Email marketing for WooCommerce stores

Email is a very effective way to market your WooCommerce store. Even though other types of direct marketing such as messaging are gaining ground, email remains easy and cost effective.

If you have an e-commerce store and aren’t using email to market to new and past customers then you are leaving money on the table.

Types of email marketing you can use with your WooCommerce store

Email Newsletter

There are a few different types of email you can use to keep in contact with your website’s visitors. The first and most common is an email newsletter. Building an email newsletter list can be as simple an signing up for an email service like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor and putting a sign up form on your website.

Typically these types of emails are sent out at regular intervals, weekly or monthly. They can contain information about new products, sales and seasonal promotions.

Having an e-commerce store put you at an advantage when it comes to collecting data on your customers. Almost all WooCommerce stores need to collect an email address when someone makes a purchase. You can then use the customer info to add them to your email newsletter. It might be tempting to add all your customers to your email list. But it is good manners to ask them first when they checkout.

The WooCommerce Mailchimp plugin will add a ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ checkbox to the checkout and payment page.

Transactional email

Transactional email are the emails that are generated and sent automatically by WooCommerce when a purchase is made. ‘Your order has been received, Your order is on the way, those types of emails.

The first thing you should do is brand your transactional emails with your store’s logo. Login to your WooCommerce store and go to WooCommerce > Settings > Email. On this page near the bottom are some fields where you can upload a header image, change colours to suit your branding and add a footer message.

Email automations

Automated email and auto-responder sequences are almost an entire subject on their own. They can be very powerful if used in the right way. Email service providers are increasingly offering automations. Services like MailChimp, Active Campaign and Drip are all great for automations.

Lead Magnets. If your WooCommerce store sells a big priced item then your customers probably do a fair amount of research online first before buying. They need to make sure the product will meet their needs. To sell products like these a lead magnet can be useful. A lead magnet is something of value that you offer a potential customer is exchange for their emails address. Once you have their email address you can send them emails that offer them valuable content and slowly build up to asking for the sale. For instance, say you sell spa pools online. They are quite expensive and most people will shop around to make sure they get the right pool at the right price. You could have a lead magnet that outlines the 5 key things to know before buying a spa pool.

This will contain useful information for the person looking to buy a pool. Information about what size they might need, power consumption, maintenance and pump life.

Then your email series can give them a few more helpful tidbits on pool selection and offer a few products that might fit the bill.

Sample products. Sometimes would be customers need to see a physical sample before making a decision. Stores that sell carpet, paint, curtains and other decorating supplies are a good example.

Your store might give people free samples to check colours etc, which is another great way to get people into your email marketing funnel.

In exchange for a sample you can collect their email address and then send a series of emails encouraging them to make a purchase. You can even offer them a small discount.

Abandoned cart recovery. Most e-commerce stores have a percentage of visitors that put items into their shopping cart and then fail to complete the transaction. This can be because of a variety of reasons. Sometimes people get distracted, or at the last moment they get cold feet.

There are WooCommerce store extensions that, provided the visitor filled in their email address, will send out follow up emails to encourage the person to come back to the site and complete the transaction. The plugin will even save the products that were in the cart and send the person a link to the full cart. So all they have to do is pay.

As you can see, email marketing can be of great use to a WooCommerce store. Everything from product research to checkout and repeat customers can be improved with email marketing.