Shopify Email App was released recently in April 2020 to be an email marketing tool for merchants on the Shopify platform. Let’s review the app briefly before you create your Shopify Email account or ignore it.
You might wonder if email marketing is still relevant in 2020 given the rapid growth and effectiveness of social media channels.
It is a definite, huge YES!
Email marketing has been an integral tool for marketers to connect with customers and earn positive ROI (return on investment). According to Hubspot research 78%, marketers saw an increase in customer engagement in 2019 according to Hubspot 78%. More importantly, marketers report a remarkable $42 return on investment for every $1 they spend on email strategies in the same year, according to Litmus Research.
What tools are best for email marketing? It depends. It all depends.
Let’s take a look at the Shopify app that was released in April 2020. Shopify email. As we develop this new email marketing strategy, I will be your Guinea Pig.
Email Marketing is essential
Myth: Email marketing is not changing over the past decade and therefore is obsolete in today’s ever-evolving technology age.
Truth Email marketing evolves daily, adopting new trends such as the “Dark Mode” that everyone was talking to on Instagram or for emails . Litmus research has shown that email is still the preferred channel for marketing communications to all ages for the past decade.
Learn more about these trends and what marketers can do to optimize email marketing strategies by reading the 2020 State Of Email research from Litmus.
Keeping an open mind and learning new tools is essential to growth. I tried Shopify recently. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of this new app.
The Pros and Cons of Shopify Email App
Pros:
The 0-step set up process
After you’ve installed the app, the app is integrated into the Marketing section in Shopify Admin. This means quicker load times, and more convenient campaign track and analytics – all integrated into one Dashboard.
Shopify Admin allows you to send, manage and analyse your campaigns. Similar steps are required for other platforms such as MailChimp and Omnisend. This process is quite complex and requires multiple steps.
Ready-made email templates
Shopify Email app makes it easy to save time by providing ready-to-use templates that you can use to promote featured products and sales. You can also create your own templates.
Pricing
It’s FREE up to October 1, 2020. You will receive 2,500 emails each month after that date. If you want to send more emails, it will cost $1 USD. Shopify Email offers a bonus feature: You can send and contact a lot more emails per week with Shopify Email than many other tools like Omnisend, MailChimp and Klaviyo.
Shopify Email is clearly the most affordable of its competitors in terms of pricing. Shopify Email is a great tool for small businesses that already have a Shopify Store.
Cons:
Few email templates
This app is new and I was expecting there to not be many templates. There are 8 templates, with one blank canvas. Shopify is currently working to develop more templates and features that users can use.
No email marketing automation
Email marketing automation can be used to send welcome, activation, or confirmation emails. These emails are sent automatically if customers or other activities meet the rules/triggers you have set. In this example, it is when a customer registers for a new account.
Shopify Email allows you to set up different customer groups so that each campaign targets a specific group. When you customize your email, you can select to send an individual group.
Bug/Feature problems
Although I have never personally experienced this issue, a few merchants have reported problems like the app being blocked from their stores or customers receiving emails at totally different times (some get emails at 6 p.m., others at 9 p.m., and some at 11:11 p.m.). Shopify support will be following up on all complaints.
If you are now familiar with Shopify Email’s pros and cons, or if you feel that the strengths outweigh any weaknesses, let’s get you connected to the app!
How do I set up my Shopify Email account?
It is very easy to set up an account. To access your Shopify admin account, go to the Search Box at top of page and type in ” Shopify Email“. Click on the Apps result. You can also login to the app and begin using it right away . It’s as easy as that.
After you’ve downloaded the app, it will be located under the Shopify admin > Marketing > Campaigns. You can then start creating your email campaigns.
How to personalize your email marketing campaign
To set up an email marketing campaign, start with the following video. This includes changing the products that are already incorporated into your store, changing fonts, images and background colors, as well as changing text colors.
Shopify Email Account Activation
This tutorial continues the tutorial “How do you migrate customers to Shopify and activate their accounts?”. If you wish to send invitations to newly migrated customers in bulk using MailChimp’s template instead of the Shopify-built-in template, you can use MailChimp’s template.
This assumes that you have already imported your customers to Shopify. If you have not yet migrated them, then follow the tutorial to import them.
These are the steps:
- Shopify Admin offers a default manual method to send invitations to customers by one customer.
- Shopify allows you to export unactivated customers by generating activation URLs in Excel with Bulk Export Export with Excel app.
- Import customer list with activation URLs to MailChimp or any other mass mailing service.
- MailChimp sends an e-mail blast to all new customers with a nice invitation to activate their accounts.
Although it may seem complicated, once you understand the system and do it once, it will only take 15 minutes to set everything up.
How to send Shopify Admin invitations
Shopify allows you to send an account invitation to non-active customers. You can open any customer data that we have imported and view Send account invitation under your customer name.
You will receive the email form by clicking Send an account invite
I filled it out with the information I wanted to give to the customer. Click on View email:
You can click Send Notification to receive the email with activation code. This will allow you to activate your account.
Clicking on activate your account will take you to the activation page.
You can send activation emails to one customer at a given time by doing this. You can do this with 100, 1000 or more customers.
Shopify allows you to export customers with activation links
We save you time by sending activation emails to all of them at once.
For this, we need to obtain activation URLs from all customers.
This data can be obtained by exporting customers customers using Bulk Import Export With Excel app. When exporting, check the activation URLs
In the Export file, you will find activation URLs.
Although there are many columns, we will only need four of them: Email, First Name, Last name, and Activation account URL. All other columns will be deleted.
MailChimp allows you to create a customer list
You can send emails, notifications and campaigns using the MailChimp service. To create customer lists. Let’s start by creating the customer list.
Login (or register) into MailChimp service.
Click on Lists -> [Create a List] and fill in the list data. My list was called “Migrated customers”.
Click Save.
Naturally, customers will not be added to the list by hand. We will import data from Excel that we exported earlier from Shopify (the one with activation URLs). Click Import subscribers
The mandatory fields are Email Address, First and Last names. One more field will be required: Activation URL. This is because we need to invite customers in order to activate their accounts at our new shop.
We now need to open the Excel export file, copy all data, and then paste it into the MailChimp form
Click Next.
MailChimp now needs to know which data we want to import about customers.
Select the appropriate title in the column names and hit Save. This will be done for Email Address, First and Last Name columns. You will need to create New column for the Activation URL column. It will be called Activation URL.
We’ll do another thing. Go to the Lists. Open Migrant Customers list. MERGE
This section will allow you to modify tags for the First Name field and the Activation URL field. Assimilate URL and NAME. Click Save Changes. This information will be required to create activation emails.
To test the list, I will add Test Customer to it. It will only contain one customer and my email. I will also copy the Excel Activation URL and add field tags to the list as in the previous step. This list will allow me to test if the email is being sent correctly and if the activation URL works properly.
MailChimp will create the campaign
We now need to create a new campaign in MailChimp. This will contain the information we will send to our customers, and invite them to activate their accounts. Click Campaigns-> [Create a Campaign]
Select Create an email (we will send the Campaign via Email).
Select the list of customers – Migrated Customers
Pay close attention to the checkbox Personalize your “To” field. NAME These tags were added earlier when we created the list. Now each customer will receive a personalized email with his/her First and Last names as the recipient.
Click Next.
MailChimp offers many templates for email campaigns. I’ll choose the “Make an Announcement” template
You will find prepared boxes you can modify or delete what you don’t need. Think about how you would like the email to look. Are you going to need images? What text should you use to attract customers and get them to activate their account?
Once you have an idea, click on it and edit it.
I have now added the Logo. Next, I modified the box with the text.
I deleted all images from boxes and buttons.
The button was edited as follows:
In the field, I have added the URL tag we created when creating the list. Each customer will be taken to their Account activation page. It will also take the customer’s Activation URL.
Click Save and close.
Send e-mails out to all customers and test them
We can now test it by sending a test email. Go Preview and Send a Test Email.
Enter the email address where you wish to send the test, and then click [Send test].
It looks good to me. This is a test and the activation button won’t work. However, I want to verify that the button works in real emails. I will therefore send this Campaign to my Test Customer List (remember, I created one).
I will click Next
Shopify Email Support:
What is Shopify Email Support and how can I get it?
You can also email Shopify support if you are unable to chat live. Email responses are slower than live chat and can take up to two hours for most support queries.
How do I email Shopify support?
To email Shopify support, you can follow the same steps as live chat (https://help.shopify.com/en/questions#/contact), but instead of choosing Chat with us, click Email us.
This form will then open. All you have to do is enter your query and hit .
