It’s been a while since our last bigger release when we introduced emails testing, but we’re back! With this release we’ve made improvements to handling guest orders and prepared ShopMagic to recover abandoned carts in WooCommerce, which should be ready in a few weeks. Apart from this, we are introducing an integration with Postmark Message Streams.
Preparing to handle cart abandonment in WooCommerce
With ShopMagic 2.13 we began our effort to recover abandoned carts in WooCommerce. We will still need some more releases until we are ready, and there is still little bit of a rocky road ahead of us. Right now you get an improved guest handling and a special tab where you can see all guests that placed an order in your WooCommerce store.
You can also view guest details with his/her personal information:
By doing this we are improving how all guest-related placeholders work and make sure that we have (and use) appropriate guest details for sending emails.
Guest details get updated with new orders
If the guests update their details when placing a new order, we are also making sure that their details are updated in ShopMagic. You may be sure that all your guests are updated when you decide to send emails to their orders.
Fallback to order data
There may be some situations when the guest details are empty. If that happens, we automatically search for their data in the matched order.
For example, when the phone number is not available in the guest profile, ShopMagic will try to replace it with the phone number from the order.
Postmark Message Streams integration
We love Postmark. We use their service for all our transactional communication. All email confirmations, post purchase emails in WooCommerce or follow ups are sent with Postmark.
Last year they shared their plan to also support marketing communication and bulk emails, i.e. newsletters, product announcements. We couldn’t have been happier when we heard that! In that very moment we decided to ditch Mailchimp and send our newsletters with ShopMagic Manual Actions.
We had to wait almost a year, but we finally got to their closed early access. We’ve tested the service and were very pleased with the results and wanted to introduce Message Streams to ShopMagic as soon as possible.
Today you can also use Postmark for your marketing, newsletters, announcements and all other communication sent with ShopMagic.
How to enable Message Streams support
In order to use Postmark, you’ll need their official plugin for WordPress. Configure it according to their instructions.
Add new message stream in your Postmark account:
Copy the stream ID. In the above example it is newsletters.
Turn on the integration with a filter (for example in your functions.php):
add_filter( 'shopmagic/core/postmark/enabled', '__return_true' );
Add an email action to your automation and fill in the stream ID:
Done!
All emails from this action will be sent with this stream to protect transactional and broadcast messages.
What’s next?
The next release will focus on WooCommerce Subscriptions integration, which should be ready sooner than later 😉 Then we will focus our efforts on recovering abandoned WooCommerce carts. Hope to come back with our announcements soon!
