A Beginner’s Guide to WooCommerce Marketing Automation

So you’ve heard the term WooCommerce marketing automation and you’re wondering how best to put implement automation into your WooCommerce store. The good news is that you’ve landed on the right article. In this guide, I will tell you what is marketing automation in WooCommerce. You will also find out what are most effective automations to increase sales in your store. And last but not least, which tools and plugins you can implement successful marketing in WooCommerce.

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Table of contents

• What is marketing automation in WooCommerce?
• Why is marketing automation important for WooCommerce?
• Types of WooCommerce marketing automation
  1. Adding customers to your mailing list
  2. Review request emails
  3. Personalized customer discounts
  4. Abandoned Carts
  5. Dead simple custom WooCommerce emails
  6. Delayed WooCommerce emails
• Summary & more about ShopMagic

What is marketing automation in WooCommerce?

Never heard of the term marketing automation? Maybe you’ve heard of similar terms such as marketing workflows, marketing funnels, automated marketing emails, or simply just automation. After all, it’s all connected.

👉🏽 Marketing automation can be as simple as an order email confirmation that gets sent to your WooCommerce customer after purchase. But we want to focus on the more advanced types of automation: the types that lead to markedly increased revenue.

Overall, the goal of marketing automation should be to get customers to take either spend money on your store or take additional actions that they would not have taken without your automation efforts.

Why is marketing automation important for WooCommerce?

➡️ Marketing automation is what sales in the 21st century are all about. ⬅️

Retailers like Wal-Mart and Target use advanced systems to analyze customer purchases and automatically send out coupons for complimentary products to what they’ve purchased to increase customer visits and the amount spent. A rather famous example is how Target 🎯 sends out mailings with coupons for maternity products such as diapers after spotting an increase in lotion purchases by female customers. How can Target 🎯 so boldly assume that these female customers are expecting mothers? Based upon correlations of product purchases in past sales data.

You can take these principles of action->reaction events with your WooCommerce store and get similar results. Namely, more sales! The way we think about e-commerce automation is via events and actions. If a certain type of event occurs, like a completed order, then instruct the system to take a particular type of action, like sending an email offer with a unique coupon for a complimentary product. This is the power of marketing automation 🔮!

Types of WooCommerce marketing automation

The number of ways you can automate your marketing efforts for your e-commerce store is endless. There are so many different methods and combinations to try. Right now, let’s discuss some big ones that should result in huge wins for your WooCommerce store:

1. Adding customers to your mailing list

   This is quite straightforward, but the first step in setting up automation for your store is to make sure that new customers automatically get added to your email mailing list. Whether your list is hosted with Mailchimp, AWeber, or another list provider, you want to make sure that the marketing automation tool you’re using with WooCommerce allows you to automatically add new customers to your list. Of course, without you having to do any manual exports and imports from WooCommerce with a CSV file.

   

   Add customers to mailing lists with ShopMagic

   Decide whether you want to make it optional for your customers to be added to your mailing list. In ShopMagic, we’ve created the ability to add a checkbox for your customers to join your mailing list. However, it’s possible to turn it off and just automatically add them to your list.

   💡 You might be obliged to give your customers the choice of whether to join your list or not. It depends on your mailing list provider’s usage policy.

   In most cases, customers aren’t too upset if they’ve automatically been added to a mailing list after they’ve checked out. As long as they can opt out easily!

   ✅ ShopMagic does all that automatically! I will just leave you a link where you can download it from here ⤵️ ⤵️ ⤵️

   ShopMagic

   The best WooCommerce marketing automation plugin for free!

   Download for free or Go to WordPress.org

   WP Desk

   10,000+ Active Installations

   Last Updated: November 15, 2024
   💡 The core version is free, so just give it a try. However, if you wish to try some of the following add-ons, you will have to purchase the PRO version.

2. Review request emails

   Customer reviews are critical for increasing sales 📈. The introduction of honest, unbiased book reviews is one of the reasons behind Amazon’s uber success. Even though book publishers detested that Amazon refused to remove negative reviews about their books, customers learned that Amazon was a source they could count on for transparency. It was mostly due to their review system. Most successful online retailers have followed the step.

   

   Nonetheless, getting a customer to take the time out to write a review for your shop is simple. Most customers, even if they’re satisfied, just don’t care to bother writing your store a review.

   💡 Unsatisfied customers are highly likely to write a negative review. Either the store they purchased from and/or the product itself. So there are chances that the only times you’ll get reviews is when they’re unhappy.

   A Review Request Email Automat – why should I send it?

   A Review Request Email Automation can help tip the scales in your favor. To implement it, write a genuine thank you email that will go to your customer. Remind them of your satisfaction guarantee. Also, ask them to take a minute to write a review if they were satisfied with their purchase. Set this email to go out 3-5 days after the expected delivery of shipment. This way you can be sure your customer has received the item. ShopMagic is designed to handle this automation.

   Again, ShopMagic is designed to handle this automation and we’ll be putting out an entire article soon about the nuts and bolts of setting up a Review Request Email Automation.

   💡 Sounds interesting? Read more about the WooCommerce Review Requests add-on.

3. Personalized customer discounts

   One way to boost WooCommerce sales is to offer a unique coupon to customers that are just at that tipping point of purchasing a particular item, but just need a little push.

   

   How do you know which customers are on the tipping point and worth sending a personalized coupon to?

   There are a few steps to set up here:

   • WHEN a customer abandons their cart (big one!),
     • THEN use ShopMagic to send them a unique coupon to come back and purchase what they’ve put in their cart at a discount!
   • WHEN a customer purchases a particular product,
     • THEN create a coupon for a similar or complementary product may encourage them to pull out their credit card again – this is ultimately what you want, a potential customer to become a real customer through a purchase.
   • WHEN a customer spends over $100 in the past 2 months,
     • THEN set up automation to send them a thank you email with a coupon for 10% off any purchase.

   Customer discounts sent with ShopMagic

   One thing we’ve done with ShopMagic provides the ability to generate a unique personalized coupon. It applies to only one customer. That means that you can feel free to have ShopMagic email a coupon to your customer on your behalf and not worry that they’ll post the coupon on Facebook for all their friend to take advantage of. You’ll feel secure knowing that your offer is for them, and them alone.

   💡 Sounds interesting? Read more about this WooCommerce marketing coupon automation add-on.

4. Abandoned Carts

   It’s often a good idea to HIDE 🥷🏽 shipping costs from your customer until checkout. This encourages them to fill out their information in your checkout before they abandon the cart. If they are going to abandon the cart, it’s usually immediately after they see the shipping cost.

   Here’s the deal: You need to set up an automation that grabs their email address and name during checkout and before they abandon cart, then send them an email immediately after to encourage them to complete their checkout with a subject line of something like: “Did You Forget Something?”

   

   Alternatively, you can create an automation to send them an email offering free shipping to get them to pull out their credit card and complete their purchase.

   ShopMagic Abandoned Carts add-on is built to grab an email address during the checkout process even if a customer abandons their checkout.

   You can then set up a WooCommerce ShopMagic Automation that sends them an email encouraging them to complete their order and you can even include a unique coupon code for free shipping – effectively removing their objections to buying.

   💡 Sounds interesting? Read more about this Abandoned Carts marketing automation add-on.

5. Custom WooCommerce emails

   💪🏼 While we’re actively working on ShopMagic every day and making it super powerful – we think we’ve come up with an effective product.

   We’ll get into some of the advanced ways you can use ShopMagic for WooCommerce marketing automation in other articles, but for now, let’s just say that ShopMagic has its email creator, entirely separate from WooCommerce which allows you to create customized automatic transactional emails for customers exactly the way you want.

   ✅ ShopMagic is built on the idea of cause and effect. So when a customer takes a particular action, you can set the system up to respond in a very specific way. The most basic example would be: a customer makes a purchase, and ShopMagic sends a specific thank you email to the customer asking them how they like the product.

   

6. Delayed WooCommerce emails

   👉🏽 What’s so magical about a customer thank you or confirmation email?

   In the above example, a basic thank you email editing is easy. So no more cumbersome tweaking of complex PHP template coding with WooCommerce’s email template system! Yet beyond ease, what makes ShopMagic’s approach to a confirmation email in WooCommerce so ‘magical’ is the little stuff: like being able to delay a transactional email!

   Delayed emails sent with ShopMagic

   

   Delayed Actions is a new add-on we’ve just put out that allows you to specify exactly when in timer, after the initial purchase, you want that email to go out. So perhaps the customer got their default WooCommerce order confirmation email as normal immediately after purchase. But you would like to remind them to fill out a customer satisfaction survey about their experience.

   Sure, you could put a link to the survey in your initial order confirmation email and hope that once they receive their product they’ll remember to search for your email and click the link to leave their feedback. But that’s not likely to happen, is it? A better way would be to set up an automation in ShopMagic that sends them the Thank You email and asks them to fill out your survey 5-7 days after their order. This delay may be enough to assume that they’ve received their shipment in the mail. At that point, they should either be happy or unhappy with their product and will be ripe to send feedback.

   💡 Sounds interesting? Read more about the Delayed Actions marketing automation add-on.

You keep mentioning ShopMagic – What is it again?

We’re proud of the work we’re doing here with ShopMagic. In fact, in terms of tools go, we think it’s the best free marketing automation for WooCommerce out there.

As with all things WordPress and WooCommerce, there are a lot of ways to skin a cat. And when it comes to marketing, there’s a huge overlap of various products and services that when combined can basically cover almost any automation needs out there. The problem for us though was that there were specific things unique to WooCommerce that we wanted to be involved in automations, and we felt there was a need for us to build something to fill that gap.

Summary & more about ShopMagic

Today, you’ve learned a few methods of marketing automation in WooCommerce. You can start building successful marketing campaigns and email automation in WooCommerce with ShopMagic free!

If you need more features, you can always go PRO in the future.

Of course, if you have any questions let us know. And remember to read more about the plugin in our blog!