Social media marketing is abuzz. But did you know that email marketing is more effective than social media? In comparison, email marketing gets an average click-through rate of 3.57% while you can only get a 0.07% click-through on Facebook. In this post, we’ll teach you how to start an email marketing campaign on WooCommerce.

Why Email Marketing Works?

More than 90% of consumers check their emails daily and 77% prefer email for marketing. Cold calls, text messages and even social media ads are considered intrusive. If you do good email marketing, you’ll have an email list of people that have already shown interest in what you offer.

Also, email is a platform that you own and you don’t need to abide by Facebook, Twitter and Google’s rules which regularly get updated.

Social Media Not Without Merit

While email marketing is more effective, social media marketing is not without merit. Social media will allow you to tap into the entire social media user base while email marketing entails that you build your own mailing list. Also social media can become a gold mine if you have what it takes to go viral.

How to Get Started on Email Marketing on WooCommerce

Have a Clear Goal

Before you go jump on email marketing, it’s important that you don’t jump in blind. You should have a clear goal in mind. What do you want to achieve with the emails that you will be sending out? Drive more traffic to your site? Promote your product? Increase sales? Keep your customers engaged? Send special offers? Whatever your goal is, it should be clear from the start.

Find a Platform to Use

There are plenty of platforms that you can use for email marketing but we’ll focus on MailChimp. MailChimp integrates well with WordPress and WooCommerce. To get started, you’ll need to create an account on MailChimp. Other well-known email marketing platforms are Active Campaign, AWeber, ConvertKit, ConstantContact, Drip and GetResponse.

Build Your Email List

Don’t be Lured into Buying Emails

The success of your email campaign depends a lot on how you build you email list. There are plenty of ways to build your email list. You might be tempted to take a shortcut and buy an email list from a shady company. Don’t do this, you’ll only get a list of emails that has been spammed endlessly and thus has lost any value.

Gathering Emails

Importing Emails You Already Have

If you already have a list of client emails, you can import this list to your MailChimp account. Make sure the people in your list have consented to receive emails from you.

Create an Email Opt-In Form

You can create an email opt-in form in a prominent area of your site. It can be your main call-to-action on your home page. You can add it to your side-bar. You can add it on the top-bar. Or you can choose to create a pop-up. Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups do work well when they are implemented properly. In fact, email opt-in pop-ups can drive up to 1,375% more email sign ups. Don’t spam your visitors with pop-ups. You can show them one pop-up every set number of days. You can show a pop-up when a visitor has spent a specific amount of time on your site. You can show a pop-up when your visitor has scrolled down to the end of your landing page. Getting the right timing to show a pop-up is critical.

Add Email Opt-In to Your Contact Form

Another way of building your list is by having your form contacts become a part of your list. Note that you must expressly indicate that you are going to add them to your mailing list. If you are using Contact Form 7, you can use the Contact Form 7 MailChimp Extension to automatically add form submission to your Mailchimp lists.

Add Email Opt-in to Your Checkout

You can also automatically add your new customers to your MailChimp list by adding an opt-in form at checkout. You can do this using the MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin. You can check out our post on how to set up email opt-in on WooCommerce checkout.

Create Your First Newsletter

After you’ve determined your goal and gathered enough emails, you can get started on your first campaign. We’re not going to tell you how to create your campaign because that depends on your strategy but there are a few important pointers to keep in mind.

Optimize Your Campaign for Ease of Reading

Your campaign should be easy to read. Avoid big words that are difficult to understand. Simple words work best. Avoid using passive voice and adverbs. If your campaign is a mess and hard to read, people will not read it.

Optimize Your Campaign for Clicks on Your Call-to-Action

Make sure your call-to-action is clearly visible. If your campaign can’t encourage your email list to take action, then it is useless. Also, test that your campaign looks good on a mobile device. Many of your contacts will browse emails over their phone and if your call-to-action is not visible on mobile view, you will be losing out on a lot of clicks.

Make Sure Your Campaign is Relevant to Your Customers

If the campaigns you send out are not relevant to your email list, you’re risking your contacts unsubscribing from your campaign. People unsubscribe from email lists all the time. That’s to be expected. But if your unsubscribe rates are too high, MailChimp may put restrictions on your account. You can prevent this by not subscribing emails that did not agree to receive emails from you and sending them campaigns that are relevant to them.

When everything is set, get ready to send your first newsletter. After you’ve sent your campaign, what’s next?

Check Your Data

After you’ve sent your first newsletter, it’s time to look at your data. Most email marketing platforms will have built in analytics reporting. How many opened your emails and clicked, were converted and unsubscribed?

When you’ve sent your second newsletter, check your analytics data again and compare. Determine how you can improve your conversion rates. You can even split test your campaigns to see which works best and what are the best times for sending out your newsletters.

Got any questions about starting your own email marketing campaign on WooCommerce? Let us know in the comments.