ShopMagic 2.8 is here: Marketing opt-ins and Lists

This release took us way longer than we previously expected, but we are proud to release a brand new ShopMagic 2.8 with some highly requested features: marketing opt-ins (so important in the GDPR era) and lists.

You obviously know how important it is to send marketing communication only to customers that gave their consent. It has always been so important, but after GDPR has been introduced it became crucial.

Right to this point there was no way to manage the customer consent in ShopMagic. All communication from ShopMagic was treated as transactional and was sent to all matching customers. Customers were also unable to unsubscribe from certain communication types.

But this changes with the newest ShopMagic version and I will cover all the important changes in this post.

Meet ShopMagic Lists

With lists you can manage your marketing opt-ins or opt-outs and make sure that you actually have the customer’s consent to send marketing emails.

List types

There are 2 types of lists in ShopMagic:

1. Opt-in – these lists require the user to give consent to be subscribed. For example he can do this in checkout by ticking a checkbox or on his account page.
2. Opt-out – all new customers will be automatically subscribed to these lists when they place the order and haven’t previously unsubscribed from these lists. We do not recommend using these lists, especially for the EU customers, however we wanted to include these feature for some specific cases you might have in your WooCommerce store.

Subscribing to lists

There are a number of ways your customers can subscribe to lists:

In the checkout:

On the communication preferences page or in account:

Or automatically when they place the order (only for opt-out lists).

When you add a new list there are a number of settings that you can configure:

Opt-ins and opt-outs

When your customers (or guests) start to subscribe to lists (or unsubscribe from them) you will see a handy list with all opt-ins and opt-outs. There is also a search that you can use. You can also import emails from other sources.

New events

We’ve also added 2 new events connected to lists. Now you can target each opt-in and opt-out and for example send an email or add subscribers to Mailchimp.

New filter

There is also a new filter which is extremely important when you want to make sure that you send emails only to customers that gave their consent to marketing communication.

If you want to target only customers that opted in to receiving newsletters, make sure to add this filter:

But hey, you can use multiple filters at the same time. If you want to send the coupon to subscribed customers that spent more than $1000, you can!

Unsubscribe link in the emails

Last but not least, you can also include an unsubscribe link in the emails. There are 2 ways to do this.

Placeholder

You can include the {{ customer.unsubscribe_url }} placeholder anywhere in the message content and it will be converted to a link when the message is sent.

Automatic

When you create a Send Email action, you will find a new checkbox that enables the link in the footer:

It looks like this in the WooCommerce template footer:

Is that all?

Wow, that was quite a ride! I didn’t expect this post to be this long. Yes, I think I covered everything that is the most important in this release.

OK, there is one more thing. The price, right?

This is all free!

Yes, we included all of these features in ShopMagic free. Why give this for free, when we could charge for these features? Because our goal is to create the best free follow up emails and marketing automation plugin for WooCommerce. And this expresses our commitment to this goal in the best possible way.