EDITS.WS

Tag: constant contact

  • What Is an Email Blast? How to Do an Email Blast “the RIGHT Way”

    Do you want to know what is an email blast and how to do it “the right way”?

    An email blast or broadcast sends a single email message to many subscribers in your mailing list. This can be highly effective strategy to get more sales, and bloggers use these blasts to get more website traffic.

    In this article, we will explain how to do an email blast the proper way and share some examples.

    Properly sending an email blast

    What Is an Email Blast?

    An email blast is a single email message that is sent to an entire email list, a large segment of that list, or many email lists at the same time.

    These emails target most or all contacts in your mailing list, making an email blast a broad reach-out campaign.

    Email blasts are also known as broadcast emails, mass emails, bulk emails, e-blasts, and email campaigns. Most people use the term ’email campaigns’ to avoid the aggressive feeling associated with the term ’email blast’.

    Email blasts are mainly used for sending promotional content and newsletters. At WPBeginner, we use email blasts to promote our premium WordPress plugins and share our helpful tutorials.

    For example, look at the email campaign All in One SEO for WordPress sent on their birthday sale event.

    Example of a flash sale email blast

    If you want to let all your subscribers know about special offers, then email blasts are the most reliable and efficient form of communication.

    Are Email Blasts Outdated?

    Although email blasts are great for delivering any message to a large number of people, some consider them an outdated communication method.

    That’s because email blasts are bulk emails sent to everyone regardless of their choice, priorities, and needs. At times, blast emails can feel irrelevant and useless to the recipients.

    Due to this, the email recipients may ignore the message, mark the email as spam, or even unsubscribe from your email list.

    Here are the top reasons why users don’t like email blasts:

    1. Unsegmented: Email blasts often use the entire mailing list without segmentation. Your email subscribers are usually very different, and they may be interested in different products or services.

    2. Untargeted: The email blasts send the same message to everyone without considering their interests, past interactions, or needs. Users often unsubscribe from your mailing list after receiving these unwanted emails.

    3. Not personalized: We all love reading a message that addresses us personally. Email blasts that don’t personalize the emails are often marked as spam.

    4. Unexpected: Broadcast emails are usually unexpected, so there can be a natural feeling of resistance from the recipients.

    Unlike 10 or 15 years ago, many new marketing methods are available, like social media, pay-per-click advertising, and more. However, none are as effective as email.

    So, you might be wondering: is email blast dead? The answer is NO.

    Email is still the most reliable form of communication in the world. With new technology, there are better ways to do an email blast to get higher results.

    We will explain how to do an email blast the RIGHT way in the following section.

    How to Do an Email Blast “the Right Way” – Step by Step

    Marketers from big and small companies alike are still using email blasts to promote their product launches, discount offers, and more.

    And the results are brilliant. That’s because they are using email blasts the right way.

    If you are not a professional marketer, you can follow the steps below to run an email blast successfully:

    Step 1: Choose the Best Email Blast Service

    First, you need a robust email marketing service to create an email blast. An email marketing service lets you create a mailing list, segment that list, and send bulk emails.

    There are dozens of email marketing services in the market. Among them, Constant Contact, Brevo, Drip, and ConvertKit are the most popular companies.

    We have tried and tested all of the above email marketing services, and we believe they are great at what they offer. However, we recommend Constant Contact because they provide the best deal.

    Constant Contact is the most beginner-friendly email blast software. It has dozens of pre-made email templates to help you quickly get started. You can choose a template and easily customize that using their drag and drop editor.

    It has simple options for collecting emails, automation features to send/trigger emails based on user actions, and more. Plus, it lets you segment your subscribers and send targeted email campaigns.

    To get started, you need to visit the Constant Contact website and sign up for a new account.

    Constant Contact website

    You can quickly create a Constant Contact account as they offer a free trial account (no credit card required).

    Once done, you will see your Constant Contact dashboard, where you can manage your email lists, see subscribers, and send email blasts.

    Constant Contact Dashboard

    Alternatively, you can also use Brevo, which offers a free email marketing plan.

    Step 2. Create Your Email List

    An email list is simply a list of email addresses you can send messages to. It is like your contact book containing the email addresses of your subscribers and prospective customers.

    To create an email list in Constant Contact, just go to the ‘Contacts’ menu at the top and click on the ‘Create List’ button.

    Create list in Constant Contact

    An email list is where you store all your email contacts.

    Clicking on the button will bring up a popup where you need to enter a name for your email list and click the ‘Save’ button.

    List name

    Constant Contact will now create your email list.

    The next step is to add contacts to your list. Just open your new email list, and click the ‘Add Contacts’ button.

    Add contacts to your list

    Constant Contact lets you add contacts in multiple ways. You can type in a contact, upload from a file, or import from Gmail, Outlook, and other apps.

    If you want to grow your email list faster, then you can see our guide on easy ways to grow an email list.

    Step 3: Segment Your Email List

    Once you have an email list, the next step is to segment it. Email segmentation is the most important part of doing a successful email blast.

    Email segmentation divides your email subscribers into smaller groups or segments to send highly-targeted emails.

    You can segment your email subscribers based on gender, age, geographical location, interests, purchase history, contact activity, and more.

    For example, a bookstore may create different segments for arts, physics, and maths students to send targeted emails.

    Email segmentation is a crucial task that must be done with a clear goal. You need to be clear on which subscribers should be included in a segment.

    For more details, you can see this guide on smarter ways to segment your email list.

    To create segments in Constant Contact, you need to go to the ‘Contacts’ menu and click on the ‘Segments’ tab. After that, click on the ‘Create Segment’ button.

    Create segment

    Constant Contact offers a bunch of criteria you can choose from.

    In the next screen, you can create a segment by choosing the criteria you want.

    Segment criteria

    You can create a segment by contact activity like emails sent, opened, clicked, or did not open. You can also include email subscribers by contact details, including job title, city, country, etc.

    Once you are finished, simply click on the ‘Save and Preview’ button.

    Then, you can repeat the process if you need to create more segments.

    Step 4: Create a Targeted Email Campaign

    After creating segments, the next task is to create a targeted email campaign or an email blast.

    You can create an email campaign in different ways depending on the email marketing software you use.

    To design an email campaign in Constant Contact, you must go to the ‘Campaigns’ menu and then click the ‘Create’ button.

    Create email blast campaign

    This will bring up a popup showing a bunch of campaigns you can make with Constant Contact.

    You need to choose the Email option to continue.

    Choose email campaign

    After that, you will see dozens of pre-made email templates ready for use.

    You can preview the templates individually or simply type keywords to search for a template.

    Find templlate

    Simply click to choose a template as a starting point.

    After that, the email campaign builder page will open. First, you need to name your campaign.

    Edit template

    Next, click the ‘Email Settings’ link to edit the email subject line, sender name, and more.

    Then, you need to click on the ‘Personalize’ option.

    Email settings

    Here, you can choose the first name or any other contact details to insert in your subject line.

    You can also enter a generic name like Customer, User, or Friend to address users whose names are unavailable. Once done, simply click on the ‘Insert’ button.

    Personalize subject line

    You will see some text with large brackets added in your subject line.

    For example, you can see [[FIRSTNAME OR “customer”]] in the screenshot below.

    Personalized tags

    After that, you can edit your email preheader From Name (company or organization name) and From Address.

    Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your changes.

    Other email settings

    The next step is to customize the email body.

    You can simply point and click on any element in the email to edit or delete it.

    Edit email body

    You can also drag and drop elements and layouts from the left sidebar.

    Once your email design is complete, you can preview your email. If it looks good, just click on the ‘Continue’ button in the top right corner.

    Next, you will see email send (blasting) options on the screen.

    From here, you can select recipients from email lists or segments. For example, we will choose the segment that we created earlier.

    Email sending options

    In the right sidebar, you will see options to send your email campaign now or schedule it for later.

    Step 5: Measure Results and Improve Email Deliverability

    Sending an email campaign doesn’t mean that your work is done. After posting your email blast, you will need to measure your results and see how the recipients interact with your messages.

    Top email marketing services like Constant Contact have built-in email stats features.

    To view your email campaign stats, just click on the ‘Reporting’ menu item at the top.

    Reporting in Constant Contact

    You can also see the performance of your email campaigns individually by clicking on them.

    You will see the email open rate, the total sent emails, bounces, and successful deliveries. The reports will also reveal click rate, did not open, unsubscribes, and marked spam stats.

    Email stats

    The biggest challenge of email blasting is email deliverability. A lot of the time, your emails don’t get delivered at all or are sent to the spam box directly.

    Here are some proven techniques to improve email deliverability:

    • Update your email list occasionally to remove fake email addresses, deleted emails, and more.
    • Maintain the frequency of your emails (no spikes).
    • Avoid misleading subject lines.
    • Make your emails useful with valuable and engaging content.

    Best Email Blast Examples

    There are two main types of emails used for marketing: Broadcast Emails (Email blasts) and Triggered Emails.

    Triggered emails are automated emails that are sent to your users following their actions. For example, you can send a welcome email after a user subscribes to your list.

    Email blasts are different because you will manually create campaigns and send them to a large segment at once. Email blasting is done with the belief that the single message will be helpful to every subscriber in a list or segment.

    You can’t broadcast a welcome email to your entire email list, which may also include old customers. So, email blasts can be used only for specific purposes.

    Here are the best email blast examples:

    1. Flash Sale

    If you are offering a flash sale, you can send mass emails in bulk to inform all of your subscribers.

    Here are a couple of subject line examples for a flash sale email blast:

    • [FLASH SALE] Fashion Shoes 40%-60% off!
    • [LAST CHANCE] 40%-60% off sale ends today!

    2. Event Information like Webinars

    You can send mass emails if you run online courses and webinars for your users.

    Here are a couple of email subject lines for an event information email blast:

    • LIVE Training: 10 steps to create a winning email campaign
    • Join us LIVE tomorrow at 5 PM for a FREE marketing class

    3. New Products

    You can send an email blast when you launch a new product. It’s best to segment your list into already purchased customers and new subscribers so that you can send different campaigns to them.

    4. Newsletters

    Newsletters are the most common type of broadcast email. News, magazine websites, blogs, as well as business or non-profit organizations send newsletters to inform their subscribers about the latest news.

    You can see our tutorial on starting an email newsletter to learn more about best practices to make it more successful.

    We hope this article helped you to learn what is an email blast and how to do an email blast the right way. You may also want to see our guide on how to get a free business email address or our expert picks for the best free autoresponder tools for businesses.

    If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

    The post What Is an Email Blast? How to Do an Email Blast “the RIGHT Way” first appeared on WPBeginner.

  • 15 Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

    Are you looking for easy and smart ways to automate tasks and increase sales in your WooCommerce store?

    By automating tasks in your online store, you can save time and money while growing your business and increasing sales.

    In this article, we will show you how to use WooCommerce automations to increase sales.

    15 WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

    Why Automate Your WooCommerce Store?

    If you are running a WooCommerce store, then you probably spend a lot of your time performing repetitive tasks. These can be anything from sending marketing emails for your online store to processing customer invoices.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you could automate all of those tasks and focus on growing sales and your business instead?

    Luckily, you can use the best WordPress automation tools and plugins to automate WooCommerce tasks. By doing this, you will save time, offer a better user experience to your customers, and ultimately increase sales.

    With that being said, here are 15 WooCommerce automations to increase sales:

    1. Use Automation to Personalize Your Email Marketing

    Are you keeping in touch with your customers using an email newsletter? You may not be taking advantage of all the automation tools available in your email marketing software.

    For example, the best email services like Constant Contact, Sendinblue, and Omnisend all have integrations with WooCommerce. They allow you to personalize your emails by adding the customer’s name and more.

    They also let you set up a Welcome email series using a drip campaign. This is a sequence of automated emails that will go out automatically to new customers.

    Choose an email automation

    You can learn how to get started by scrolling down to the automated drip emails section of our guide on how to send automated emails in WordPress.

    Additionally, if you are looking for a complete tool that offers WooCommerce email customization and automation, then we highly recommend using FunnelKit Automations.

    Apart from letting you fully customize your WooCommerce emails, it also lets you set up smart, automated follow-up emails and workflows to boost your sales.

    You can get started with FunnelKit Automations by selecting an automation from a library of handy templates.

    Autonami Email Library for WooCommerce

    For example, you can automatically send an email series to new customers, recover abandoned carts, send promotional emails to selected audiences, and more.

    There is also an option to create your own WooCommerce automation from scratch. You will then see a visual email automation builder where you can make any customizations that you need.

    Autonami Marketing Automation Email Analytics for WooCommerce

    For example, the screenshot above shows the workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer makes their first order. You can even see in-line analytics for each email.

    You can learn more in our guide on how to customize WooCommerce emails. Make sure you scroll down to the section on FunnelKit Automations.

    Tip: We recommend combining FunnelKit Automations with an SMTP service like WP Mail SMTP. This will make sure your emails are delivered to your customers and won’t get lost or end up in the spam folder.

    2. Set Up an Automated Marketing Campaign With Push Notifications

    You can also run an automated marketing campaign using push notifications instead of emails. These notifications go directly to the user’s web browser or mobile device. This means they have a much higher engagement rate, similar to SMS messages.

    The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It is the best web push notification software for WordPress, and over 10,000 businesses use it to send targeted messages.

    Create a new drip autoresponder

    For each notification, you can change the title, message, URL, icon image, and more by expanding it.

    There is also a preview of how your notifications will look in the browser.

    Edit your push notifications

    PushEngage also lets you choose when to send each notification. For example, you can immediately send the first notification and select a different time for the following one.

    For more details, see our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

    3. Let Customers Track Orders With Automated Transactional Emails

    WooCommerce will need to send different transactional emails to your customers. These help them get order confirmations, track their order status, get invoices, and find out more information about your online store.

    You can customize and automate these emails using FunnelKit Automations, which is a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation.

    The FunnelKit Automations dashboard makes it easy to create a new automation. You can simply click on one of the plugin’s many templates.

    Funnelkit Automations WooCommerce Automation Templates

    You can filter the list to quickly find the WooCommerce automation you wish to use. For example, you might want to send automatic thank-you emails to repeat customers.

    You can then customize the automation using the visual automation builder, including the content of the email.

    Funnelkit Automations Workflow and Email Customization

    For detailed instructions, please see the section about sending automated transactional emails with FunnelKit Automations in our guide on how to send automated emails.

    4. Quickly Update Your Customers With Automated SMS Messages

    Many customers prefer to receive text messages to notify them about their orders. Plugins like YITH WooCommerce SMS Notifications or FunnelKit Automations will automatically send SMS messages to your customers.

    Yith SMS Notifications Plugin

    SMS messages are an effective way to keep your customers up to date. They have a 98% average open rate, with 95% of messages being read in the first 3 minutes!

    You can send automatic texts to your customers when their orders are dispatched or their status changes. You can automatically send SMS notifications to your customers or let them opt in at checkout.

    Learn how by following our guide on how to send SMS messages to your WordPress users.

    5. Automate All Invoicing and Payment Processes

    As a business owner, there is a lot to manage. If you are still creating invoices manually, then you can switch to professional invoicing software that automates all invoicing and payment processes. Then, you will be free to focus on growing your business.

    A plugin like WooCommerce PDF Invoices makes it easy to automatically generate invoices, collect orders, and manage your finances.

    WooCommerce PDF Invoices

    You can also save time by accepting recurring payments or adding subscriptions to WooCommerce. These WooCommerce automations will help automate the billing process and can save you time.

    With automatic recurring payments, you don’t have to spend time manually sending invoices and waiting for payments from your customers.

    Plus, adding subscription payments to your eCommerce business will give you a more consistent cash flow, fewer payment errors, and fewer payment delays.

    Creating a recurring payment in WooCommerce

    6. Use Automated Store Activity Notifications to Boost Sales

    Automated FOMO and social proof notifications can also increase sales in your WooCommerce store.

    FOMO, short for fear of missing out, is a marketing technique used to create excitement about a product. It uses psychology to encourage customers to make buying decisions faster.

    Plus, social proof shows visitors that other customers have purchased your products. This can convince users that your online store is trustworthy.

    The best way to add social proof to your website is by using TrustPulse. It is one of the best social proof plugins for WordPress on the market.

    TrustPulse automatically monitors activity on your site. When potential customers are close to buying something, they will see a notification showing that another customer has just made a purchase.

    By simply displaying social proof, you will give your visitors a small push to complete their purchase. To learn more, see Method 1 of our guide on how to use FOMO to increase conversions.

    7. Automatically Display Your Best Product Reviews

    Would you like to automatically display the best reviews of your products from across the internet? You could copy and paste them manually, but that is a lot of work. Plus, there would be a delay before they appear on your website.

    Luckily, Smash Balloon has a Reviews Feed Pro plugin that lets you automatically show off your best reviews from platforms like Google Reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and more.

    Customer reviews, displayed on a WordPress website

    It comes with pre-designed templates, so you can display your reviews in different layouts, including showcases, carousels, grids, and more.

    The Reviews Feed automatically copies your website’s design so that the reviews look like a natural part of your website rather than content embedded from another platform.

    You can follow our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews to set up your own automatic review feed in WooCommerce.

    8. Use an Automated Sales Funnel to Boost Sales Conversions

    A sales funnel is the path a user takes on your website to become a customer. It is made up of the specific pages a user may visit before making a purchase.

    For example, a new visitor might land on a blog post, then view a product page, then go through your checkout flow.

    Unfortunately, only 10% of shoppers, on average, will add anything to their carts. After they do, 60-80% of them abandon their carts without completing the purchase.

    Luckily, you can use FunnelKit, the best WooCommerce sales funnel plugin, to change that. You can use the plugin to optimize each step, offer a better user experience, reduce distractions, and nudge users toward completing their purchases.

    For example, it comes with a one-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.

    WooFunnels One Click Upsell

    FunnelKit also lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.

    For instance, the FunnelKit Funnel Builder lets you add order bumps to boost profits if someone adds $X to their cart. You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout page.

    Edit design of your bump offer

    To learn more, see our guide on how to make a high-converting sales funnel in WordPress.

    9. Reduce Cart Abandonment With Popups and Push Notifications

    As we said earlier, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy them. This means if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.

    Luckily, you can use automatic push notifications to reduce cart abandonment rates. For example, you can pop up a notification when a user is about to leave your website and offer a coupon or free shipping.

    Or, if the customer already has discounted items in their cart, they may just need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. Push notifications like these can help you recover 3 to 8% of abandoning cart sales.

    Smash Balloon exit intent popup

    You can learn how to use OptinMonster to add exit-intent popups by following our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

    But what if the customer leaves your site before they see the popup? Push notifications can also help you connect with your visitors after they leave your website. These messages will display in your subscriber’s browser even when they are not actively browsing your store.

    Push notification abandoned cart example

    The easiest way to do this is with PushEngage. It is the best web push notification software on the market, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.

    For more details, see our guide on how to add web push notifications to WordPress.

    You can also significantly reduce cart abandonment by simply improving your online store and checkout process. We share plenty of proven tips with real examples in our guide on how to recover WooCommerce abandoned cart sales.

    10. Send Automated Coupons to Bring Back Customers

    It costs 5 times more to get a new customer than to keep an old one. Over time, people may lose interest in your website, forget about your products, or start shopping with a competitor.

    One way to bring those customers back is to automatically send them a coupon code via email. You can use automation tools to send a coupon to customers who have become disengaged, such as when they don’t place an order for 2 months or have stopped opening emails.

    Scheduling an automated coupon code

    You can learn how in our step-by-step guide on how to send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers.

    Another good use for automated coupons is recognizing and rewarding customers when they engage with your online store. For example, you might send a coupon after a customer reviews one of your products.

    This builds loyalty to your store and can get you more sales. It also encourages shoppers to review more products in the future.

    You can also schedule coupons in advance so that they go out automatically on popular holidays like Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. This will leave you free to focus on promoting your offers and getting as many sales as possible.

    See our guide on how to schedule coupons in WooCommerce for detailed instructions.

    Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, you can also offer a coupon in a popup. Showing a coupon at the right time makes a huge difference in converting your website visitors into paying customers.

    There are a few ways to do this, and we give you all the details in our step-by-step guide on how to create a coupon popup in WordPress.

    11. Automate Your Social Media Channels

    You can also use automation to post your online store content to your social channels. This lets you keep your social followers engaged with fresh content.

    Uncanny Automator has integrations with all popular social platforms. It will let you publish new blog posts on Facebook, show off your latest product images on Instagram, advertise your sales on Twitter, and more.

    Post a featured image to Instagram from WordPress

    You can learn how to do this step-by-step by following our guides on how to automatically post to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

    12. Automatically Display Social Media Content in WooCommerce

    Are you looking for ways to show fresh content without doing any extra work? One way to do that is to automatically display your latest social media activity in your WooCommerce store.

    This can save you time and keep your website content fresh and engaging for visitors. Plus, it can boost social proof by displaying your social media followers, comments, and like counts.

    Smash Balloon automates your website content by displaying your latest social media activity. It is a popular social media feed plugin for WordPress that is used by over 1.4 million websites.

    For example, you can add a Facebook feed to WordPress, and new posts will automatically appear in real time. Your customers can also like, share, and comment on your WordPress posts, which is a great way to get more engagement on Facebook.

    An example of an embedded Facebook feed, created using Smash Balloon

    You can change the feed’s color scheme, design a custom header, add ‘like’ and ‘load more’ buttons, and much more.

    If you are posting beautiful photos and engaging videos to Instagram, then it makes sense to post that content to WordPress too.

    An Instagram photo feed, created using Smash Balloon

    You can even show other people’s photos on your site by creating a hashtag feed or displaying the posts that other people have tagged your account in.

    In the following image, you can see an example of an online store that uses a custom Instagram feed to show user-generated content.

    An example of Instagram user-generated content

    For details, please see our step-by-step guide on how to add your social media feeds to WordPress.

    Tip: For more tips on how to use social channels to grow your online store and increase sales, you can see our complete social media cheat for WordPress.

    13. Make Your Forms Smarter Using Automation

    You can use form plugins like WPForms to collect all kinds of information from your customers.

    For example, you can use a form plugin to display a contact form, create a questionnaire, gather testimonials, or build a survey form.

    The best thing is that WPForms easily integrates with many other tools and plugins, so you can easily automate any action after someone fills out your form.

    For example, when someone fills in an order form, you can use conditional logic to send an email notification to the correct department, depending on the product that was purchased.

    WPForms Conditional Logic for Sending Notifications

    You can also send a confirmation email to the customer who filled in the form to let them know you will be in contact soon. This a nice gesture that lets your users know that you have received their information.

    In addition, by using the Google Sheets Addon, you can send any form fields you want to a spreadsheet. This will allow you to use spreadsheet features to analyze the data and collaborate with others in your team.

    Using WPForms' Google Sheets Addon

    To automate your forms further, Uncanny Automator will let you connect WPForms and other form plugins to 100+ third-party services without having to pay fees to services like Zapier.

    For example, you can create an Uncanny Automator recipe to send customer form data to Airtable. Then, your team will be able to access and use the data easily.

    Using Uncanny Automator to Send WPForms Data to Airtable

    To learn more, see our guide on how to create automated workflows with Uncanny Automator.

    14. Automate Live Chat Using Artificial Intelligence

    Automated chatbots are the future of live chat software because they allow you to engage with your customers 24/7. They can free up time by automatically answering common customer questions, generating leads, improving user experience, and making more sales.

    Chatbot.com is the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. It lets you easily automate live chat on your website by setting up your own chatbot using a drag-and-drop builder. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills.

    ChatBot live chat

    It even comes with pre-built templates that you can use as a starting point to quickly get your AI chatbot up and running. These templates include different scenarios like selling products, customer service, recruitment, bookings, and more.

    For example, you can use the eCommerce bot template to walk your customers through the entire buying process. There are even templates for specific industries, including a coffee shopbot, recruitment bot, and restaurant bot.

    If visitors want to communicate with a real person, then you can easily forward them to your customer support agent, phone support, or any of ChatBot’s live chat software integrations, such as LiveChat.

    15. Use Uncanny Automator for Even More WooCommerce Automations

    This article contains many specialist tools that do specific automation jobs very well. By contrast, Uncanny Automator is a Swiss army knife that allows you to create all types of automation workflows without having to write any code.

    It acts as a bridge so that you can get different WordPress plugins talking to each other, as well as loads of third-party services.

    You create automation by building Uncanny Automator recipes, consisting of triggers and actions. The action will be automatically run when a user or WooCommerce triggers an event.

    Uncanny Automator Triggers and Actions for WooCommerce

    Here are some of the WooCommerce triggers you can use to run a recipe:

    • A customer viewing a product
    • A customer adding a product to their cart
    • A customer paying for a product
    • A payment failing
    • A customer reviewing a product
    • And much more

    Then the recipe can automatically run any of these WooCommerce actions:

    • Creating an order with a product
    • Changing the price of a product
    • Generating and emailing a coupon code
    • Giving an order a specific status

    There are dozens of recipes that you can create, allowing you to save hundreds of hours while running your online store more efficiently.

    For instance, you can use Uncanny Automator to automatically create a new customer account when someone submits a contact form on your website, or send notifications to Slack.

    Bonus: Track Conversions to Learn How to Increase Sales

    To use any marketing automation platform effectively, you will need easy-to-understand reports that tell you exactly what is working for your business and what isn’t.

    MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It lets you get a clear picture of what is happening on your site and what you can do to bring in more sales.

    It comes with WooCommerce conversion tracking, form submissions, outbound link tracking, and user tracking.

    Its Reports page has an ‘eCommerce’ tab that shows your most important conversion metrics, including the conversion rate, transactions, revenue, and average order value. Below that, you will see a list of your top products with quantity, sale percentage, and total revenue.

    Ecommerce report in MonsterInsights

    You will also see your top conversion sources. You can use this report to attract more customers and offer exclusive discounts for customers from specific sources.

    For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to set up WooCommerce conversion tracking.

    You can also connect Google Sheets with WooCommerce to easily record and manage your orders and customer data. Once the information is in a Google Sheet, you can easily filter it based on factors like the order total, the customer’s location, coupons used, and more.

    You can then share this information with your team, even if they don’t have access to the WordPress dashboard. For example, you can easily send this data to your suppliers, marketing departments, or other team members.

    You are even able to turn this data into charts and graphs. All of this makes it easier to analyze the information and then use these insights to fine-tune your business and get more sales.

    We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to increase sales using WooCommerce automations. You may also want to see our guide on how to add wholesale pricing in WooCommerce or our expert picks for the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

    If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

    The post 15 Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales first appeared on WPBeginner.

  • Constant Contact Email Marketing: A Detailed Review

    When most people think of Constant Contact they think of “Email Marketing”. Over the years, Constant Contact has grown from a reliable email marketing solution to an all-in-one digital marketing platform for small businesses. But is it still a good choice for email marketing today? This article provides the information needed to decide if Constant Contact is the right email marketing system for your business.

    What is Constant Contact?

    Constant Contact Branded Logo White

    Constant Contact is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that has been a consumer favorite for decades as one of the best email marketing services. Although it is known to be incredibly stable for email marketing, in recent years, it has kicked up innovation to create a suite of performance tools for its small business customers.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Homepage

    Constant Contact surpasses what is typically expected of email marketing with features such as email automation, social media handling, texting, eCommerce, and AI. So, whatever industry you are in, it seems that Constant Contact has the tools any small business would need to implement a successful marketing strategy.

    Pros and Cons of Using Constant Contact

    Any email marketing platform will have to make trade-offs with what it offers its customers. Overall, Constant Contact is a reliable platform that is investing heavily in innovation. Here is a brief look at some of the pros and cons of the platform:

    Pros Cons
    • Free Trial
    • Simplest Interface
    • Scalable Platform
    • Great Customer Service
    • High Deliverability Rate
    • Native SMS Marketing
    • No Free Plan ($9.99)
    • Low number of 3rd Party Integrations
    • Surveys & Event Solutions are pretty dated
    • No In-built CRM (Except in the $449 tier)

    To fully understand what Constant Contact offers, we need to quickly dive into their tiered pricing structure and what features belong to each.

    Constant Contact Pricing

    With Constant Contact, plans start at $9.99. For Digital Marketing, it offers a Core Plan and a Plus plan. But it also offers an all-in-one Marketing Automation+ plan as well (though technically that is a separate product suite).

    • Core: Starting at $9.99/mo
    • Plus: Starting at $45/mo
    • Marketing Automation+: Starting at $449/mo

    Constant Contact Core and Plus Pricing 2022

    Each subsequent plan has more and more features offered to deliver exactly the solutions particular use cases need. The plans and their general use case are:

    • Core – Email Newsletters and Social Media Management
    • Plus – Mid-ranged Email Automations and eCommerce Insights/Segmentation
    • Marketing Automation+ – Advanced Automation, Lead Scoring, Opportunity Management, and CRM
    • *SMS – SMS can be added to Core and Plus plans

    Currently, with the Core plan, you are allowed up to 500 contacts for $9.99/mo. The number of emails you can send per month is limited to 24 times your total contact count. You can upgrade for more contacts and email sends with their tiered pricing.

    constant contact priced tier

    See the Current Constant Contact Pricing.

    It isn’t a hidden secret that Constant Contact’s Marketing Automation+ plan is technically outside of Constant Contact itself. In late 2021, SharpSpring was acquired by the email marketing giant to add a professional suite of tools to the company’s portfolio. Time will tell if the two platforms are merged or continue to operate as two separate tools.

    Sharpspring Marketing Automation+ Homepage

    Regardless of the business details, Constant Contact has developed a strong set of tools for marketers and business owners at every stage of sophistication. Next, we’ll take a deeper dive into the features of each of these plans that can be taken advantage of.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Features

    Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing platforms available. It’s known for its easy-to-use automation features and excellent customer support. We’ll take a deep dive into several feature categories so you can understand what Constant Contact fully has to offer.

    At the end of the day, managing contacts and sending email blasts is the basic job of an email marketing service. Some platforms offer more complex tools and services catered to professional marketers rather than to DIY small business owners who are juggling multiple tasks. Constant Contact allows users to easily create emails and manage their contact lists seamlessly. While it may not be perfect for everyone, the company has made great strides, providing various levels of complexity in its features.

    Email Templates

    To get into it, the cornerstone of the Constant Contact experience is in the email creation flow. For most, they start with one of the hundreds of email templates that are pre-built and ready to be customized.

    Constant Contact Pre-made Email Templates

    Constant Contact has also been slowly developing a brand template creator that works with a simple URL. For businesses just beginning, you can even use your Facebook business page instead of a website.

    Branded Template URL Insertion

    It works by quickly pulling in your website’s logo and brand colors, and gives you a quick choice of layout preference for your template. Many drag-and-drop interfaces are great for building emails but can be difficult to when it comes to styling. The branded template option gives a headstart on those settings so that business owners can get to the meat of their email building.

    Branded Template Editor

    One downside to Constant Contact templates is that they save as “Campaigns”. These campaigns are merely copied for reuse. Mailchimp, for instance, allows you to create a template that is altogether different from campaigns. This helps to differentiate between their use cases. In Constant Contact, you might find yourself editing a template without realizing it.

    Creating Emails

    Constant Contact has a strong drag-and-drop editor. There are several “blocks” that you can drag into the email to visually place them where you want. This is dead simple and lets you get right into creating your content.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Drag and Drop Editor

    Constant Contact’s emails are reliable in rendering fidelity to a myriad of email clients (new and old). It has solid industry relationships with email service providers (ESPs) that allow them to quickly troubleshoot new issues. In addition, Constant Contact emails are mobile responsive. And, the editor gives you a chance to see both desktop and mobile views of your email while you are creating it.

    Pre-made Email Template Responsive

    Contacts and List Management

    Contacts and Contact Lists are a vital part of sending emails. Usually, it is contact lists that hold most of the strategy behind email marketing.

    Constant Contact lets you create contacts, add them to lists, add tags to individual contacts, and assign notes to each contact. This basic functionality is present in every pricing plan.

    Individual Contact Management

    For the Plus plan, you can unlock more powerful email segmentation functionality. You can create segments using conditional for activity, engagement, dates, and tags. These segments may refresh with the latest data at any point.

    Contact Segmentation

    We won’t cover segmentation for Marketing Automation+ since, as we mentioned above, that plan is actually with Constant Contact’s acquired brand, SharpSpring.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Reports

    Reporting is essential to any effective email strategy. Being able to see progress over time as your lists grow and mature is the only way to tell if you are doing everything correctly. Your contacts will be the first to tell you if your emails are off-base or uninteresting (unsubscribes).

    Constant Contact gives detailed, real-time reporting on your sent email campaigns. Reported data includes:

    • Successful Sends
    • Bounces (Various Types)
    • Opens
    • Did Not Open
    • Clicks
    • Spam Reports
    • Unsubscribes
    • Comparisons of Vital Metrics to Industry Averages and List Averages

    It also shows trends in audience responses to marketing emails by providing an overview of campaigns in certain timespans.

    Email Campaign Reporting

    For eCommerce stores (such as WooCommerce or Shopify) Constant Contact’s reporting can go a little further for you. Connecting the integration will pull eligible subscribers into your Constant Contact account and will do so automatically every day. One less list upload on your hands.

    More than that, Constant Contact can automatically segment your customer data into powerful yet easy-to-use segments. Want to send an email to your best customers? What about people who haven’t purchased in a while?

    WooCommerce Customer Auto Segmentation

    Constant Contact can analyze store sales data to determine if an email campaign had an impact. Email attribution reports give you a glimpse into what is working and where you can improve.

    Email Marketing Attributed Sales

    List Growth and Lead Generation Tools

    Constant Contact’s email marketing tools are more than sufficient, to be sure. Its lead generation tools are a weakness for them but it does have some working tools to help out its customers.

    Constant Contact Lead Generation Options

    Signup Forms

    Constant Contact signup forms are bare and offer very little nuance. For website owners who want the easiest possible solution and then never think about it again, Constant Contact forms are the right bet.

    It offers these types of forms:

    • Pop-up
    • Flyout
    • Banner
    • Inline
    • Hosted Landing Pages

    Constant Contact’s forms offer very few styling options outside of background, font colors, and button colors. It does the minimum in that regard.

    Build Constant Contact Opt-in Form

    Their landing pages use the same editing interface as the form builders. Yet instead of outputting a Javascript embed code, it gives you a Constant Contact-hosted URL to link to. The URL can be partially branded but not as much as a self-hosted landing page URL.

    If your website is on WordPress, using a dedicated WordPress contact form plugin or a newsletter opt-in form plugin would be a huge asset. Those tools usually have all the missing features of Constant Contact native sign-up forms.

    Facebook Lead Ads Integration

    We know that email marketing has matured into a complex marketing strategy best used when intermixed with other marketing channels. Thus, an omnichannel marketing approach is a tide that elevates all singular marketing strategies with it.

    As far as straight lead generation goes, Constant Contact has a Facebook Lead Ads integration that allows marketers to create Lead Ads on Facebook and Instagram. Those who signup on those lead ads are automatically added to Constant Contact in a dedicated list succinctly named “Facebook Lead Ads”. This makes it a cinch to create an automated series that fires based on a newly added contact.

    Design Facebook Lead Ad

    This feature is a very nice touch that makes the process much easier for first-time advertisers. And the integration means no manual list uploads or time spent with additional Zapier automation to port those contacts over in real time.

    Email Automation

    Constant Contact makes it easy to automate your simple email marketing campaigns.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Automation Options

    Though, for most of the automation features, you’ll have to be in their Plus plan. The Core package enables sending “Welcome Emails” when a contact first subscribes to a list. This gets the job done for downloadable lead magnets.

    Setup Automated Welcome Email

    With the Plus plan, more automation features are at your fingertips. You can set up automatic email series (multiple emails strung together), birthday messages, yearly anniversary emails, and several eCommerce automation emails based on store interactions.

    “Automated Customer Journeys” is the newest feature on the platform that allows marketers to create advanced automation based on visual decision trees. This is especially helpful for eCommerce stores since common store interactions are common conditional triggers.

    Automated Customer Journey Builder

    All these automated features can save you a lot of time and help ensure that your customers always receive timely and relevant information.

    For more, check out our list of the best marketing automation platforms for your business.

    SMS Marketing

    In 2022, Constant Contact announced support for sending SMS messages as part of its marketing platform. This new feature allows businesses to send multi-channel campaigns and track results with detailed reporting.

    Constant Contact SMS Pricing 2022

    With SMS, businesses can reach customers where they are—on their mobile devices. SMS messages are easy to see and are often read, making them a great way to send customers urgent information or deals.

    Constant Contact SMS Marketing

    Constant Contact’s easy-to-use platform makes it simple to create and send SMS campaigns. And with detailed reporting, businesses can track who opens and clicks on links in their messages, so they can adjust future campaigns accordingly.

    Integrations

    Connected systems are growing more and more important for digital marketers. This is especially so when using tailored technologies and platforms for specialized tasks.

    For most website integrations, all you need is an email opt-in form that easily integrates with Constant Contact. With advanced email opt-in forms like Bloom, you can integrate Constant Contact to your site and start growing your audience with ease.

    However, Constant Contact does offer more integrations with Zapier.

    Zapier Homepage - Automation and Integrations

    Zapier is a data-connecting platform that connects APIs from thousands of serves so that data doesn’t remain siloed. More than that, Zapier can create highly customized automation using conditional logic from each connected platform.

    This means that an end user can get data from one platform and (under certain conditions and rules) send that data to be used on another platform.

    Constant Contact has a searchable list of integrations (3rd party and native) but the list is only found inside an active account.

    Constant Contact Email Marketing Integrations

    Other Third-Party Constant Contact Integrations

    Of the listed integrations for Constant Contact, you can also see a healthy spread of other marketing and business essential services.

    • Canva – Imports Canva designs into the email creation flow
    • Vimeo – Imports Vimeo videos into the email creation flow
    • Shopify – Easily adds products into emails and collects customer interaction data for automations
    • WooCommerce – Easily adds products into emails and collects customer interaction data for automations
    • Stripe – Syncs Stripe contact data and pulls email data into Stripe’s dashboard
    • Facebook & Instagram – Allows for posting to these platforms as well as creating Ads
    • Twitter – Schedule or immediately publish Tweets
    • WordPress – Brings over subscriber data into Constant Contact contact lists
    • Salesforce – Contacts from CRM are automatically brought over so you can have a single source of truth
    • Eventbrite – Easily promote your events by adding event details into the email creation flow
    • Gmail – Sync Gmail contacts with Constant Contact as you transition to professional email marketing

    If you are concerned about particular services that you use, you can see if those individual services have created their own integrations using Constant Contact’s API.

    Constant Contact Ease of Use

    Constant Contact has always been a favorite among small businesses because it is user-friendly. Most small businesses need the most streamlined experience possible. Balancing that with features is a tall order but Constant Contact has done that well.

    For starters, the pricing plans by Constant Contact are strategically selective. The available features for each tier cater to particular use cases. This ensures that beginning email marketers are not getting lost in the Core Constant Contact email marketing plan with unneeded and overly complicated features.

    Its Plus plan adds complicated features that dedicated marketers crave. The addition of Automated Customer Journeys brings a lot more power to the automation suite.

    The email creation flow is also one of the best there is. It sports a nice integration with Canva so that you can bring in your designs without downloading them from Canva and reuploading them in Constant Contact. Your Downloads folder can be happy about that. Plus, AI can create and analyze email subject lines that will perform well, based on the content of the email and data from related campaigns.

    Canva Constant Contact Email Integration

    Its forms are easy-to-use, but that is particularly because the forms lack styling, A/B testing, and conditional logic. The social posting / social ads feature makes creating posts and ads easy. For advanced marketers, these tools may be limiting, but for the average small business owner, the ease of use is liberating.

    Overall, Constant Contact is one of the easiest-to-use email marketing platforms.

    Constant Contact vs Other Email Marketing Services

    Let’s dive into the key difference between Constant Contact and a few rival platforms to see how they stack up.

    Mailchimp vs Constant Contact

    Mailchimp small business email marketing

    It’s no secret that many use Mailchimp for email marketing. Constant Contact and Mailchimp are email marketing platforms that offer similar features. However, there are some key differences between the two.

    Constant Contact offers less customizable signup forms and landing pages. Mailchimp’s brand template creation tool is also more sophisticated. Mailchimp offers a free plan, which is why it has many more third-party integrations to its name.

    Constant Contact, on the other hand, offers a simpler interface that helps new customers get started easier. Its verbiage describing “contact lists” and how they work are easier to grasp than Mailchimp’s use of “audiences”.

    It is worth knowing that all Constant Contact plans (even the free trial) include unlimited access to customer support through phone, live chat, or email interactions. Mailchimp has no support for its free plan and limited support for most of its plans.

    ActiveCampaign vs Constant Contact

    ActiveCampaign Customer Experience Platform

    When looking at Constant Contact’s Automation+ plan, both platforms offer lead scoring, website tracking, and a variety of other features to help businesses manage their customer relationships. However, there are some key differences between the two platforms.

    Most people thinking about Constant Contact won’t go for that suite of tools. They’ll likely stay with Constant Contact’s Core and Plus plans which don’t compete with what ActiveCampaign brings to the table. ActiveCampaign offers a comprehensive CRM solution while Constant Contact mostly handles list management. It includes features such as deal management, website tracking, and pipeline processes that Constant Contact does not offer. ActiveCampaign also has a more robust lead-scoring system, which can be helpful for businesses that generate a lot of leads.

    Constant Contact is less expensive than ActiveCampaign, making it a better option for small businesses or businesses on a tight budget. It focuses mostly on external email and digital marketing activities since it doesn’t focus as much on CRM as ActiveCampaign.

    ActiveCampaign is a more advanced tool than Constant Contact. A better comparison if you are looking for advanced features would be SharpSpring by Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, Constant Contact is a great platform for any small business or website owner needing email marketing. Its simple UI and reasonable price make it a great choice for anyone looking to get started in email marketing.

    For you WordPress users, here are some of the best marketing plugins you may find helpful.

    Featured Image via Net Vector / shutterstock.com

    The post Constant Contact Email Marketing: A Detailed Review appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.