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Increase WooCommerce Customer Engagement with Email Automation using MailChimp

Email marketing remains the winner of conversion games, no matter how conventional or old-school it is. As per a survey, emails still have more than 60% of open rate, implying that you can achieve an unbelievably good conversion rate, if promoting the right content to the readers.

Alongside keeping the emails innovative, businesses need to add right CTAs (Call to Action) and send the email on optimal timestamp. For example, offers for businesses won’t perform well if sent of weekends. Similarly, retail shopping offers won’t do any good if you’ll send it to your customer in their busiest work hour, but, if pushed on holidays, a good conversion rate can be achieved.

Seeing the importance of multiple factors related to email marketing, it might look an exhausting task for manual accomplishment. However, scheduling, template creation, bulk sending, etc. are a few things, which could make your digital marketing campaign effective and yet smooth. And yes, it is possible. With the right tools and approach, you can automate a large part of this process.

Wait, are you using WordPress with WooCommerce for running your online business?

Well, get MailChimp. This email marketing and automation tool will help you automate your WooCommerce sales campaigns and manage workflows efficiently.

In this article, we are going to discuss everything about it – from what MailChimp is, why to use it and how to integrate it with your WooCommerce store through different plugins.

What is MailChimp for WooCommerce?

MailChimp for WooCommerce, in simplest terms, is a marketing automation tool for sellers. It is an extended version of MailChimp, created by the same company. Once you integrate this tool with your WooCommerce shop and your sales data (Such as, data, customer statistics, purchase summary, etc.) will get synchronized to your MailChimp account.

This free plugin can do a lot of things, such as –

  • Create targeted marketing campaigns;
  • Post-purchase follow-up with the customers;
  • Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns
  • Sending notifications related to abandoned carts;
  • Push product recommendations to your customers’ inboxes;
  • Create analytical reports and calculate the ROI of your campaigns.
  • Subscription form to convert your website visitors.
  • Promo Code promotion

And a lot more!

Additionally, there are multiple extensions for the MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin, which could uplift the capabilities of your email marketing campaigns. How and what – let’s talk of these things in later sections.

Why Should You Utilize MailChimp for Automating your Email Marketing Campaigns?

Significantly-increased customer engagement and boosted sales – You want these, right?

MailChimp for WooCommerce can help you achieve it easily. Not sure? Okay. Now, understand why MailChimp is our favorite email automation and reporting tool for your WooCommerce marketing campaigns –

The Freedom of Customization

Emails with good visuals, less content and spacious designs are the best for promotional campaigns. Instead of putting in hundreds of dollars in getting such HTML templates designed for you, businesses can do it on their own, if using MailChimp. It has numerous pre-designed customizable templates to woo your customers. At the same time, you can also create completely custom templates through it.

Time-saving is guaranteed with this comprehensive solution.

MailChimp is an all-in-one solution for your email marketing needs. This powerful platform lets you do designing, scheduling, list management, analysis and many other email marketing related tasks in one place. Also, you won’t need to sit back and wait for sending an email to a number of people at a certain time; you can just schedule it and forget. No manual email creation is required every time either. MailChimp will handle the rest.

Smooth Multisite Operations

If you own multiple WordPress and WooCommerce websites, and want to manage & track your email marketing campaigns for them, it is always advised to go for a multisite Plugin like MailChimp. It can be installed and set up really quick for your websites.

Email marketing campaigns, without good analytical data, won’t perform efficiently in the long-term. It requires regular insights and their scrutiny so that a business could create well-targeted email campaigns. Also, the availability of good real-time analytics reports helps you understand what’s performing and whatnot.

As there are details like open rate, click cards, intuitive analytics charts and unsubscription are made available for you by MailChimp, you can improve your marketing campaigns using this advanced email automation tool for the future. Overall, it yields amazing results if utilized well.

Social Sharing

Social media platforms are the best way of gaining the attention of your buyers or customers. It’s where most of your potential leads are. Hence, the social sharing of your offers is more than necessary today.

You can manage Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ad campaigns using the MailChimp for WooCommerce tool.

Targeted Campaigns

Narrowing your audience on the basis of parameters, such as location, activities, gender, etc. may help you improve your conversion rate and customer engagement rate. Using MailChimp, segmenting of your audience and subscribers isn’t tough at all. So, you can run successful targeted campaigns using it.

Prevention for the ‘Spammer’ tag!

Business emails need to be sent in hundreds, or in thousands sometimes. That’s the cause why your emails start landing in the spam folder of your potential customers in some days only. MailChimp helps in the avoidance of this issue. You can create subscriber lists with any number of email addresses and minimize the risk of getting marked as a spammer.

Return on Investment

So, the basic MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin is free. Having enough features for small businesses, it does not add any economic burden on your shoulders. On the other side, the costing of advanced MailChimp extensions, available for WooCommerce, is not costly either.

If we talk about the ROI for your marketing campaigns will be much higher than your investment in buying a subscription for any of these plugins. So, using MailChimp for WooCommerce is always a profitable decision.

Useful Plugins

We’ve given a quick introduction of MailChimp for WooCommerce Plugin above. Though this plugin is great, your big store might need some more plugins to improve its functionality. The best plugins for this purpose are –

WooCommerce MailChimp Pro

There is a free version of this freemium plugin, created by Saint Systems. Using this plugin, you can easily integrate your WooCommerce with the MailChimp account. It can do the following –

  • Automating the subscription of your customers to MailChimp Lists
  • MailChimp Tag Creation and auto-building of interest Groups
  • Adding tags to list items as per order status (order creation, processing, and completion) automatically

However, you will need to use the WooCommerce MailChimp Pro Plugin to avail of the advanced features of this extension. They are different pricing packages of the plugin, as per your requirements ($49 for one website, $99 up to 5 websites and $149 up to 25 websites – per year). You get a year of support and updates with these packages, alongside.

With this setup, you will be able to perform following advanced actions –

  • Enabling double opt-in to adhere to the international laws related to anti-spam.
  • Creating product-specific lists and tags for your shop, in order to segment your target audience better.
  • Creating a single big list of all customers for common marketing campaigns.
  • Manually adding customers to lists created as per interests and tags.
  • Creating a purchaser list after order completion.

Not just this, there are multiple features that will soon be added to the MailChimp for WooCommerce Pro by Saint Systems.

WooChimp

For the integration of your WooCommerce shop’s data to MailChimp, you can get started with WooChimp – WooCommerce MailChimp Integration Plugin and make it happen smoothly. The regular license of this premium plugin costs $38 at present.

With this plugin integrated into your WooCommerce store, you can turn your email marketing campaigns into the lead-yielding machine. Alongside sending the order data to your MailChimp account, this plugin also lets you avail of the benefits of its advanced targeting and reporting aids. WooChimp plugin subscribes your buyers to your store on checkout so that you could send your future offers to them without hassles.

With the WooChimp plugin, you can –

  • Create better-targeted campaigns based on customer behavior.
  • Merge multiple tags to create efficient lists.
  • Enable powerful auto-responder functionality which could reply to your customers automatically as per their actions and order status.
  • Check the shop insights through advanced campaign-to-order reports as tracked through this plugin.

Alongside, the WooCommerce store owners get –

  • Full benefits and features of MailChimp to utilize.
    • Shop data is automatically sent to MailChimp.
    • Bidirectional integration of WooCommerce and MailChimp did for their store.
    • Optional checkbox for signing up the buyers during checkout.
    • Capabilities to display a signup form on any shop page in widgets.
    • An option to add all customers to MailChimp directly.
    • Efficiency to skip re-subscribing the people who’ve unsubscribed.
    • Translation-ready plugin.

Looks fascinating already, right?

Making MailChimp with your WooCommerce Store

Okay. So by now, you have understood which plugins are to be installed and purchased for WooCommerce shop.

Downloading and installing those plugins isn’t a tough job, we all know. So, we are not going to describe that process. Also, we have added the links for the needed plugin with their descriptions. Therefore, you can find the requisites easily.

For now, we are going to describe the quick steps of making the MailChimp work for your shop so that you could avail of all its advantages. Here is the procedure –

  1. Create a MailChimp account, using the link to their official website. For registering to MailChimp, you will have to visit their website and click on ‘Sign up for Free’. Thereafter, enter the email address, username, password, etc. to begin towards email automation for your eCommerce shop.
  • You’ll receive an email confirmation for the account creation. Use the instructions and link to get access to your account.
  • After confirming I’m not a robot, you will be able to see forms, asking for your details. Enter the details, such as first name, last name, business’s name, website URL, address, etc.
  • After it, all remains is – taking a quiz, connecting social media accounts and importing existing email subscription lists (if there is any). For now, you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to it only. However, you can also use MailChimp for running Instagram ads. Once it’s all done, you will be able to get started with the MailChimp.

Now, create lists in your MailChimp account and install the suggested plugins to your WooCommerce website to enjoy amazing email automation facilities which, in the end, results in boosted customer engagement & sales. Additionally, you can find dozens more such free and premium plugins to uplift the reach and revenue of your WooCommerce Store.

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I am a Product Marketer and Growth hacker with expertise in Digital marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO), Email Marketing, Paid Campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, Content development strategies, and Competitive Research & Analysis. Nimesh is Product Manager at theDotstore.com