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Ever felt like your WooCommerce store's email marketing could use a boost? Automating your emails might be just what you need. By integrating Mailchimp with your WooCommerce site, you can streamline your efforts and enhance customer engagement.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to seamlessly connect these two powerful tools. You'll learn step-by-step how to create an account, set up the integration, and configure key settings on your WooCommerce store.
Why Connect MailChimp to WooCommerce?
Mailchimp is undoubtedly one of the most popular email marketing tools today. Many loved it for its user-friendly interface and robust features.
When you integrate it with WooCommerce, you’re getting the best of both worlds. These are some of the benefits we see:
- Unified Customer Data: This comprehensive view lets you understand your audience’s preferences and speak their language.
- Automated Email Marketing: Nobody has time to manually send welcome emails, check abandoned carts, or tailor product recommendations. With WooCommerce and MailChimp, this is all automated.
- Personalized Customer Communication: According to sender.net, 96% of businesses succeed with their marketing strategies by personalizing emails. With this approach, you can boost the chances of conversions.
- Segmentation and Targeting: Segment your audience based on purchase history, preferences, or demographics to deliver targeted messages that resonate deeply with each group.
- Enhanced Reporting and Analytics: Get invaluable insights into how your campaigns are performing, how your customers are behaving, and what's driving the most ROI.
With MailChimp and WooCommerce, you'll be able to ramp up your productivity, connect with customers like never before, and take on almost any obstacle your business faces with confidence. And that's just scratching the surface of what this dynamic duo can do for your online store.
Before You Begin
First things first, let's get everything in place. Make sure you have WooCommerce installed on your WordPress site and an active Mailchimp account ready to go. If you haven't set these up yet, no worries! Follow these simple steps:
1) Set Up WooCommerce on Your WordPress Site
Log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to the plugins section. Click on "Add New" and search for WooCommerce.
Once you’ve found the WooCommerce plugin in the search results, click "Install Now" and "Activate."
With WooCommerce activated, your hosting environment is now equipped with the tools to start customizing your online store.
2) Set Up Your Mailchimp Account
Next, you'll need a Mailchimp account to manage your subscribers and send targeted email marketing campaigns.
Visit the Mailchimp website and sign up for an account if you don't already have one. For this tutorial, we’re going to choose the free plan. Once you're signed up, log in to your Mailchimp dashboard.
Now, you’ll need to create an audience.
Your audience is where all your subscriber data will be collected and managed. You can create an audience (by adding new contacts) specifically for your online store. By default, your registered business name is automatically selected.
3 Simple Steps to Connect MailChimp With WooCommerce
There are several ways to integrate Mailchimp with WooCommerce. But for this tutorial, we’re going with the Mailchimp for WooCommerce plugin because it’s the easiest and gets the job done quickly.
Here’s how to get everything set up:
Step 1: Install the Mailchimp for WooCommerce Plugin
Mailchimp for WooCommerce is a free plugin that connects your WooCommerce store with Mailchimp. We love this tool because it lets you sync customer data and automate your email marketing with just a few clicks.
Let's walk through the steps to get everything set up!
From your WordPress admin panel, go to the “Plugins” section and click "Add New." Type "Mailchimp for WooCommerce" on the search bar and press enter.
Locate the plugin in the search results and click the "Install Now" button. Once the installation is complete, click "Activate."
Step 2: Connect Your WooCommerce Store to Mailchimp
With the plugin installed and activated, it's time to connect your WooCommerce store to your Mailchimp account. This will allow you to sync your store data and manage your email marketing directly from Mailchimp.
From your WordPress dashboard, go to the Mailchimp plugin settings. Click on the “Connect Account” button.
On the pop-up modal, enter your Mailchimp credentials and click "Log In." Then, click "Allow" to authorize Mailchimp to access your WooCommerce data.
After logging in, click the “Sync now” button to sync your store data to MailChimp.
Note that the sync process might take time, depending on the number of products and customers you have. Simply head over to the Overview tab to monitor the progress.
If any issues occur, you can go to the “Advanced” tab and click on "RESYNC NOW" to re-sync your audience data without losing anything.
Step 3: Set up Store Settings
Under the Store tab, specify the physical location of your store in the Locale settings section.
Then, select the minimum permissions needed for managing the Mailchimp for WooCommerce plugin. Typically, you would check the box next to "Administrators."
You can also configure the default product image size for abandoned cart emails, order notifications, and product recommendations under the “Product image size” section. You can leave the size as default if you prefer.
Under the Audience tab, choose your cart tracking preferences. Make sure that the “Sync new non-subscribed contacts” option is checked.
Note: Make sure you’ve chosen a Mailchimp audience you want to sync with WooCommerce. It should be pre-selected if you only have one audience.
Then, on your MailChimp account, customize your email settings. Enter details like the "To" field, "From" field, subject line, send time, language, and message for subscribers.
You can also add tags to new subscribers for better segmentation. Under the “Audience” tab on MailChimp, click on “Tags” and then the “Create tag” button.
That’s it! You’re now ready to send emails to your audience.
Other Ways to Connect MailChimp With WooCommerce
If you’re looking for other options to integrate Mailchimp and WooCommerce, you can try one of these methods:
Use Other Third-Party Plugins
The WordPress ecosystem offers an abundance of plugins to help you integrate MailChimp with your WooCommerce store. Here are some of the best options we've found:
WP WooCommerce Mailchimp by Saint Systems
WP WooCommerce Mailchimp by Saint Systems is an excellent choice for those who prefer simplicity. While it may lack some of the more sophisticated capabilities offered by other plugins, it excels at handling basic integration needs.
Setting it up is easy, too. Just install and activate the plugin from the WordPress repository, enter your Mailchimp API key, and configure the sync settings and audience preferences according to your requirements.
This plugin is, overall, a reliable and user-friendly option to consider.
MailOptin
MailOptin offers a ton of opt-in form options that can help you capture more leads and grow your subscriber base.
However, like other plugins, MailOptin’s advanced features are locked behind a premium plan. But for us, the free version already packs a serious punch. You don’t need to commit to a paid plan if you’re just testing the waters.
Getting started with MailOptin is straightforward. Just head over to the WordPress plugin repository, install and activate it on your site, and then connect it to your Mailchimp account using your API key. From there, you can start designing eye-catching opt-in forms that perfectly complement your WooCommerce store.
So, if you're serious about taking your email marketing to the next level, MailOptin is definitely worth checking out!
Import Your CSV File Manually
If you're someone who prefers to have complete control over your data and doesn't mind rolling up your sleeves a bit, then this method might be the way to go.
One of the advantages of this approach is that you don't need to rely on any additional plugins. It's just you and your data.
But let’s be honest. Manually importing a list can be a bit time-consuming, especially if you've got a massive amount of customer data to wrangle. But if you don't mind putting in a little extra effort, then here's how it works.
First, you'll need to export your customer data from your WooCommerce dashboard. Go to the "Reports'' section and click on the “Customers” tab. At the top right portion of the page, click the “Export CSV” link.
Next, log into your Mailchimp account and head over to Audience > All contacts. Once there, click the “Add contacts” from the top right. Choose "Import Contacts" from the dropdown menu and select the CSV file you just exported from WooCommerce.
From here, you can start mapping those fields correctly. Take your time and make sure each column from your CSV file is matched up with the appropriate Mailchimp field. Once you've got everything squared away, click the import button. And you’re done!
That’s It!
Mailchimp and WooCommerce make the perfect combo for taking your online business to new heights. These platforms help you save time, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver personalized communications to your customers.
With those tedious manual processes off your plate, you can laser in on what really matters most, and that is, growing your business.