WooCommerce follow-up emails: 7 best practices and examples

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Many online store owners doubt the value of sending WooCommerce follow-up emails. They assume they don’t need them since customers will always come back on their own when they need something. 

The truth is that WooCommerce follow-ups are a potent tool for customer engagement and feedback. When executed correctly, they can delight customers, revitalize your sales funnel, and drive repeat purchases. 

This guide will uncover seven best practices and examples for creating effective post-purchase emails for your WooCommerce store. 

Discover how to keep your customers engaged, your sales thriving, and your brand at the forefront of their shopping journey.

Let’s get started.

What are WooCommerce follow-up emails?

WooCommerce automated follow-up emails are emails sent sometime after a customer has bought something from you. The typical schedule is about one week, but you can send them sooner or later.

The good news is that you don’t need any special WooCommerce follow-up email plugin. The best WooCommerce marketing tools can easily help you create automated follow-up campaigns.

If you have some experience with email marketing, you know that, in general, follow-ups give you a quick way to:

• Get feedback about your product that a customer has purchased
• Build stronger relationships with customers
• Convert one-time buyers into repeat customers
• Move customers down the funnel, turning them into brand advocates who will spread great word-of-mouth about your company and products

Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s go over the best practices and examples of great WooCommerce follow-up emails.

Benefits of sending WooCommerce follow-up emails

Sending WooCommerce follow-up emails can provide numerous benefits for your online store. It can help nurture customer relationships, boost sales, and improve customer satisfaction. 

Here are some key advantages of sending follow-up emails:

• Increased customer engagement: Follow-up emails keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage customers to revisit your store, building stronger connections and loyalty
• Repeat purchases: By offering exclusive discounts, product recommendations, or incentives, you can entice customers to make additional purchases, driving higher revenue
• Valuable feedback: Soliciting feedback through follow-up emails lets you gather insights into customer experiences. This enables you to identify areas for improvement for your products or services
• Cross-selling and upselling opportunities: These emails provide a platform to showcase complementary products or upgrades, increasing the average order value and maximizing revenue potential
• Brand advocacy: Satisfied customers who receive personalized follow-up communications are more likely to become brand advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth and attracting new customers

By leveraging the power of WooCommerce follow-up emails, you can create a seamless post-purchase experience, nurture long-lasting customer relationships, and drive sustainable growth for your online business.

Best WooCommerce plugins for follow-up emails

In this section, we’ll cover some of the best plugins for creating automated WooCommerce follow-up emails.

Depending on your needs and preferences, you can choose from plugins offering multiple features, such as Omnisend, or plugins focusing on a specific function, such as WooCommerce Recover Cart Abandonment.

Here are some of the popular email plugins you can use for your WooCommerce store:

• Omnisend
• YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
• WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart
• ShopMagic
• AutomateWoo

All of these platforms offer the option to send follow-up emails in addition to other email marketing features. Some of them also offer a free version, so you can try out a WooCommerce follow-up email plugin free of charge.

1. Omnisend

Omnisend provides a complete marketing automation plugin for your WooCommerce store that also enables you to send follow-up emails.

You can use it to set up automated follow-up email campaigns using pre-designed templates and tons of customization options. The best part is that you can set these automated workflows and go live in minutes, not hours.

Combine that with the unmatched email marketing features and an intuitive user interface, and you have all that you can possibly need for your follow-up email campaign.

2. YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

This is a good plugin for setting up WooCommerce follow-up emails for abandoned carts.

You can use it to set up an automated workflow for sending follow-up emails to prospects who left products in their carts. It also allows you to send a coupon or offer to further incentivize these prospects to make a purchase.

However, it doesn’t offer much flexibility or customization options, and its functionality is limited to abandoned cart follow-up emails.

3. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

This is another niche plugin for sending WooCommerce follow-up emails for abandoned carts.

You can use it to set up automated workflows for sending follow-up emails at specific times. It has some preset abandoned cart templates that you can use to quickly set up an automated WooCommerce follow-up email campaign.

4. ShopMagic

This is a more generic email marketing plugin designed specifically for WooCommerce stores.

You can use it to create a follow-up email campaign and customize it according to your preferences. It allows you to set specific events and triggers that will act as a signal to send a follow-up email.

Other than WooCommerce follow-up emails, you can also use it to create all types of email marketing campaigns.

5. AutomateWoo

This marketing automation plugin for a WooCommerce store also offers the option to set up WooCommerce follow-up emails.

You can retarget any customers who have interacted with your brand, not just those who have abandoned their carts, using this tool. It comes with a decent set of features and allows you to create customized campaigns.

7 best practices for sending WooCommerce follow-up emails

Let’s start your follow-up journey with these best practices you need to master for your WooCommerce store.

If you’re on WordPress and want to get started on email marketing, check out Omnisend’s WooCommerce plugin.

1. Set up email automation for follow-ups

If you want to set up post-purchase messaging/follow-up emails, you’ll need to automate the process. WooCommerce automated emails will boost your efficiency, as certain triggers or a pre-set schedule will send out messages automatically.

If you do this manually, you’ll likely end up with some extensive Excel sheet where you record all the items your customers have purchased from your store and when you should (manually) send your follow-ups.

Does that sound like it could be exhausting? It is.

Automate your workflow. Your setup need not be complicated, and triggers will be easy to configure with the right plugin. Here’s a good example of how an effective workflow could look:

Your setup can trigger emails to send every week, every 30 days, or more after a customer has made a purchase.

Of course, you also need to figure out the shipping schedule.

If a customer purchases an item from your store, and it takes ten days for it to be delivered, it wouldn’t make sense to trigger the follow-ups after seven days, seeing as there would be nothing to talk about.

Considering your average shipping times, think about how long it would take for the customer to be still enjoying the product.

You don’t want to wait too long — aim to automate your follow-ups to send about three days after the customer has received the product.

2. Segment your list

When sending WooCommerce follow-up emails, you should know not to send the same emails to all your customers. 

Your setup could probably use the same email templates, but the content should be personalized to boost engagement and the likelihood of conversion.

Typically, marketers tend to segment their lists by geographical or other demographic data.

However, this doesn’t usually make that much of a difference, unless you sell gender- or location-specific products.

Segmenting by behavior or transactional history is better, especially for WooCommerce follow-up emails.

After all, a customer who has purchased from you many times will need different messaging than one who bought from you for the first time.

Here’s more on how to set up smart segmentation.

3. Use engaging subject lines

We enjoy researching the best email subject lines and there’s a great reason why: fantastic subject lines lead to higher click rates, which lead to much better sales for your WooCommerce store.

When crafting your WooCommerce post-purchase email, remember to think of something that will interest your readers.

Of course, the subject lines must be relevant to the content of the email.

In general, however, the following email subject lines can work for your follow-ups:

• Enjoying your new purchase?
• 10% off your next purchase!
• Tell us what you think and get $25 off
• Your recent purchase…

And if you need more help, try out Omnisend’s subject line tester.

4. Take a customer-centric approach

You must view your entire customer journey/marketing funnel when crafting any specific step.

So, when looking at your emails for follow-ups, make sure you’re focusing on the long-term. If you’re focusing on the short term, you want the sale, now, at any cost.

If you’re focusing on the long-term, you understand that a happy customer is a lifelong customer.

When you’re creating your WooCommerce follow-up emails, make sure you’re focusing on the value that they bring to the customer.

A great way to keep your follow-up emails customer-centric is through personalized recommendations. They should already be relevant to your customer, but personalizing the products you recommend while using them to cross-sell will amplify the effect.

5. Ask for feedback

In that same vein, your follow-up email presents an excellent opportunity to ask for feedback.

This is a very customer-centric approach, seeing as you’ll be using this feedback to improve something in your product or marketing. This can include:

• Actual products your customer ordered
• Shipping, packaging, or unboxing experience
• Pricing, checkout experience, and payment options
• Communication: offers, descriptions, etc

There are a lot of things you can improve about your product, since it all depends on the type of feedback you’ll be getting.

In general, though, make sure you get feedback and then make sure you use it. Omnisend’s Product Review feature uses automatic email and SMS workflows to automatically collect customer reviews without taking up more of your time on an ongoing basis.

6. Be brief

Don’t send out chapters of promotional content.

This usually happens when marketers aren’t sure what will appeal to their customers, so they pack the email body full of everything in hopes that one of those things will hit the right note.

And that’s because they didn’t properly segment their subscriber list.

If you’ve segmented your contacts, then you’ll have a better understanding of what would appeal to your readers.

When it comes to writing, the advice is always to write what you want to say, then cut it in half.

Remove all the filler content and keep all the action words, and you’ll have something appealing, effective, and brief.

7. Make an offer for referral or recommended products

Lastly, what should you include in your WooCommerce email follow-ups? Well, this is a great time to do one of two things:

• Offer a reward for a referral
• Recommend products

Referrals are great because you kill two birds with one stone: you get a potential new customer (the friend that is being referred) and you incentivize your current customer to buy again.

Just make sure the offer is attractive.

With recommended products, you’re aiming at one thing: getting the customer to buy again, quickly.

This works by offering an appealing deal (free shipping, % discount, $ off, even a gift) if a customer buys from you again.

Here’s an example of how to make product recommendations:

7 amazing follow-up email examples you can steal

Let’s look at some examples of follow-ups that you can use as inspiration for your own WooCommerce post-purchase email templates:

1. Crate & Barrel

In this great (visually and copy-wise) example, you can see how Crate & Barrel is offering an incentive to encourage the customer to buy again, and soon.

This email is also a perfect illustration of how to create a sense of urgency. It includes a coupon that clearly displays the expiration date, creating a valuable limited-time offer.

2. Ulta Beauty

Here, Ulta Beauty is going for some social proof with requests for reviews.

While this is being sent after the customer has received the product and has it on top of their mind, it doesn’t really offer an incentive.

Why should the customer review this product?

If it had added some incentive (even a free one, like having it featured on its social media), it would give more motivation.

3. Pottery Barn Kids

This email from Pottery Barn Kids has striking visuals.

It’s going for the recommended product angle in its follow-ups, and it’s a great strategy.

4. Sephora

This is an interesting example of innovative follow-ups.

Here, Sephora is focusing on community-building by automatically adding recent purchases to the customer’s profile, called “My Beauty Blog.”

That is one way of social proof, as the customer can then (probably) rate it, share it, and provide feedback.

It’s a sort of exclusive social proof, as it extends only to those other Sephora users with access to the community.

5. Zulily

Rather than sending out a coupon, this email setup by Zulily is going for the refer-a-friend angle and giving away credits that the customer can use for their next purchase.

This has two main benefits:

• It helps focus on customer acquisition
• It rewards current customers and incentivizes them to purchase again

Even better, the email is designed so well that there are three reminders of credits.

At #1 in the graphic, there’s the customer’s credit balance, and then #2 (which the customer will probably see first) is the initial offer for credit.

Lastly, at #3, there is a longer explanation of the credit — $15 for each new customer, but only after that new customer’s order has shipped.

6. ILIA

This follow-up email from clean cosmetics company ILIA is unique because it doesn’t directly try to pursue more sales. Instead, it is a short personal message from the founder that shows the principles of the company and how much it values customer satisfaction.

The photograph of the founder further humanizes the brand and enables its recipients to feel like they have a close, personal relationship with it.

Although this email won’t directly drive conversions, it will boost brand affinity and loyalty.

These are some great examples of WooCommerce follow-up emails you can use in your email marketing strategy to really build up your customer relationships, get repeat purchases, and create brand advocates.

7. Bellroy

Bellroy adopts a personable tone for its follow-up email. It comes across as a friendly check-in to see if everything is okay while adopting the journey metaphor that reflects the brand’s product range.

The opening copy reinforces the brand’s main features and benefits — such as streamlining and new ways of carrying. Finally, it encourages a review, but only after checking how things are going for the customer.

It’s a simple, less direct approach to gaining feedback that’s fully on brand.

Other messages to add to your WooCommerce email automation

There are plenty of WooCommerce automated emails that can enrich your marketing toolkit and increase sales. The most important triggers for every online business are the following:

1. Welcome email: These emails often help retailers convert subscribers into customers. They are incredibly effective in terms of customer engagement as well as conversion. For tips on how to make them look attractive, check out this article.
2. Browse and cart abandonment emails: These emails are sent automatically to visitors when they abandon your store or the checkout process. Cart abandonment emails have some of the highest conversion rates over other automation workflows.
3. WooCommerce order confirmation email: Although you send this WooCommerce post-purchase email, it still generates new purchases by pulling the customer back into your sales funnel. The average conversion rate for such emails is 0.94%.
4. Customer win-back emails: This automated workflow is beneficial when you want to reconnect with customers who are no longer engaged with your emails. The conversion rate of these workflows is above 2%.

In addition to these workflows, marketing automation for WooCommerce can be supplemented with custom drip campaigns. You don’t need to collect any special data to recreate for the emails mentioned above.

Marketing automation platforms, like Omnisend, collect that for you, and having a plugin for WooCommerce ensures that the platform will work seamlessly with your site. However, if you want to send birthday emails or more sophisticated automated messages, make sure you have the customer data to trigger your emails.