Achieving top-of-mind awareness is one really good way to keep your customers coming back. You could do this by sending out newsletters, which I definitely recommend. Newsletters are really good for updates and sharing product information, but they aren't terribly good at getting feedback from users. You could instead send out automated e-mails after someone purchases a product with the Follow Up Emails plugin. You'll stay top-of-mind and you can also get some feedback from the customer.
You need to have the Follow up emails plugin, available at WooThemes.com, installed and activated on your site. You'll also need at least one product on your site.
Follow up emails has its own section in the WordPress admin. We'll have to go through the process of creating a follow-up e-mail and then select how it gets sent out. Let's take a look at the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to Follow-Up Emails | New Email.
You'll only see a few settings, as Follow-Up Emails does everything in a step-by-step process.
- Enter a name for the e-mail in the Name your email field. This name is just for your use, so you don't need to worry about a customer seeing it.
- Now select the type of e-mail you wish to send. For our purposes, we want to send out an e-mail after a product has been purchased. For that, we want to select Storewide Email.
- Click on Continue to Step 2.
- Enter the subject line in the What is your subject line field.
- Under the When should the email be sent field, you should select Days. A few more fields will appear. In the empty field before Days, enter 7 or however many days you wish to wait before sending the e-mail. In the dropdown after Days, select after first purchase.
- You can optionally only send this e-mail for selected products with the Do you wish to email for field. For our example, we're just asking the customer how they like the product for every product in the store.
- Click on Continue to Step 3.
- Now write the e-mail to the customer. You can use some placeholders in the e-mail; these are listed right next to the text editor.
- Click on Save your email.
You'll be redirected to a page that lists all of your e-mails. Make sure that the Status is listed as Active.
Now, the next time a customer makes a purchase, an e-mail will be queued up and sent out.
You can do so much more with the Follow up emails plugin. It's an entire e-mail automation marketing service built into a plugin, so you can use it right from your dashboard. You can send out multiple e-mails per product, per category, based on when users register, and more. One of the more effective strategies is to use Follow up emails to send out coupons several months after their first order. It keeps you top-of-mind and adds an extra incentive to make another order.