WooCommerce Follow Up Emails: 12 Best Practices and Examples

If you’re running your own store on WordPress, you know how important it is to have great WooCommerce follow up emails.

There’s an amazing amount of value you can get for your ecommerce store by setting up automated follow up emails.

And that’s what we’ll be looking at today.

But just in case you’re not 100% clear on what follow up emails are…

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

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7 best practices

Let’s get started on your follow up journey with these best practices you absolutely need to master.

#1 Set up follow up email automation

If you want to set up post purchase/follow up emails, you’ll need to automate the process.

Either that, or you have some extensive Excel sheet where you record all the items your customers have bought, when, and when you should (manually) send your follow up emails.

No.

Set up automation, such as this one below:

You can set it up so that the email goes out 1 week, 30 days, or more after a customer has made a purchase.

Of course, you also need to figure in the shipping time.

If a customer purchases an item from you and it takes 10 days for it to be delivered, it wouldn’t make sense to send a follow up email after 7 days, seeing as there would be nothing to talk about.

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

You don’t want to wait too long. I’d recommend sending the follow up email about 3 days after the customer has received the product.

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#2 Segment your list

You should know by now: don’t send the same emails to all your customers.

Usually people tend to segment their lists by geographical or other demographic data.

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

It’s better to segment by behavior or transactional history.

After all a customer that’s bought from you many times will need different messaging than one that’s bought from you the first time.

You can read more here about how to set up smart segmentation.

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#3 Use engaging subject lines

Here at Omnisend, we do enjoy researching the best email subject lines.

And there’s a great reason why: fantastic subject lines lead to higher open rates, which lead to better click rates, which lead to—you guess it—much better sales.

When you’re crafting your follow up emails for WooCommerce, remember to think of something that will interest your readers.

Of course, it’s important that the subject lines are relevant to the content of the email.

In general, however, these following subject lines can work for your follow up emails:

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

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#4 Take a customer-centric approach

It’s important that you view your entire customer journey/marketing funnel when crafting any specific step.

So when looking at your follow up emails, make sure you’re focusing on the long-run, not short-run.

If you’re focusing on the short-run, you want the sale, now, at any cost.

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

That’s why, when you’re creating your WooCommerce follow up emails, make sure you’re focusing on the value that it’s bringing to the customer—this one, and all your customers.

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#5 Ask for feedback

In that same vein, your follow up email presents a great 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:

• the actual product
• the shipping or packaging
• the prices
• the 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.

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#6 Be brief

Don’t send out chapters of promotional content.

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

And that’s usually because they didn’t properly segment the list.

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

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

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

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#7 Make an offer for referral or recommended products

Lastly—what to include in your follow up emails?

Well, this is a great time to do one of two things:

• reward for a referral
• offer for recommended products

With referrals, it’s 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’s interesting.

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

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

Both of these ideas work great.

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5 amazing follow up email examples you can steal

Let’s look at some great examples of follow up emails that you can use for your WooCommerce store.

#1 Crate & Barrel

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

It’s great, to hurry up the purchase, that they’ve added urgency with a coupon that clearly displays the expiration date.

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#2 Ulta Beauty

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

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

Why should the customer review this product?

If they’d added some sort of incentive (even a free one, like having it featured on their social media), it would give more motivation.

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#3 Pottery Barn Kids

Great visuals in this email from Pottery Barn Kids.

They’re going for the recommended products angle in their follow up emails, and it’s a great strategy.

However, they’re missing something: I’m sure you can figure it out…

Incentive!

Why should the customer buy these items?

I understand not wanting to hook your customers on non-stop discounts, but the incentive can be a small, social one, or a big, large gift.

But with the proper motivation, more people will buy (again).

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#4 Sephora

This is an interesting example of innovative follow up emails.

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 that have access to the community.

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#5 Zulily

This one is pretty great (I even decided to mark it up).

Here, Zulily is going for the refer-a-friend angle and giving away credits that they can use for their next purchase.

Remember, I said that this hits two areas:

• it gets new customers
• it gets old customers to buy again

Even better, they’ve designed the email so well that there are three—three!—reminders of credits.

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

Then lastly, at #2, is the longer explainer of credit—here, $15 for each new customer, but only after that new customer’s order has shipped.

Great.

These are some of the 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.

If you have any other examples of great follow up emails, let us know in the comments below!