WooCommerce Follow Up Emails [Free plugin 2024] ShopMagic

If you are looking for the WooCommerce Follow-Ups extension, it is no longer sold as a separate product. Its page on woocommerce.com now serves AutomateWoo, where follow-up emails are one feature among many, and the entry price is considerably higher than Follow-Ups used to be. So the real question is no longer “what is cheaper than Follow-Ups” but “what sends follow-up emails in WooCommerce without buying a full automation suite”. The answer is ShopMagic, free, which covers the follow-up work Follow-Ups was bought for: automated emails on any order event, customised templates, segmentation, Mailchimp sync and delivery logs. What sits behind the paywall is timing and targeting, chiefly delays and advanced filters. Below: what happened to Follow-Ups, what to do if you still have it installed, and how the free replacement maps onto it.

What happened to WooCommerce Follow-Ups?

It was consolidated into AutomateWoo and is no longer a standalone purchase.

Visit the old product page at woocommerce.com/products/follow-up-emails/ today and you land on AutomateWoo. “Follow-Up Emails” survives as a named feature inside that plugin rather than as a product you can buy on its own. Checked October 2026, AutomateWoo lists at $159 per year for a single site, which is where anyone hoping to buy the old Follow-Ups extension now ends up.

That matters in two practical ways.

If you are shopping, you cannot buy Follow-Ups. The choice is AutomateWoo’s full suite or a different plugin, and most stores that wanted Follow-Ups wanted a fraction of what AutomateWoo does.

If you already have it installed, plan to move. A retired extension stops receiving updates, which over time means compatibility problems with WooCommerce releases and PHP versions rather than a sudden failure. Nothing breaks today. Something breaks eventually, usually at the worst moment, and migrating on your own schedule is cheaper than migrating after a WooCommerce update takes your follow-ups offline.

What replaces it for free is ShopMagic. The overlap with what Follow-Ups actually did is close: build an automation on a WooCommerce event, filter who it applies to, send a customised email, and see in the logs whether it went. Unlimited automations, no contact cap, no branding in your emails.

The honest boundary: delays are not in the free version, and a delay is what makes a follow-up a follow-up rather than an instant notification. Review requests and per-customer coupons are also paid. If your follow-up plan is “email them three days later”, you will need the PRO add-on for the timing, though still at a fraction of a full automation suite. If your plan is “email them when X happens”, free covers it outright.

Customising content, setting BCC and sending a test email are all here, none of which WooCommerce offers by default.

Table of contents

1. What happened to WooCommerce Follow-Ups?
2. What follow up emails are
   • They increase conversions
   • They build relationships
   • They target specific customers
   • They run automatically
3. What Follow-Ups did, and where each feature is now
4. Moving off Follow-Ups
5. Sending follow up emails free with ShopMagic
6. Summary
7. Frequently asked questions

What follow up emails are

✅ They increase conversions

Some work immediately, such as abandoned cart emails. Others work on a delay, like winning back inactive customers. The common factor is that they address people who already know your store, which is why they outperform messages sent to a cold list.

✅ They build relationships

A follow-up is not a sales email sent once in hope. It is a sequence that acknowledges the purchase, improves the experience after it and can reduce post-purchase dissonance, the second-guessing that sets in between paying and receiving.

✅ They target specific customers

Follow-ups fire on events, a specific product bought, a first order, a long gap since the last one, and filters narrow who qualifies. The point is not to email everyone later, it is to email the right subset.

One caveat worth knowing before you plan around it: filters based on customer history only work for customers with accounts. In a guest-heavy store the reliable filters are the ones reading the order itself.

✅ They run automatically

Set the flow once and it runs without you. The part people skip is the review: check the logs and the results after a month, because a follow-up sequence nobody has looked at since launch is as likely to be quietly broken as quietly working.

What Follow-Ups did, and where each feature is now

We used Follow-Ups ourselves for around eighteen months, which is part of why ShopMagic exists. The feature most stores bought it for was subscription renewal reminders, sent before expiry, which had a measurable effect on renewal rates.

Here is the feature set it was known for, and where each lands today.

The pattern: the mechanics are free in ShopMagic and the scheduling is not. That is a different split from the old Follow-Ups licence, where everything came together, so it is worth checking which column your own use case falls in before assuming free is enough.

Moving off Follow-Ups

If Follow-Ups is still running on your store, nothing demands action this week. But a retired extension is on a clock, and the move is easier done deliberately.

Write down what it is actually sending. Open your existing campaigns and list them: trigger, audience, timing, content. Most stores discover at this point that two or three of their follow-ups have been going out to nobody for a year, which shortens the job considerably.

Rebuild one automation first and run both in parallel briefly. Pick the lowest-risk one, build it in ShopMagic, send yourself a test, and watch the logs. Keep the old one switched off for that trigger so customers do not get two copies.

Check the ones that depend on other plugins. Subscription reminders and anything keyed to another extension are where the mapping is least direct, so handle them last and verify them individually rather than assuming.

Deactivate rather than delete until you are sure. Keep the old configuration readable for a few weeks in case you missed a campaign.

Sending follow up emails free with ShopMagic

✅ With ShopMagic free you can:

• Build workflows on any WooCommerce or WordPress event, with no limit on how many.
  
• Send automated emails for any point in the sales process, to any recipient, with any message.
  
• Use the WooCommerce template or paste your own HTML if a designer produced one.
  
• Add customers to a Mailchimp list on checkout or on any event, provided they opted in to marketing separately from the purchase.
  
• Set up upsells, win-back emails and review requests to past customers.
  
• See everything in one dashboard, including what was sent, what is queued and what failed.
  

Over 10,000 stores worldwide use ShopMagic.

💲 Behind the paywall, the three that matter for follow-ups specifically:

• Delayed actions, which is what turns a notification into a follow-up sent hours or days later.
• Advanced filters, for segmentation beyond what the built-in filters cover.
• Customer coupons, generating a unique code per recipient rather than one shared code that ends up on an aggregator.

Summary

WooCommerce Follow-Ups is no longer a product you can buy. Its page on woocommerce.com now serves AutomateWoo, where follow-up emails are one feature of a larger automation suite listed at $159 per year as of October 2026. Anyone searching for a cheaper Follow-Ups alternative is working from outdated information, and the useful question has changed: not what undercuts Follow-Ups, but what sends follow-up emails without buying a suite.

ShopMagic’s free version covers most of what Follow-Ups was bought for. Automations on any WooCommerce or WordPress event, unlimited in number, with customised templates, Mailchimp sync, delivery logs and no branding in your emails. The split is different from the old licence, though, and worth checking before you assume free is enough: the mechanics are free and the scheduling is not. Delays, advanced segmentation and per-customer coupons are paid. A follow-up that fires on an event costs nothing; a follow-up that fires three days later needs the delay add-on.

If Follow-Ups is still installed, you are not in trouble today but you are on a clock, because a retired extension stops getting compatibility updates and fails at a WooCommerce release rather than on a date you choose. Do it deliberately: list what your campaigns actually send, rebuild the lowest-risk one first, verify anything tied to subscriptions or other extensions individually, and deactivate rather than delete until you have watched the replacements run for a few weeks.

The quickest way to find out what this costs you is to install the free version and build the follow-ups you have planned. The moment you reach for a delay is the moment you know, and until then you have paid nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still buy WooCommerce Follow-Ups?

No. It is no longer offered as a standalone extension, and its old product page now serves AutomateWoo, where follow-up emails are one feature among many.

What replaced Follow-Ups?

AutomateWoo, which includes follow-up emails alongside a much broader automation feature set, at a correspondingly higher price. Checked October 2026, it lists at $159 per year for one site.

My store still runs Follow-Ups. Will it stop working?

Not immediately. A retired extension keeps running but stops receiving updates, so the risk is a compatibility break at some future WooCommerce or PHP update rather than a shutdown on a known date. Migrate on your own schedule rather than after something breaks.

Is there a free alternative?

Yes. ShopMagic’s free version covers automations on any event, unlimited in number, with custom templates, Mailchimp sync and delivery logs.

What is not free in ShopMagic?

Delays, advanced segmentation and per-customer coupons. For follow-ups the delay is the significant one, since it is what separates a follow-up from an instant notification.

Can I send follow-ups without a delay?

Yes, if the trigger itself provides the timing. An email on Completed order arrives when you mark the order complete, which for many stores is already the right moment for a thank-you or a review prompt.

Will my existing Follow-Ups campaigns transfer automatically?

No. There is no import, so you rebuild them. List what each campaign sends before you start, since most stores find some have been dormant for a long time.

Does ShopMagic handle subscription renewal reminders?

Reminders tied to a subscription extension are the least direct part of any migration, so check that mapping specifically against your own setup rather than assuming parity.