Mailchimp is one of the best marketing automation services out there. In fact, it’s the only one (out of the top marketing automation solutions) that provides a permanently free version, which is efficient enough for small businesses.
However, with just email marketing, your website won’t see the sort of success that it deserves. You’re more likely to have a stock increase in your website’s traffic than having any meaningful spike in user interaction, conversion, or lead generation.
To achieve your goals, you need a combination of services. And for anyone who runs an e-commerce site, there’s nothing better than the WooCommerce-Mailchimp partnership. Together, they can do wonders.
This piece is a guide to achieve distinct success with your website and your business, in general, utilizing the core capabilities of Mailchimp coupled with WooCommerce.
Note that these practices might be insufficiently effective if you have the free plan of Mailchimp.
The primary question we’ll be solving here is this: I have connected my WooCommerce store with Mailchimp, now what?
Your journey has just begun! So, sit tight and enjoy the ride.
BEFORE BE BEGIN
Mailchimp can be used to do A/B testing through almost all marketing tools.
A/B testing means sending different messages to different people and recording which message works better. You can split your email subscribers 50/50 and send both these segments different communication. If one of the messages gives you 80% conversion while the other one is only 40% effective, then you go with the first option. You can also split your audience differently or transform this into A/B/C/… testing.
All the various methods that I mention below are eligible to be massively more productive, like 4000% times more effective (don’t take that literally), if you implement A/B testing.
So, always do A/B testing.
Further, Mailchimp can be used to leverage better salesmanship through emails. And better salesmanship directly translates into more sales (or conversions, sign-ups, leads, and so on – whatever helps you sleep at night!).
So, how do you sell more stuff?
THE STANDARD LOWDOWN ON THE POSSIBILITIES
Before we jump into the more technical things to supercharge your WooCommerce-Mailchimp marketing, let’s go over the few standard possibilities.
You shouldn’t miss these simple opportunities by investing all your time in the more advanced stuff.
- Create a newsletter sign-up form on your sidebar after installing the Mailchimp plugin. Without it, you won’t go anywhere.
- Is your audience blog-savvy? Well, then use the RSS-driven campaigns feature of Mailchimp to auto-send a mail to your people each time you publish a new post.
- Create basic, minimalist communication personalized with your branding to send to new users automatically (use the Create an Automation Email feature).
Now, let’s see how you can level up your marketing automation using the Mailchimp-WooCommerce duo.
CRAFT UNIQUE EXPERIENCES
First of all, Mailchimp helps you craft unique experiences.
The day of the blatantly boring autoresponder is long gone. Mailchimp helps you send highly personified messages to your customers at exactly the right time. When a customer needs information but doesn’t get any, their likelihood of never purchasing from you increases manifold. Mailchimp solves that problem for you, helping to insure the customers.
There are other ways too in which Mailchimp helps you.
For example, you can utilize Mailchimp integration to leverage:
- feedback collection after a purchase has been made,
- follow-up communication with customers who didn’t finish their buying cycle,
- sending product discounts or new launch information to customers who have made purchases in the past, and so on.
PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS
A lot of core tools of Mailchimp focus on building an elaborate vocabulary of what the customers purchase.
Based on the purchase history, these tools can generate highly relevant and laser-targeted product recommendations to recapture your lost sales as well as increase your general revenue across the board.
For example, one such tool is the abandoned cart emails tool. It can help you bring back people who leave the store before completing their buying cycle.
BRANDING BEFORE SELLING
You can’t sell effectively if you’re not a brand.
Don’t mistake branding for your website’s logo, sales copy, colors, or fonts. Branding is what the customer feels for that logo, sales copy, color, or font. Branding is what the customer feels your business stands for.
Brands run the world, businesses don’t. And Mailchimp helps you build your own branding through your communication with the customer.
For example, you can design personalized order notifications such as invoices, calls to action, order confirmations, shipping updates, etc. that create a sense of matching style with your business. This personalization can go a long way and help customers return.
TRACK ENGAGEMENT AND ROI
Mailchimp makes it stubbornly easy to track your engagement and ROI (return on investment). The reason why it can do that is because of the giant pool of customer data.
And data is power.
Using this data, you can also create highly effective ads for your Instagram or Facebook. When creating ads on these networks, you can set a similar target audience as the one Mailchimp finds your audience to be.
Now, you can further track the engagement and ROI with these ads to understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs improvement.
MOBILE-FRIENDLINESS AND POP-UPS
A lot of users simply visit a website. It might be due to the fact that they’re just researching more before making up their mind. How do you capture that segment?
- You build responsive sign-up forms that open really well on mobile screens.
- You design scalable personalized communication that works well across media from emails to phone screens and from computer screens to desktop notifications.
- Leveraging pop-ups is not shady if you do it the right way. And with Mailchimp, you cannot go wrong. When a member of your target audience visits your landing page and sees a lucrative offer through a well-designed, non-spam-looking pop-up, he or she is going to buy it, no matter what. Also keep in mind that the timing (how much does the user scroll before seeing the pop-up) and the placement (Does it need to be in-your-face? Or could it be more subtle, placed at the bottom?) also matter a lot.
USE MAILCHIMP’S SEGMENTS
Mailchimp creates many segments of customers by default. If your business is not using this intelligence, then trust me, it’s losing out on a great deal of revenue every passing hour.
Mailchimp automatically creates segments like:
- Lapsed customers,
- Repeat customers,
- First-time customers,
- Recent customers, and
- Potential customers.
All this data is gold. You can push different messages, promotions, coupon codes, or product launches to different segments. Remember, you should be using A/B testing all the time.
And all this can be done with singular clicks. No need to code or hire someone else.
The ROI on email marketing is as high as $38 for each dollar you spend, so make sure you give it your best shot.
ALWAYS PULL INSIGHTS
You will get detailed reports for each campaign you push through your Mailchimp-WooCommerce combo. Make sure you scrutinize every aspect and every detail closely.
There are reports for revenue, engagement, and growth. They help you understand user behavior.
For example, you can learn which segments opened the mail, the items that were the hottest, and which method maximized your revenue.
Learning from your mistakes is as critical as having a name for your business.
Once you’ve pulled insights from your reports, you will be able to adjust your marketing and further fine-tune your communication. You’ll know what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s becoming a spectacular cash cow.
VIEW REVENUE FROM YOUR EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Using a few different sections once you’ve connected your WooCommerce store to Mailchimp, you can view your revenue data, which is highly insightful for designing future campaigns.
First of all, you can get a broad overview of the revenue on your Mailchimp dashboard. All your campaigns are listed here and you can track your orders and revenue generated from them, as well as from other kinds of automation.
Also, each campaign comes with a dedicated revenue report. Go to Reports > View Report > E-commerce > Product activity > Order history.
RECAP
So, what did we learn?
There are the usual, basic ways to increase your subscriber count with Mailchimp on your WooCommerce store. Put a sidebar widget. Simple, neat, time-tested, and something I love to call “good ol’ fashioned stuff”. Well on hindsight, I love to dub almost everything good ol’ fashioned stuff.
But then there are ways to supercharge your marketing automation.
WordPress and Mailchimp, with a few analytics plugins, are already a notoriously successful combo. You add WooCommerce to the mix and your online store will see unimaginable success.
But that requires time and possibly learning.
You can do a lot of things. There are a lot of best practices (like using A/B testing for each segment’s personalized messages). But will you be able to see them through every time?
Probably not.
That’s why Mailchimp makes it pretty easy for you. Most of the stuff is one-click. The ease of implementation coupled with WooCommerce’s already pretty solid store framework makes marketing automation a breeze.
