New Subscriptions Integration: Send Subscriber emails with Jilt

This is a guest post from Max Rice, cofounder & CEO at Jilt/SkyVerge.

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At Jilt, we work with hundreds of WooCommerce stores that sell everything from digital downloads to shoes. Stores selling subscriptions are among our favorite types of stores. Their business model is a bit more unique, and they have specific needs when it comes to communicating with their customers through email.

We worked with one store in particular that sold subscriptions to meal plans & recipes. They had a complicated series of emails setup in a custom system — their goal was to send the right emails to the right subscribers at the right time, but it wasn’t working well. Customers were either getting too many emails or none at all, which was especially a problem during their trial period.

The store also had a lot of trouble customizing their emails to match their brand and they wanted to personalize them with subscriber information to help increase open & click rates. Since personalized emails generate 6x higher transaction rates than those without personalization, they knew it was important to be able to easily personalize both the subject lines and contents of their emails.

Based on our experience working with that store and many others, we set out to help solve their problem by building an integration between Jilt, an email marketing platform built for eCommerce stores, and WooCommerce Subscriptions. Our goal for the integration was simple: make it incredibly easy to send targeted, personalized emails to subscribers at exactly the right time. We’ve worked with Prospress for many years (fun fact: I helped add sign-up fee discounts back in 2012), especially with integrations like the Memberships extension and a dozen different payment gateways, so we were confident we could build a fantastic integration.

While Subscriptions itself comes with a great set of standard emails, they’re built on top of the standard WooCommerce emails which can make them challenging to customize and personalize. And sending emails through your own store can pose issues for deliverability, so it’s better to use a service to send your emails or install an SMTP plugin, like Postmark.

With Jilt, you can go beyond these standard emails and we’ve created a few templates that can be used to send a single email or a series of emails to your subscribers based on subscription properties and events.

Every template includes a pre-built design and content so you spend more time getting your email copy just right instead of staring at a blank email wondering what to write. These templates are available now:

• Welcome new subscribers — Shouldn’t every new subscriber get a heartfelt thank you message? Set expectations like when items will ship, what they get, and more.You can send a single email or a series to get feedback, set expectations, and say thank you. ❤️
• Trial ending soon — Remind your subscribers when their trial period ends and help them get the most out of the remaining time. This is great for asking for feedback and talking with customers before their first payment is processed, keeping your trial-to-paid conversion rates as high as possible.
• Pre-renewal emails — Surprises are great for birthdays, but not so much for payments. Especially if your customer forgot about it (which happens a lot). Telling customers they have an upcoming payment prevents surprises and gives your customers the opportunity to share feedback before continuing with a subscription. These are also great for those longer-term subscriptions (like annual billing) where there is a high chance that your customer has forgotten about the upcoming payment.
• Pending cancellation email — After a customer cancels a subscription, they want to know what happens next: when does their access end and can they re-subscribe in the future? Use a pending cancellation email or series to confirm that you’ve received a customers cancellation, share when their access ends, and ask for feedback as to why they’ve cancelled.
• Cancelled subscription win-back — When a subscriber has cancelled, it’s important to find out why. Send a win-back email or series to ask for feedback and then try to save the sale. A discount in the 2nd or 3rd email in a win-back series works great.
• Expired subscription win-back — If your subscriptions end after a set number of billing periods, send a series of emails to win-back your subscribers after their subscription ends. This is another great opportunity to provide a small discount for re-subscribing.

Cancelled and expired win-back campaigns automatically detect when a customer re-subscribes so they won’t receive any further emails in those series.

Every campaign can be personalized with dynamic content from customer or subscription information, like name, dates, status, ID, or order total.

Make your emails even more relevant by using subscription data to target a specific audience and segment customers by subscription status, start date, products (or categories) purchased in the subscription, and more.

You can also send other emails through Jilt, such as abandoned cart recovery emails, educational series after a purchase, feedback requests to encourage product reviews, emails for WooCommerce Memberships, and more.

Ready to start sending the right subscription emails to the right customers at exactly the right time? Sign up for Jilt and see how easy automated lifecycle emails for subscriptions can be.