Six MailChimp Tools to Build Your Brand and Sell More Stuff

At this very moment, your store is loaded with data, and that data is fuel just waiting to grow your business.

It provides invaluable information about your customers: what they enjoy buying from you, how often they make a purchase, and when they last made a purchase. Once you integrate your WooCommerce store with MailChimp, our powerful marketing tools – including automations and reporting – put that data to work to personalize your marketing and sell more stuff.

Here are 6 tools that’ll help you on your quest to build your brand:

1. Turn on automated campaigns

Marketing automation is software that talks to your customers just like you would to help you find your people and better engage them. Automation is different from a manual campaign because it can be left running in the background, so you can delegate more repetitive tasks to it to save time.

It’s like having a second brain to help run your business—and now it’s free and easier than ever.

Here are 4 types of MailChimp automation campaigns that can help you connect with customers, no matter where they are in their journey:

• The first is a welcome series, which is a perfect opportunity to make a strong first impression. When someone signs up for your list or makes a purchase from your store, you can welcome them to your list, introduce them to your business or new products, or thank them for their interest or purchase. Our research shows that welcome automations earn 5 times more orders, on average, than regular bulk email.
• Next, you can create personalized order notifications that match the look and feel of your brand. This automation gives you the power to design, send, and track invoices, shipping confirmations, and other transactional notification emails—without ever leaving MailChimp. You can even add a product recommendations block to suggest other relevant items and encourage repeat business.
• Our best customer automation makes it easy for you to reward customers with exclusive coupons, promo codes, or other offers. Thanking patrons for their loyalty can make them feel valued—and build longer-lasting relationships.If you’re still not convinced, consider this: In MailChimp, best customer automations result in nearly 6 times more orders per recipient than regular bulk campaigns.

• Last, but not least, send a date-based automation such as a birthday or anniversary message to delight customers on their special day. You can design a celebratory message—or send a special promo code—and set it to automatically send in time for the noteworthy occasion.

This keeps customers engaged and thanks them for their continued support.

2. Gently remind customers what they left behind

When you turn on the abandoned cart automation in your account, you recapture sales you’d otherwise miss out on. And when research shows that 67% of online shopping carts are abandoned before a customer completes a sale, that’s a lot of revenue you could be taking advantage of.

Abandoned cart emails run in the background of your business, so you can automatically reconnect with customers who navigate away from their shopping cart. By reminding shoppers of the awesome stuff they left behind and encouraging them to return to your store, you’ll recapture sales and generate more revenue. In fact, we’ve found that our average user earns enough money from abandoned cart emails to pay for their MailChimp account.

3. Segment your customers

If you want to boost the relevance of your messaging, you can segment your customers based on their shopping behavior. Our research has shown that campaigns sent with e-commerce segmentation result in almost 3 times more sales per subscriber than campaigns sent without any segments at all.

Thankfully, MailChimp makes that simple—when you connect your store, your customer purchase data is automatically synced to your MailChimp list. We then create pre-built segments of your potential, first-time, and loyal customers, for example, so you can quickly target them in just a few clicks.

If you’re worried about maintaining those manually, fret not: We’ll update those segments for you automatically as subscribers meet the requirements.

4. Use simple templates, make copy concise, and test, everything.

Good email is about more than just good text. You’ve probably already seen your share of best practices, but there doesn’t seem to be a golden set of rules that guarantee perfect email engagement.

That being said, each year, millions of customers use MailChimp to send billions of emails, and our data scientists have been able to identify three things typically shared by accounts that send really good email.

• They tend to use simple layouts. Our 1 column layout gets used the most often, with 48% of sent campaigns using it.
• They keep their copy concise. 95% of our high-performing accounts typically sent campaigns with 200 words or less per image, which seems to show that a lower copy-to-image ratio often results in higher click rates. But there are always exceptions to the rule; under the right circumstances, using more words can actually be the right move.
• They test what they’re sending out. We found that campaigns that were A/B tested consistently lead to much better engagement: When looking at campaigns sent by the same account, A/B tested campaigns did 73% better with open rates, 198% better on click rates, and almost 15% more in sales than regular campaigns.

So if you walk away with anything from this list, remember that testing seemed to be the most consistent indicator of high performance.

5. Recapture the attention of people who visited your site.

Anytime a customer comes to your site, you’re competing with a ton of distractions that can prevent them from completing a purchase. In fact, 97% of first-time visitors to e-commerce websites leave without making a purchase.

That’s where Google remarketing ads come in handy: They give you a way to reach folks who like your brand, wherever they go online, and bring them back to the thing that first caught their eye.

When you connect your store, we’ll pull in your best-selling products and generate thousands of ad sizes that display across more than 2 million sites in the Google Display Network. Once you publish your remarketing ads in MailChimp, they’ll recapture lost sales in the background, so you focus on other parts of your business.

Before you send your next email to drive traffic to your site, follow our recipe to set up a retargeting ad that brings back the folks who get away.

6. Grow your list with pop-up forms.

If you’re worried that pop-up forms aren’t effective, we have a number for you: We found that users saw their list growth rate increase by 60% after implementing a pop-up form.

Not only is a pop-up form an excellent way to announce a promotion, it’s also useful for inviting people interested in your business to join your list, so you can turn website visitors into subscribers. They can also act as a warm greeting to your site.

You can customize our pop-up, embedded, and hosted forms to fit your needs—and best of all, they’re absolutely free.

Start using your data to personalize your marketing, sell more stuff, and grow your business. Connect your WooCommerce store to MailChimp today!