Last updated - October 9, 2020
When you are running an online store, emails are an essential aspect that you cannot ignore. There are several types of emails that you send to customers. These include order completion emails, follow up emails, and other ones with a marketing nature. Whatever be the purpose of the mail, emails bring in a lot of scope for customer engagement and brand building. WooCommerce, by default, has a standard set of email options. However, you can incorporate a professional appeal to all your emails by using some of the WooCommerce email plugins. This article will list out some of the notable WooCommerce email plugins, and discuss the various strategies that you can incorporate into better WooCommerce email management.
WooCommerce email management plugins
Your store may appear quite boring and dull if you are sending just plain text in all your transactional emails. In fact, you can customize your email templates to make them look attractive and engaging. WooCommerce email plugins would definitely help you if you are actively focusing to improve your email strategies. Here is a list of some of the best:
Email Customizer for WooCommerce
This plugin allows complete customization of your WooCommerce emails. With the help of this plugin, you can easily customize different aspects including header/footer, colors, links, and even the text in the email. In addition, it allows you to add custom CSS, to personalize your emails. Moreover, the preview option would help you see your customizations before finalizing it. This plugin would help you create a great impression on your customers, without getting into the hassles of coding.
The regular license of the plugin is available for purchase at $29.
WooCommerce Email Test
It would be really good if you can see how the emails you are sending to customers appear in their inbox. This free plugin helps you manage this feature without much trouble. WooCommerce Email Test plugin works in a simple manner. It creates a ‘test order’ on your WooCommerce admin, and using that you can test several email types that you regularly send. These emails include New, Processing and Completed orders along with customer invoice and customer notes.
WooCommerce Pretty Emails
This plugin truly helps to make your WooCommerce emails look pretty. You can customize several aspects of your email using this plugin, including banners, text, font, color, etc. in addition, you can include social media profiles in the emails that you are sending to customers using this plugin. You can purchase a regular license of this plugin at $18.
YITH WooCommerce Email Templates
Emails are a great way to make a great impression in the minds of your customers. This YITH plugin helps immensely to create professional quality to the emails you send out to customers. Basically, you can personalize the emails to make it consistent with the overall style of your site. One advantage of using this plugin is that you can create a separate template using the available layouts, for each different email type that you are sending.
The plugin encourages you to experiment with different styles with the preview option to make sure you are managing good outcomes with what is in your mind. It also allows creating a menu on the email, which you can link to various resources that might be useful to the customer. Moreover, it helps you customize the footer and easily insert social media icons on your emails. The plugin is compatible with WPML, so you don’t have to worry about translations. A single site license of this plugin is available for $65. You need to pay $99 for a license for up to 6 sites, and $179 for up to 30 sites.
Follow Ups
This extension provides you with something extra to the default transactional mail options on your WooCommerce store. Basically, you can send follow up emails to customers based on their interests. This is a proven way to improve customer engagement on your store, and the result would be better sales and conversions. The extension helps you automate your email strategy by ensuring prompt emails to customers and prospective buyers. And, you don’t need to worry about missing out on any leads, as there is an option to keep reminders in the extension.
In fact, you can actually create an email list using this extension, and personalize the templates to suit each specific campaign. It also integrates Twitter into your customer engagement strategy, to send prompt reminders. Moreover, the extension offers detailed reports that would enable you to stay on top of multiple campaigns at the same time. And the option to integrate Google Analytics helps you a lot in measuring the success of individual email campaigns.
A single site subscription to the plugin is $99. 5 site and 25 site subscriptions are available at $149 and $249.
Advanced Notifications
When you receive a new order, normally the notification is sent to the customer. However, you also have to inform the fulfillment team about it. Advanced Notifications extension take care of this aspect of your store. It helps you send automatic notifications to multiple parties connected to your site based on several triggers. When you receive a new order, when products go out of stock or low stock, etc., the plugin sends a notification to all the people you have specified. In addition, the extension helps you exclude specific products, categories or shipping classes from the notification list.
WooCommerce Custom Emails
This plugin enables you to have a great strategy to manage transactional emails in your store. The notable advantage is that you can target specific customers or users for your email campaigns. You will get great options to personalize the look and feel of the email too. In addition, you can specify multiple store events as triggers to send emails to targeted recipients. And, you also have the control on when to send the emails, whether immediately or after a time delay.
The plugin would cost you $39 for a regular license.
SIP Advanced Email Rules for WooCommerce
Sending targeted emails to customers is a proven strategy to ensure repeated purchases on your site. And, it would be more effective if these emails are sent promptly without manual efforts. This plugin helps you to manage exactly that by applying conditional logic to send targeted emails to customers. In fact, you can use this plugin to communicate to customers on a variety of store events. For example, if a customer has placed an order on a holiday, you can send an email notifying them that there will be a delay in processing the order. Such timely communication can help you go a long way in building satisfaction and trust among customers.
How to make better use of transactional emails?
You need to send a few essential emails to your customer at various stages of interaction. Without saying, you need to place links to relevant sections on your site and social media handles in these emails. Here is a look at some of the scenarios where you can use a personalized, well-written transactional email.
Welcome email
This is the first opportunity you get to create a good impression with a prospective customer. Most websites send a welcome email to users who sign up on their site or subscribe to their newsletter. In fact, by signing up or subscribing, the user has shown interest in your products or site features. That itself is a window of opportunity which you can utilize in a sensible way. Chances are much higher for users to engage with a welcome mail than to a run-of-the-mill promotional mail that you sent.
Actually, you can create a detailed strategy revolving around the welcome mail by analyzing certain patterns. First of all, you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve through the mail. Are you trying to encourage the customer to make a purchase? Or do you want to redirect the customer to a blog article first? You need to have clarity on these aspects well in advance. You can even create a welcome mail campaign instead of a single mail.
And, based on the user’s behavior on your site, you can design the content of the mail. For example, if the user has registered without a purchase, you can guide them to the Shop page. On the other hand, if a guest user made a purchase, your welcome mail can give a glimpse of the benefits exclusive for registered users.
Order confirmation emails
This is really not an optional mail. You have to send an email to anybody who purchases from your store. Hence, it poses a similar opportunity as the welcome email to create a good first impression and future engagements. You will find multiple possibilities with the order confirmation email to boost your sales and improve customer satisfaction. For example, you can point your customers to a knowledge base or discussion forum relevant to their purchase. Furthermore, you can suggest related products which they can purchase next from you.
Reminders
Reminder emails are another great way to get the attention of users who have already engaged with you. Before sending a reminder email, you should have a clear idea of what action are you trying to make the customer perform. You can effectively use emails to recover abandoned cart in your store. Because of the huge volume of abandoned cart across all type of eCommerce businesses, there is the immense possibility of conversion here.
Another opportunity to send reminder emails to users is when you have already sent discount coupons to customers. Sending a reminder mail to those who have not redeemed their coupons would be a good way to drive users back to your store.
Back-in-Stock notification
Often customers show interest in products that are temporarily out of stock. Here, you get another opportunity to win back that customer. As you know for sure that the customer is interested in the product, offering a reward along with the back-in-stock notification might improve the chances of conversion
Why are transactional emails important?
You have already seen the huge opportunities associated with each email that you send to customers. Here are a few more points to ascertain their importance. With the help of transactional emails, you can:
Build your brand
You can personalize the email template for each type of transactional email that you send to your customers. Most of the plugins we discussed above offer various options to enhance the look and feel of the emails. If you create a consistent design language across all the several communication channels, including emails, your customers would easily retain your brand identity.
Display professionalism
More than overtly focusing on marketing opportunities, if you use transactional emails to educate customers, they might develop a better bond with your brand. In addition, you can guide customers to relevant resources that might enable them to use your product in a better fashion. Including links to contact, your support team might also help to assure customers of your professionalism.
Request reviews
Product reviews can really help customers to make a purchase decision. And, it is slightly tougher to motivate satisfied customers to write a review. A timely intervention through email will help you manage more reviews on your site. You can read more about WooCommerce product reviews here.
Conclusion
Emails are an essential part of eCommerce business. While being an obligatory element in all online transactions, emails can also prove to be great for improving customer engagement and sales. There is always scope to personalize every email that you send to customers and prospective buyers. WooCommerce community offers several tools to enhance the email strategy on your store. This article has offered you a glimpse of some of the best WooCommerce email solutions tried and tested by many store owners. Moreover, you got a few clear strategies to work on around transactional emails. Let us know your opinion of the article.
