Following up with your WooCommerce customers is probably one of the most missed opportunities for any store owner. And I don’t just mean a simple thank you, although that is important, too.
The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Across All Industries is 69.57 Percent
Just think about it. Every situation where a follow-up email could be the deal breaker, if not for right in the moment, certainly in the long-term. It’s your chance to up-sell them after a purchase. You might thank them by including a coupon for a future purchase. Or send them a nudge or incentive if they abandoned the cart before checking out.
Naturally, exactly what —and when—you send is critical. And that is where the WooCommerce Follow-Up Extension comes in.
Conditional Logic in the WooCommerce Follow-Up Extension
You may have heard me talk about conditional logic before. In a nutshell, it means that something is triggered when something else happens.
If you do this, then this will happen.
Creating and Managing Follow-up Emails
Follow-up Types
You will first need to set up the follow-up type on the email as each one gives you different options in the Follow-up Details. You should note that there may be other options added here. For example, if you were running the Subscription extension, that would be included as a follow-up type.
Here you will see the full screen to compose and set up your email followup with Purchase Email as the type.
The email types you can set up are designed by a specific email function and an action taken by your customer.
The next few screenshots, with the exception of one, will show you the options for the follow-up type purchase email. But keep in mind that all the settings I show you will change for each of those specific follow-up types that I showed you above.
Follow-Up Triggers
This is where you put the conditions. What appears here will depend upon your follow-up type. You can see all the options we have if we select Purchase Email:
You can delay the sending by minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years. In addition, for this particular type, we can choose by product and/or category. Again, this will vary, depending on your follow-up type.
Using conditional logic, you can add as many tiggers you want to meet specific criteria. Each one of these will have their own separate options.
Followup Settings
The settings have a few options that you can trigger that will keep you from accidentally sending out too many emails.
Follow-up Coupons
Being able to automatically add a coupon to the follow-up email is a great way to thank new or existing customers. Simply create a coupon like you do any other coupon in WooCommerce and it will be used specifically for the selected followup.
Follow-up Exclusions
You are able to exclude any categories or products from a specific followup:
Customize Who the Follow-up is From
Instead of the default, you can make it a bit more personal here, as well as add anyone you would like to a blind carbon copy.
Google Analytics Tracking for Followup
You can toggle this checkbox to add tracking by generating a link-tracking URL to use with your Google Analytics.
Send a Test Email
Once you have put this together, you can send yourself or someone else a test email.
Email Campaigns
You can group emails, or even tweets, into a campaign, as I will show you in a bit. You just create a campaign name here:
And when you have created a followup, you can assign it to a specific campaign. So you could create four followups and have them going out every few days after a purchase has been made.
Manage Lists
And here you can manage the lists that you have created through the follow-ups.
Follow-up Tweets
You can also create a followup with a tweet on Twitter. You will see these work very much like the follow-up emails in regards to the options you have.
Here you can see all the triggers for the follow-up tweets.
Follow-up Mailing Lists
Built into this extension is the ability to sign up new subscribers, give them the option to join a mailing list by adding a form, and sending or scheduling targeted single emails to those subscribers.
As you can see from this screenshot, you are able to:
- Add a new subscriber individually or subscribers by bulk
- Sort subscriber lists for target marketing
- Give subscribers the chance to opt-out
Follow-Up Settings
Several general settings are available here.
The SPF and DKIM gets a bit technical, but will help with email deliverability and controlling SPAM. There is further documentation at WooCommerce explaining this more.
Here are some of the general settings for the mailing lists I showed you before:
Several tools are available for backing up and restoring, exporting mailing lists, logging, and some data management.
Plus some extras to help you with abandoned carts, subscriptions payments and connecting your Twitter account:
Customer Data Manager
Customers are listed here with information to help you manage your follow-ups as well as seeing who subscribed to the mailing list.
Coupons
Previously, I had shown you where you can attached coupons to follow ups. These coupons are specific to this extension and the follow-ups and are created and managed separately from your regular WooCommerce coupons.
Email Templates
When creating an email you can choose the the existing templates, or if you have the skills, you can create your own template.
Reports
And lastly, there are specific reports available for your follow-ups.
I have touched just the tip of the iceberg here. For example, if you are a nonprofit it would be perfect way to follow-up with your donors.
And most importantly, this extension integrates smoothly with many WooCommerce extensions and other plugins.
A missed opportunity in your online store is something hard—if not impossible— to regain unless you have the right tools in place. And the WooCommerce Follow-Up extension will do it for you.