non-subscribed – contacts that have neither opted in or opted out.
• Suppressed – contacts that have a suppressed status, such as hard bounces, people that marked you as spam, etc.

If you don’t see a certain file, that’s just because your store doesn’t have any contacts that meet the conditions for that file.

Import Contacts to MailPoet

Now, you need to import those contacts to MailPoet. When you import a list to MailPoet, you can set all of the subscribers’ statuses to one of these statuses:

• Subscribed
• Unsubscribed
• Inactive

For this reason, you should not just import the “all contacts” CSV file from Jilt, as you might accidentally mark unsubscribed contacts as subscribed. Instead, you should only import contacts from the Subscribed.csv file first. Then, you can go back and separately import your unsubscribed contacts if needed (making sure to mark them as unsubscribed). For more details, please read our checklist before importing contacts.

To import your contacts, go to MailPoet → Subscribers and click Import:

We recommend cleaning your lists before importing them – the next page will show a prompt to try clearout.io for free. Or, you can just proceed straight to the import process:

On the next screen, choose the option to Upload a file and select the CSV from Jilt. Remember – you should start with just the Subscribed.csv file so that you only import subscribed contacts:

Then, click Next Step.

Now, you’ll see another screen where you can:

• Map the fields in your CSV to fields in MailPoet. If MailPoet doesn’t have an existing field, you can either ignore the field or tell MailPoet to create a new custom field for that information.
• Choose which list to add subscribers to.
• Set the status for these subscribers. Since you only uploaded the Subscribed.csv file, you can safely mark all of these contacts as subscribed. The same is true for updating existing subscribers.

The last setting – Updating existing subscribers’ information… lets you choose how to handle duplicate contacts. That is, a contact that MailPoet has already synced from WooCommerce. 

You can either tell MailPoet to overwrite the existing information with the information from Jilt. Or, you can choose No to have MailPoet just skip those contacts and leave the information as the defaults from the WooCommerce sync:

Then, you can click the Import button to import all of your Jilt subscribers.

If needed, you can repeat the process to important unsubscribed contacts – just make sure to mark them as unsubscribed in MailPoet’s import settings.

Create Your Segments

Once you’ve imported your contacts, MailPoet gives you lots of tools to create segments. You can set this up by going to MailPoet → Lists → New Segment.

From there, you can set up segments by adding one or more conditions like:

• Country
• # of orders
• Purchased items
• Total spent
• WordPress user role
• Etc.

As long as the shopper has a WooCommerce account, you’ll still have that shopper’s full purchase history for segmentation – you won’t lose that in migrating from Jilt because it’s all stored in WooCommerce.

You’ll also get dedicated integrations for certain plugins, like whether or not a person has an active subscription with WooCommerce Subscriptions or a membership powered by WooCommerce Memberships.

7. Move Email Templates and Set Up Automations

Now, you’re ready to move all of your email templates from Jilt to MailPoet. As we mentioned earlier, you cannot migrate them automatically. Instead, you’ll need to recreate your templates using MailPoet’s visual, drag-and-drop editor. Or, you can also create new designs using MailPoet’s pre-built templates.

As part of this, you’ll also want to use MailPoet to set up any other email automations that you need on your store. This includes:

• Abandoned cart reminder emails
• First purchase emails
• After-purchase emails for certain products or categories
• Etc.

However, even though you can’t automatically migrate your emails, we do still recommend exporting your key Jilt emails as HTML just so that you have them. This can also help you manually recreate those emails in MailPoet.

Let’s go through the process…

Export Emails from Jilt

To export your emails from Jilt, go to the Automations list in your Jilt dashboard. Then, select the automation sequence you want to export – e.g. your “win back inactive customers” sequence:

On the next screen, open the drop-down for the email that you want to export and click Export HTML:

You’ll need to repeat the process for all the emails that you want to export. Unfortunately, there’s not an option to bulk export all of your emails. For this reason, you might just want to focus on key emails.

To export the HTML for broadcast emails:

• Go to the Broadcasts area.
• Click the gear icon next to the email that you want to export.
• Select Export HTML.

Create Emails in MailPoet

Now, you can recreate your emails/sequences in MailPoet.

To get started, go to MailPoet → Emails → Add New. Here, you can choose from basic emails, like a newsletter (which is similar to Jilt’s Broadcast emails).

Or, if you scroll down, you’ll see five types of WooCommerce-specific emails:

• Abandoned Shopping Cart – send one or more abandoned cart reminders.
• First Purchase – send a special email to people after their first purchase.
• Purchased In This Category – send an email to people who purchase a product in a specific category for the first time.
• Purchased This Product – send an email to people who purchase a specific product for the first time.
• WooCommerce Emails Customizer – customize your core WooCommerce transactional emails using MailPoet’s editor.

These WooCommerce-specific emails are what let you really duplicate the automation functionality in Jilt.

Select the type of email that you want to create – for example, abandoned cart reminders.

You’ll then be able to customize some details, like how long to wait after an abandoned cart to send the email. You can create multiple emails with different timings to create an abandoned cart sequence.

Once you’ve made that choice, you can choose from one of MailPoet’s pre-made templates or start from a blank slate:

Then, you can customize everything using MailPoet’s visual editor, which lets you recreate your Jilt templates or build new designs.

To help you work with WooCommerce, you’ll get dedicated content widgets for products and abandoned cart content. For more about how it works, check out the email editor documentation.

If you want, you can also save your design as a template, which lets you quickly reuse it later on:

To create additional emails, you can just repeat the same process.

8. Export Additional Jilt Assets If Needed

At this point, your site is configured to use MailPoet going forward. But before you close your Jilt account, you might want to export some additional data. Namely:

• Your historic Jilt invoices if you need them for accounting.
• Your existing abandoned carts. You won’t be able to import this data to MailPoet, but you still might want to have it just in case you need the information. Jilt will export it as a CSV file.

To export your Jilt account’s invoices, go to Settings → My Account → Invoices in your Jilt dashboard. We’re using screenshots from Jilt’s help documentation here:

Then, bulk select all of the invoices that you want to export and click Export invoice. Jilt will then email you a .zip file that contains all of those invoices:

To export carts:

• Go to the Abandoned carts area.
• Bulk select the carts that you want to export.
• Choose Export carts under the Actions drop-down.
• In the popup, choose All carts.
• Click Start export.
• Wait for an email from Jilt that contains a CSV file.

9. Sunset Your Jilt Account

Now, you’re officially ready to sunset your Jilt account. 

However, all Jilt cancellations are permanent and it’s not possible to reactivate your account or access data once the cancellation is processed.

So – before you make things permanent, we highly recommend going through and double-checking that you’ve exported everything and your site is working properly with MailPoet. For example, you’ll want to make sure that…

• Your MailPoet forms are up and running where they should be.
• Any third-party opt-in plugins now point to MailPoet and not Jilt.
• All of your contacts show up in your MailPoet lists.
• You’ve set up all the automation emails that you need and you don’t need to access any of your existing Jilt email templates.

Once you’ve verified that everything is working, you can cancel your Jilt account by going to Settings → My Account → Billing and clicking Cancel account (or Downgrade to free plan):

Start Using MailPoet as a Jilt Alternative Today

Jilt is a great email marketing tool for eCommerce stores, but it’s going away for good on April 30, 2022. If you’re looking for an alternative to avoid interruption in your email marketing efforts, MailPoet is a great choice if your store uses WordPress and WooCommerce.

In this guide, we’ve shown you step-by-step how to migrate from Jilt to MailPoet to avoid any interruptions in your store’s marketing.

If you still have any questions about moving your store from Jilt to MailPoet, let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to help you get your migration working.

In this guide, I’ll explore the benefits of abandoned cart emails, how to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails with MailPoet, and best practices for creating abandoned cart emails.

Let’s dive in!

What are abandoned cart emails?

Abandoned cart emails are automated emails sent to users who leave items in their online shopping carts. These emails remind customers about the items they were interested in and encourage them to make a purchase. A great example of an abandoned cart email is the Headspace email pictured below:

Abandoned cart emails are a great opportunity to remind people about your products, further demonstrate the value of what you’re selling, and encourage people to take action. But you don’t need to take my word for it. There are some fascinating stats to back me up:

• Abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of over 40%
• People click on the links in more than 21% of these emails
• 50% of those clicks resulted in purchases

In short, abandoned cart emails can significantly increase your number of successful sales and help you retain customers. Remember, it’s always easier to keep an old customer than to find a new one.

How to create WooCommerce abandoned cart emails in MailPoet

MailPoet offers direct integration with WooCommerce, making it easy to set up WooCommerce abandoned cart emails (and other WooCommerce emails). This feature also offers several benefits:

• GDPR compliance. MailPoet will only send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails to people who are already on your list, ensuring that you stay compliant with the law.
• Ability to create multiple emails. You can create an entire series of abandoned cart emails. In fact, we recommend it!
• Access to email templates. MailPoet offers several templates specifically for abandoned cart emails.
• Complete automation. Once you’ve created your emails, MailPoet will automatically send them any time a cart is abandoned in your WooCommerce store. You don’t have to worry about a thing!

To get started, go to the “Emails” area of MailPoet and click the “Add New” near the top of the screen. This will take you to a page where you can choose the type of email you want to create.

Scroll down the page until you see the WooCommerce email options, then select “Abandoned Shopping Cart”.

This will open a page where you can configure exactly when your email will be sent. You can specify a number of hours, days, or weeks that need to pass between the cart being abandoned and the email being sent.

Once you’ve specified a time to send your abandoned cart email, you’ll be directed to the templates area of MailPoet. You can select and edit a template as you normally would.

When you’re satisfied with the design and copy of the email, click “Next”. This will direct you to a page where you can customize the email’s settings. This includes an opportunity to change when the email is sent out and to rename the Google Analytics campaign associated with this email.

When you’re satisfied with all of these settings, you can click “Activate”. MailPoet will then automatically send this email out any time someone abandons their cart in your WooCommerce store.

If you’re setting up more than one abandoned cart email (and you totally should – we cover why further down!), simply repeat the process and adjust the time lapsed after a shopper has abandoned their cart. If your abandoned cart email is successful in recovering the purchase, MailPoet will automatically stop the series for that customer for you.

Best practices for WooCommerce abandoned cart emails

Knowing the technical details of how to send WooCommerce abandoned cart emails isn’t enough to guarantee conversions. You’ll also want to follow some best practices in writing, designing, and scheduling these emails. 

We’ve got an in-depth guide to abandoned cart email best practices, so I’ll stick to covering the most important things here.

1. Understand why people abandon shopping carts

Online marketing agencies have collected an enormous amount of data about shopping cart abandonment. We know that 34% of shoppers abandon their carts when a site forces them to make an account, 23% abandon their carts because of issues with shipping, and 18%  of shoppers abandoned shopping carts so they could compare prices with other retailers.

You can use this data in a couple of ways. First, you can assess the shopping experience on your site for leak points, reducing the number of people who abandon their carts in the first place. For example, you might decide to remove the need for customers to create an account. Or you can make the idea of creating an account more appealing to encourage people to follow through.

Second, you can address some of these issues in your abandoned cart emails. For example, if you do want users to create an account before making a purchase, you can use your abandoned cart emails to emphasize how signing up benefits the customer. You can also offer a discount that can help defray shipping costs. 

2. Create a series of WooCommerce abandoned cart emails

A single abandoned cart email is a great start, but you can recover even more sales by creating a series of emails. In fact, we recommend sending three emails:

• Immediate email. This email is sent 30 minutes after someone abandons their cart, while your products/services are still fresh in their mind. This email should be a quick, simple reminder about your products. You can also include contact information for customer service.
• Second email. This email should be sent 24 hours after a cart is abandoned. If your first email isn’t opened, it’s time to switch up your tactics. Share your reviews and testimonials and remind customers how your products/services will help them.
• Third email. You want to send this email 72 hours after a shopping cart is abandoned. This is the time when you offer customers a discount. Just remember to make sure that you’re still going to make a profit after the discount. 

This structured series gives potential customers more opportunities to interact with your brand. And if they purchase your product/service after the first email, MailPoet will automatically unsubscribe them from the email series.

3. Use a persuasive subject line

Your subject line should make the purpose of your email clear in as few words as possible. Remember, mobile email clients only display 25 – 30 characters. You need to catch your audience’s interest that quickly.

Many subject lines for abandoned cart emails use some variation of “Don’t forget your stuff”, but there are several tactics you can use to create a subject line:

• Ask a question. For example, if you sell running gear, you might ask “Don’t you want to run in comfort?”
• Offer a discount. If you’re offering a discount, make it clear with a subject line like “Save 10% on your stuff”. 
• Use time sensitive language to create a sense of urgency. This works particularly well when combined with a discount. For example, you might say “Come back today for 10% off”. 
• Use action words. Tell your customer what you want them to do. Phrases like “Complete your order” offer powerful, clear direction.
• Personalize where possible. Something as simple as using your customer’s email address can make a big difference. You can find the appropriate shortcodes in the MailPoet knowledge base.

If you need some inspiration, check out our list of 12 of the best email subject lines we’ve seen.

4. Remind people about the products they were going to buy

You want to remind people about what they planned to purchase by emphasizing high quality images of your products/services.

Beardbrand does a great job of this in the email displayed below:

If you sell products like clothes or shoes, you may also want to include information about things like color and size.

You can also add things like product descriptions and reviews/testimonials.

This can easily be done in MailPoet by using the Abandoned Cart Content Widget. 

5. Make your call to action clear

A successful call to action has two main characteristics:

• Specificity. When someone sees the call to action, they should know exactly what you want them to do. In abandoned cart emails, you might stick with “View Cart” or “View Item” as your primary call to action.
• Visibility. Your call to action should have prominent placement. You can also use things like buttons and contrasting colors to make the call to action more visible.

You also want to make sure that the call to action is repeated. The easiest way to do this is to place a button at both the beginning and the end of your email.

Final advice on how to create WooCommerce abandoned cart emails

If you’re not using WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, you’re potentially losing hundreds or even thousands of sales every year. 

Luckily, MailPoet makes it easy to create fully automated abandoned cart emails for your WooCommerce store. Advanced tools like the Abandoned Cart Content Widget and personalization shortcodes allow you to optimize these emails for the highest possible conversion rate. 

So what are you waiting for? Start creating WooCommerce abandoned cart emails today!

In this guide, I will explore:

• How to define a marketing email
• Why less is more in email marketing
• The importance of consistency
• How to figure out what your audience wants
• How to balance marketing emails with newsletters
• When to send follow up emails
• The power of offering multiple subscription options

When you’re finished reading, you’ll have the knowledge you need to create a successful email marketing plan. 

How to define a marketing email

Technically, every email sent to your list is a marketing email. You’re always trying to reinforce your brand, strengthen relationships, and remind people about your products/services. 

For the purposes of this article, however, I’m going to define marketing emails as emails with the sole purpose of selling a product/service. This definition doesn’t include things like newsletters, email courses, or requests for feedback. We’ll talk more about the importance of this in the section on balancing your email schedule with different types of content.

Why less is more

Everyone wants to spend less time on their inbox. There are dozens of articles and even whole books about the topic. Moreover, a survey by TechnologyAdvice revealed that 45% of adults want to receive fewer marketing emails. 

The other reason to minimize the number of marketing emails you send is to ensure a consistent quality level. Customers can tell when an email is rushed; if it happens often, they’ll stop paying attention to your emails. Automation is a huge help here, since you only need to create an automated email once and it’ll send every time someone completes an action. Luckily, MailPoet makes it easy to create several types of WordPress autoresponders.

All in all, you’re better off limiting the number of marketing emails you send during an average week. When I help brands develop an email marketing plan, I usually recommend one or two marketing emails per week, with an increase to 3-4 emails per week during major sales. 

The importance of consistency

On the other hand, you don’t want to send emails too infrequently either. A long gap between emails can lead subscribers to forget about your brand and why they signed up in the first place. Moreover, people sign up for your list because they want to hear from you. A full 60% of users want to receive emails at least once a week, and 80% want to receive emails at least once a month:

(Image from https://jilt.com/blog/email-marketing-frequency/) 

So what’s a marketer to do? Well, you need to give your audience clear expectations and stick to them. To do this, make sure your sign up forms and landing pages contain the following information: 

• How often you’ll send emails 
• What types of emails you’ll send
• Other benefits of signing up for your list, like your opt-in bonus

Of course, you also need to deliver on these promises. That means if your site says you’ll send emails once a week, you send emails once a week. You can make this easier by creating your emails in batches and scheduling them in advance.

If you notice yourself regularly failing to meet your promised schedule, take some time to reassess your email marketing efforts. Is there a way you can make it easier to create campaigns? Can you delegate email marketing to an employee? What about switching your weekly emails to a product or article roundup so you can focus on your website content? Whatever you decide, make sure to tell your subscribers about it and update your signup forms & landing pages to reflect any changes.

How to figure out what your audience wants

We talked about how to set audience expectations in the previous section, but that’s only half of the equation. Your scheduled content must be rooted in what your audience actually wants.

There are three main ways to figure this out: by considering industry trends, taking a look at your analytics, and asking your audience directly.

Industry trends

The first thing to consider is what brands in your industry are already doing. Luckily, companies like MailChart do an enormous amount of research on email marketing. The MailCharts Industry Insights area includes reporting on a variety of popular industries, ranging from health & fitness to air travel. This can give you a snapshot of how email marketing works for your industry as a whole.

This broad information is great, but there are dozens of niches within every industry. To get a clearer picture of your ideal marketing mix, you’ll want to take a look at what your direct competition is doing. Choose 3-5 brands in your niche, sign up for their newsletter, and take notes on the emails they send over the course of a month.

Some things you’ll want to pay attention to:

• What percentage of their emails are marketing emails.
• How their marketing emails are designed.
• What percentage of their marketing emails promote a sale and/or offer some kind of discount.
• If they have a separate automated welcome sequence and, if they do, what that sequence contains.
• What other types of content they send + how often each type of content is sent.
• The length of each email.

This can help you understand what your target customers are used to in terms of brand communication. 

Email analytics

This is the data your email marketing service tracks about how people interact with your email campaigns. There are five main email marketing statistics you need to pay attention to in order to determine your ideal email frequency:

• Subscribe rate. The number of people subscribing to your newsletter over a given period of time. If your subscribe rate is low, it typically means you’re not doing enough to promote your newsletter. However, it might also be a sign that people aren’t interested in receiving what you’re offering. For example, if you’re sending emails every day and nobody’s signing up, you might need to reduce your email frequency to once a week.
• Unsubscribe rate. The number of people unsubscribing from your newsletter over a given period of time. If this number is high, it’s typically a sign that you’re sending emails too often or focusing too heavily on marketing emails.
• Open rate. How many of your subscribers open a specific email. You can track these across campaigns to get an idea of your typical open rate. Pay attention to what types of emails are opened most often and the times/days of the week that emails are most likely to be opened.
• Conversion rate. The percentage of subscribers who buy something after receiving an email promotion. This can help you track the effectiveness of individual marketing emails. MailPoet makes it easy to track this through our integration with WooCommerce.
• Money earned. The amount of money made from conversions in a specific campaign. As a MailPoet user, you can view this information for all of your campaigns at a glance in the “Emails” section.

You want to pay extra attention to these statistics when your email marketing schedule changes. This can help you determine if you’re under or over-promoting sales, sending too many emails, or sending your emails at inopportune times. 

For more information on how to use analytics to improve your content, check out our  guide to email analytics. 

Asking your audience

The final way to figure out the best frequency for your emails is to ask your audience directly. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Send a survey to your subscribers.
• Include a question like “are you happy with the frequency of these emails” at the end of an email campaign.
• Ask your followers on social media what kind of content/promotions mix would convince them to sign up for your newsletter.
• Create a specialized poll that asks unsubscribers to share why they’re unsubscribing.

The key here is to make it as easy as possible for people to tell you what they like/what they want from your emails. Only a small percentage of your audience will answer, and that percentage gets smaller when the process is difficult or not clearly explained.

How to balance marketing emails with other content

To figure out your business’s ideal mix of marketing emails and other content, you’ll need to consider three factors:

• Your goals. Every email will have its own goal, but it’s also important to consider your overall goals for your list. You obviously want to sell your products/services, but that’s probably not your only goal. This means that along with your promos, you’ll need content tailored to meet your other goals. For example, you might send a monthly newsletter to strengthen relationships with your audience.
• Audience expectations. As we’ve already discussed, your content needs to line up with what your audience expects based on their previous experiences with your industry and the expectations laid out in your sign up forms/landing pages.
• Value. Your email marketing schedule should aim to maximize value for your audience. For most companies, this means sending out a mix of newsletters, promotional emails, and educational content. Other companies, especially companies that sell a wide range of products, will send purely promotional content and provide value through discounts and other rewards.

With this information, you’ll be able to create a successful email marketing schedule. This will look different for every business, but I’ve created a couple of examples to help you envision what this looks like.

Example: Fitness Store

Goals: To provide subscribers with the knowledge they need to safely use the fitness products we sell + increase sales of our best fitness products.

Audience expectations: A mix of short educational emails, longer monthly updates on what’s happening in-store + occasional product promotions.

Example: Art Supply Store

Goals: To inspire artsy people to level up their skills and try new artistic mediums, using our products to do so.

Audience expectations: To receive updates about new products, maybe some cool project ideas, and discounts.

You’ll note that this example doesn’t have any details for promotions around sales or product releases. Many businesses switch to completely different email schedules in the months before, during, and after a big sale or product release.

The power of offering multiple frequency options

Another way to make sure you’re sending the right number of marketing emails for your audience is to offer multiple list options with different email frequencies. For example, you might send a weekly newsletter to one list and a monthly newsletter to another. This lets your audience decide how often they want to be emailed.

This tactic is common among large companies, but you don’t need a marketing department to make it happen. You can use MailPoet’s automated “Latest Post Notifications” feature to schedule post roundups daily, weekly, or monthly.

MailPoet offers several templates for these emails:

At the end of the process, you’ll be able to select the lists that receive this email. You can include as many lists as you want. MailPoet will make sure that subscribers on multiple lists will only receive one email.

You can run an unlimited number of recurring post notifications at once and send each one to a different list. You can then add an area to your signup forms asking users to choose which list they want to go on.

What about follow up emails?

The final type of email you need to consider is the follow up emails that exist outside of your regular email marketing schedule. More specifically, I’m talking about the WooCommerce autoresponders you can send in MailPoet: abandoned cart emails, first purchase emails, “purchased this product” emails, and “purchased a product in this category” emails.

Figuring out the balance here is a bit tricky. Since we’ve already established that most people want to receive fewer emails, you can probably assume customers will get annoyed if they receive an email from you every day. This means that if you’re sending a newsletter every week, you don’t want to send more than 2-3 follow-up emails in a specific week. But you can’t control when people will perform certain actions.

So what’s a shop owner to do?

Well, there are also some best practices you can follow for each type of follow up email:

• Abandoned cart emails should be limited to 3 follow-up emails, with the first one typically sent 24-48 hours after the card is abandoned. If someone made a conscious decision to not purchase your products, they probably don’t want to keep hearing about those products for weeks on end either.
• First purchase emails are an opportunity to thank your customers. To best fulfill this purpose, you want to send a single first purchase email immediately after a purchase is made.
• Product purchase emails are a great way to tell people about products they might like based on their proven experiences. You can also use them to encourage people to replace consumable items. However, it’s important to remember that these emails are triggered by the sale of an individual product, not by order. If your store has a large inventory, you might want to stick with “Purchased in this category” emails.
• Purchased in this category emails are the most flexible in terms of how many you can send.

Most of all, remember that the worst thing you can do for your business is overwhelm your customers with follow up emails. You never want to be considered a spammer or have your emails reported as spam.

Final advice on how many marketing emails to send

Deciding how many marketing emails to send is all about finding the balance between marketing your business and providing value to your customers. You’ll probably need to do some experimentation to find the best content mix for you, but there are some best practices you can use to guide your email marketing schedule:

• Remember that less is more.
• Keep a consistent email marketing schedule and tell potential subscribers about it.
• Use industry trends, email analytics, and direct communications with subscribers to discover how you can better tailor your content to their needs.
• Consider offering multiple lists or list segments with different email frequencies.
• Pay close attention to how you use follow up emails and how people react to them, with an eye towards making sure you’re not flooding people’s inboxes

And of course, be sure to track your email analytics so you can optimize your schedule over time.