While WooCommerce has robust email tools built right into core, to send a greater range of messages, you need to integrate your online store with a WooCommerce email plugin. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the top plugins and email extensions for WooCommerce currently available that help store owners do more with their email communications.

For more on email marketing and WooCommerce, be sure to read 10+ WooCommerce Email Marketing Tips & Strategies and A Complete Guide to Email for WooCommerce.

1. MailPoet

Let’s kick off with MailPoet.

MailPoet is the most popular newsletter plugin for WordPress. More than 500,000 websites trust MailPoet to send their marketing messages. It provides all the tools you need to create, schedule, and send stunning custom emails from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

It’s grown a following over the years as a newsletter plugin, but these days it offers so much more. Now you can integrate MailPoet with WooCommerce to encourage signups at checkout, send personalized recommendations to customers based on their previous purchases, and set up all-important welcome and abandoned cart emails. 

Recently, they’ve also added a feature that allows you to customize WooCommerce transactional emails, too.

Key features

• Intuitive drag-and-drop email designer and templates
• Welcome emails and abandoned cart emails
• Automated post email notifications
• Secure and reliable deliverability of all emails (including ones containing WooCommerce order details etc.) via MailPoet’s email servers
• Advanced analytics for tracking open rates, clicks, and unsubscribes
• Sends transactional WooCommerce emails
• Segmentation and personalization
• WooCommerce email customizer included

How to use MailPoet

Once you’ve installed and activated MailPoet on your WooCommerce site, you’ll see your customers have been added to a new email list called “WooCommerce Customers.”

After configuring the basic settings (MailPoet > Settings), you can start sending emails to your list right away. Go to MailPoet > Emails > +New Email to choose what you would like to send.

You’ll find five WooCommerce options: Abandoned Shopping Cart, First Purchase, Purchased In This Category, Purchased This Product, and WooCommerce Emails Customizer.

Let’s say you want to set up an abandoned cart email. When you click through to set up, you’ll be prompted to choose the timing of your email.

Next comes the fun part: designing your email. MailPoet has a fantastic collection of professionally-designed templates, which you can completely customize to suit your WooCommerce store.

Once you’ve picked a template, use the user-friendly drag-and-drop designer to customize every part of your email, including text, images, and colors.

When you’re happy with your email, click “Next” to send or schedule your email.

Pricing

MailPoet is free for up to 1,000 subscribers, with paid plans including advanced functionality starting at 7€/month. Plus, you can send via MailPoet’s email servers for free.

Ideal for

MailPoet’s Starter plan lets you enjoy all of its core features immediately without having to pay a cent, which is perfect for small business owners who are getting started building an email list. As your business grows, MailPoet will grow with you. It’ll take care of your automated emails and segmentation, and provide advanced analytics so you can track your marketing efforts.

2. Email Customizer for WooCommerce with Drag and Drop Email Builder

There are lots of email customizer plugins for WooCommerce around for a reason—the standard WooCommerce email templates design is rather, well, standard. You can change the color scheme, and that’s really about it.

If you want to change the look and feel of the default email, including colors, fonts, and add your logo, you’ll need a plugin like Email Customizer for WooCommerce with Drag and Drop Email Builder.

This easy-to-use plugin provides an intuitive interface for adding a logo, header image, footer text, body text, custom paragraph texts, text color, social media icons, images, and more. 

Key features

• User-friendly drag and drop email editor
• Add a logo, header, footer, body text, custom paragraph texts, social media icons, images and more
• Send single-use, unique coupon codes to your customers to use for their next purchase
• Supports translations and WPML
• Shortcodes for dynamic data

How to use Email Customizer for WooCommerce with Drag and Drop Email Builder

Once you’ve installed and activated this plugin, go to WooCommerce > WooCommerce Email Customizer. Choose the default template you want to customize from the dropdown at the top and then select the sample order you wish to show.

The screengrab above is from the developer’s demo site for the plugin. I recommend having a play if you’re looking for an email customization plugin for WooCommerce as it lets you get hands-on.

While similar plugins use the WordPress Customizer for editing, this plugin is much like a page builder, giving you plenty of options for completely customizing the default templates. You can drag and drop elements like text and paragraph blocks, and add images, coupons, social media icons, and more.

Pricing

A regular license is $49 and includes future updates and 6 months’ support.

Ideal for

This is a handy extension for any WooCommerce store owner looking to customize their emails. It’s super easy to use and takes no time at all to change how the various default emails look.

3. AutomateWoo

AutomateWoo is a marketing automation plugin that has flown under the radar in recent years as primary developer Dan Bitzer has quietly worked behind the scenes building a robust set of features.

With AutomateWoo, you can create and automate welcome, abandoned cart, win-back, and other types of WooCommerce follow up emails. It also enables birthday emails, refer a friend, personalized coupons, and discounts for reviews.

Prospress bought out AutomateWoo last year, and Automattic has since acquired Prospress. AutomateWoo is now available for purchase from the WooCommerce Extensions Store.

Key features

• Create follow-up emails based on a variety of triggers and actions, including welcome, abandoned cart, win-back, birthday, and wishlist emails.
• Display products from your WooCommerce store in emails.
• Send personalized discounts and coupons to customers.
• Advanced analytics and statistics.

How to use AutomateWoo

After setting up AutomateWoo for the first time, the dashboard will be pretty bare. When in use, it provides stats on how many workflows have been run, conversions as a result of workflows, and other more typical email stats, such as opens and clicks.

So what’s a workflow? A workflow is a sequence you put together to carry out a particular marketing task. For example, you might set up workflows to send abandoned cart emails, invite customers to review a product, send 15% off coupons to customers who haven’t shopped with you in 90 days, etc.

A workflow is made up of different combinations of triggers, actions, and rules:

• Trigger – An event that starts the workflow
• Rules – Rules determine if the workflow will run
• Actions – Actions run when rules are met

Let’s take a look at an example: how to set up a win-back email.

In the WordPress admin, go to AutomateWoo > Workflows and click on “Add Workflow.”

Give your workflow a name and then choose a trigger. In this case, “Customer Win Back.” You might want to select the minimum number of days since the customer last made a purchase, as well as other options listed for the trigger.

Next, choose rules. You don’t have to set rules if none apply. For this example, I’m not going to use rules.

Then you want to set actions. For this example, I want to send an email that contains a 15% off coupon. Here’s are all the fields filled in for this particular action:

To the right, you’ll notice a big list of variables. These are bits of the customer, order, and other WooCommerce information you can use to make actions more personalized and dynamic.

Once you’re happy with the workflow, scroll back up to the top and choose the timing (run immediately, delayed, scheduled, fixed, and schedule with a variable) and then set it to “Active” and save. AutomateWoo will take care of running the workflow whenever the trigger is met.

Pricing

A single site subscription for AutomateWoo is $99 per year, including updates and support.

Suitable for

AutomateWoo opens up a whole world of possibilities for automating communication tasks. This is a powerful WooCommerce plugin for store owners and marketers who enjoy experimentation and testing.

Be warned, though; it doesn’t send emails itself. You’ll need to set up an SMTP plugin for that.

Other WooCommerce email plugins we recommend… and don’t

Many WordPress experts will stress that a WooCommerce should not send emails but instead use an SMTP plugin to send the emails from a sending service, like SendGrid. It’s true that hosts are not ideal for deliverability. We do recommend the SMTP plugin, but you can avoid them altogether by using solutions like MailPoet.

For the longest time, Follow Up Emails was a staple of the WooCommerce Marketplace. But this plugin hasn’t been developed in a while, so we recommend avoiding it altogether. 

Summing up

There are quite a few email extensions available for WooCommerce, but these are my top three. Each has its pros and cons, so be sure to give them a test run before adding any of the above extensions to your site.

No matter what you choose, you can’t go wrong with powering up your email communications. Customizing your default transactional emails and sending a greater range of marketing messages will not only help you better communicate with your customers but will help boost your revenue, too.

Want to read more about WooCommerce email? Don’t miss 10+ Top WooCommerce Email Marketing Tips & Strategies and How a Sunglasses Brand Built its Email Following.

Have you used any of the WooCommerce email extensions we’ve covered above? Let us know in the comments below!

There are so many plugins out there to help manage your subscribers, ranging from tools that help you grow your subscriber list, to beautifying your existing forms.

Since we needed more opt-in forms ourselves, we decided to review Bloom by Elegant Themes, which works with MailPoet right out of the box!

Bloom is a Premium plugin. It costs $89 per year for the Developer Account, which also includes all of the extra themes and plugins.

Having tested a few other subscription form plugins in my time, I found Bloom to be incredibly easy to set up. It’s simple to create beautiful looking subscription forms with minimal effort.

Creating & customizing your Bloom subscription form

Bloom offers six types of signup forms:

• Pop up
• Fly in
• Below post
• Inline
• Locked content
• Widget

I won’t be covering them all in this post – you’ll get the gist pretty quickly. I’ll be focusing on the Pop Up subscription forms.

Connecting MailPoet with Bloom

On your site, go to Bloom -> My Accounts and select New Account, in the top right.

Settings:

• Select Email Provider: MailPoet
• Account Name: MailPoet. It actually doesn’t matter what you put here, since you don’t have an account/login.
• Click Authorize and you’ll see your account lists. Then click ‘Save & Exit’. That’s it, MailPoet is set up!

Creating a new signup form

The great thing about Bloom is that it has plenty of design styles ready to be customized with your own colors and font settings. No fussy coding or hacking required. This means you can get set up very quickly!

1. Go to Bloom -> OptIn Forms and click the New Option button, in the top right.
2. Choose a new OptIn form type. Let’s pick a Popup.
3. Give your new OptIn a name, choose MaiPoet from the list of Email Providers and your “Account Name” then select the list you want your subscribers to be subscribed to.
   

   

4. Click the “Next: Design your OptIn” button and choose from various styles. You’ll be able to customize them further in the next stage of the setup.
   

   

5. Now the fun begins! You can play with the styles and add first and last name, or just a single name field. Note that you can only have name and email fields. Don’t forget to customize the OptIn titles and change/remove the image if you want. You can even give the image a little animation.
6. You can check how your form looks as you’re designing it by clicking the eye button on the right as you progress.
   

   

7. Finally, move on to “Display Settings”. This is where you can fine tune when and where your new popup form will appear. For other OptIn types, you might have different settings (e.g. popup vs below post).
   

   

8. Click “Save & Exit” and that’s it, you’ve created a new OptIn!

The final result

Our top tips for politely achieving signups

We strongly recommend that you enable, “Display once per session” for Popup and Fly-in OptIn forms. Why? These types of forms can be seen as invasive and annoying. You don’t want to put readers off your site because you are pestering them for a signup. We recommend a session duration of at least 14 days, which means that your popup won’t reappear for another 14 days after it’s been closed.

In addition, add a good delay to a popup appearing. We all have seen poor use of these types of signups, which are presented as soon as you get on a site. A 20 second delay means 20 seconds on a single page. If a user changes pages, the countdown starts again. If a user signs up to your newsletter after a delay of 10+ seconds, you can be sure they are interested in your content.

Finally, don’t use one popup form across all pages and post. Target the messaging to the place you want it to appear. Take the following situation:

You have a landing page for a specific product. You want people to sign up to your newsletter to get them to eventually make a sale. You might even send them a targeted drip campaign when they sign up. Best practice would be to make a new MailPoet list specifically for these signups and your Bloom form will subscribe users to it. You’d also customize the messaging on the form such as “Want more information about the [product]?”

The downsides of Bloom

Whilst I think Bloom is an awesome little plugin, there are 4 minor downsides:

1. You always need to click on the Preview button to see what the final result will look like. In other words, you can’t do a live preview of your form.
2. Once you select a template, you can’t easily change it.
3. I can’t add additional fields. I can only have first name, last name and email address. This means that we can’t give the user a choice of lists to opt in to.
4. Bloom doesn’t allow multiple lists. With the standard MailPoet forms you can opt a subscriber into more than one list at once, whereas the dropdown form in Bloom forces you to choose just one.

In summary

Bloom gets 4/5. Super easy-to-use and well-designed plugin. Half a point is docked only for the above issues, but in 95% of cases, they aren’t needed.