How to create a Follow-up Email Before a Subscription Expires

WooCommerce Follow-ups is a premium extension.

How create an Email to send before your subscriptions expire

Automatically warning or notifying your subscribers of an impending subscription expiration can be a key function to ensuring your recurring revenues. Letting subscriptions expire without notifying your customers could have these negative effects:

Decrease in revenue
Decrease in subscriber counts
More difficulty in winning back that subscriber

With Follow Ups, you can easily head these issues off at the pass by engaging your customers early, and ensuring that their subscriptions do not lapse.

First, start a new Follow-up

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Click either the “Create New Follow-Up” button new the top of the page or the “New Email” link in the Follow-up Emails navigation menu.

create_new_followup

Set Follow-up Type

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Next, you will want to make sure that you’ve set the correct Follow-up Type. For this tutorial, we will use the “Subscriptions Email” type.

subscription_email_type

Give your email a name and subject

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Now enter a name for your email. The Follow-up name is used by you internal for reporting and tracking the email in the future. The subject line is the subject line that will be sent when this email is triggered and sent to your customer. Your email must have a subject line to be sent.

followup_name_subject

Enter the email content

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Create the content of your follow-up by adding it here – just like any other WordPress post or page. You can just about anything with this content. The editor accepts full HTML – just like posts and pages – or you can keep the follow-up plain text. It is up to you.

If you wish to include variables that will add dynamic content from the list to the right, you can do that. For example, if you want your customer’s name in the email, simply add {customer_name} where you want in your content, and when the email is sent that variable will be replaced with the customer’s name.

See all the variables here.

email_editor

Define your triggers

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For the sake of this tutorial, we will keep the trigger simple, but you can certainly add more complexity if necessary. I am going to define this email to be triggered:

1 day before active subscription expires

trigger_before_subscription_expires

Now, every time a subscription coming up on its expiration date, this email will be triggered to send 1 day prior. Do not worry, if the subscription status changes and the subscriber renews, this email will not be sent. Subscription emails always check the current status of the subscription at send time.

Narrow down by category or product

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Follow Ups give you the ability to narrow down emails to the product or category level. Simply click the “Enable for” dropdown, and change “All products” to:

A specific category
A specific subscription product

enable_for_subscription_product

Make Active and Save Email

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Now you just need to set your email as active and save it, and you’ll be all set for emails to send when your customer’s subscription is suspended.

active_and_save_email

← More email tutorials