Making sure your emails are delivered

​All emails sent with AutomateWoo are delivered using the same method that WordPress and WooCommerce uses. By default, WordPress will send emails directly from your web server. While this usually works, issues can arise when using this method because most web servers are not optimized to send emails.

Email delivery becomes significantly more important when running an online store because there are transactional emails that your customers need to receive. WooCommerce core contains several customer emails such as order completed, order refunded, password reset and new account. Many plugins, like WooCommerce Subscriptions or WooCommerce Memberships, add more transactional emails.

As a store owner, you want to ensure that these emails are delivered without delay and do not end up in the customer’s spam folder. This is why we recommend all sites running an online store with WooCommerce use an email delivery service to send their email.

When using AutomateWoo, email delivery becomes even more important because it usually increases the number of emails you are sending.

The main issue when sending email from web servers is deliverability. In order to fight spammers, inbox providers have implemented sophisticated spam filters and as a result email delivery has become more complex. The danger when sending email from your web server is that your email will get caught in a spam filter. Even if you can receive email from your server, it doesn’t mean your customers can too.

It’s easy (and free) to check how likely it is for your emails to be considered spam with Mail Tester.

Another issue is that many web hosts place a limit on the number of emails you can send from your server per hour.

Email delivery services, like MailPoet, do the hard work for you to ensure emails are delivered quickly to your customers. Instead of sending email directly from your server, WordPress passes the email data to the delivery service via an API or SMTP.  The delivery service then sends the email from their own specialized email servers.

Email delivery services greatly reduce the chance of emails getting caught in spam filters and they are capable sending huge amounts of emails.

Most services also give you insights showing whether emails were delivered and keep logs of all sent emails. Some even include email open and click tracking.

Setting up an email delivery service is usually very easy and can be done by installing a WordPress plugin.

Here are few email delivery services we recommend:

• MailPoet (plugin) – free for under 1,000 subscribers
• MailGun (plugin)
• PostMark (plugin)
• SparkPost (plugin)
• Amazon SES (plugin)
• Mandrill (plugin)