Overview
WooCommerce Memberships has a few standard emails built into the plugin, which are intended to cover the basics of member lifecycle emails. However, WordPress isn’t a great tool for sending emails as its scheduling mechanisms aren’t robust and email deliverability from your site isn’t ideal–using a dedicated email service is better for more advanced emails.
While Memberships will always cover the basics, we’ve built an integration with Jilt, our email marketing app, to support sending advanced member emails.
Since Jilt and Memberships are both built by SkyVerge, these products are always guaranteed to work well together, and we’ll keep adding features to improve the integration.
Comparison
Here’s a quick overview of the emails built in to Memberships and those available with Jilt:
| BUILT INTO MEMBERSHIPS | JILT | |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome new members | – | 1+ automated emails |
| Member newsletters | – | yes |
| Expiring soon notifications | 1 email | 1+ automated emails |
| Win-back emails | 1 post-expiration email | 1+ automated emails |
| Paused membership reminder | – | 1+ automated emails |
Requirements
- WooCommerce Memberships version 1.11+
- Jilt for WooCommerce version 1.5+
- A Jilt account (free accounts are available)
- PHP 5.4+ (You can see this under WooCommerce > Status
Setup
To begin using Jilt with Memberships, please confirm that you meet the site requirements and follow this guide to connect your store to Jilt.
Once connected with Memberships activated on your site, you should be all set to start sending membership emails from Jilt!
When Jilt connects to your site, it automatically begins syncing member and other customer data. Jilt will get updates from your store via WooCommerce webhooks, so there’s nothing you need to do to ensure member and customer data stays updated.
Using Jilt
Jilt offers extensive documentation and an incredible support team to help you with any questions about how to create and send beautiful emails, but here are a few general notes about how emailing works in Jilt:
- You can segment emails by membership status to send specific emails to your members. You can also segment by membership plan to target the members of a particular plan with content relevant to their membership.
- Jilt offers pre-built templates for each email type to help you get started, but these can be endlessly customized with our email editor so that your email design and content fits with your site’s brand.
- Our default segmentation rules are catered to each email type (e.g., welcome or expiration emails) so there’s very little setup you need to do to start sending great emails. These rules can also be customized, though, if you want to tweak how your emails are sent.
- Jilt’s email editor lets you personalize email content with liquid so you can include information like member name and other membership details.
With Jilt, you can get started with sending membership emails in just a few clicks, but you can edit segmentation rules, email design, and email content to meet your exact needs.
Email types
Jilt includes many emails to support membership sites – let’s take a look at each email type.
Welcome new members
You can send a single welcome email or a welcome series to introduce new members to their membership. Welcome emails let you thank members for joining and help your new members get started with using their membership effectively.
Member newsletters
With Jilt’s broadcasts feature, you can send newsletters to your members to keep them updated on news about their membership, your store, and other related topics. This is a great way to keep members engaged and returning to your site on a regular basis.
Expiring soon notifications
When a membership is about to expire, you should let your members know so they can ensure they don’t lose access to their plan unexpectedly. With Jilt, you can even offer discounts codes to encourage members to renew!
Win-back emails
Once a membership ends, you can send one or more emails to encourage members to reactivate their membership plan. Jilt offers both an expiration and cancellation win-back, so you can tweak your messaging based on how the membership ended. You can also send an email immediately after the membership ends as an expiration notification in addition to a win-back campaign.
Members will immediately exit the campaign once they reactivate, so you don’t need to worry about sending additional win-back emails after that point.
Paused membership reminders
If you’re using WooCommerce Subscriptions with Memberships, your members may be able to pause their membership by suspending the associated subscription. You can also manually pause memberships upon request even if you’re not using Subscriptions. This campaign lets you remind members about their paused membership and entice them to reactivate!
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can I use Jilt to send emails to other customers that aren’t members?
A: Absolutely! Jilt is a full-service email marketing platform, so you can use it to send all sorts of emails. In addition to the membership emails listed above, Jilt can also send other automated emails (e.g., abandoned cart emails or product review requests), transactional emails (e.g., order receipts), and broadcasts (e.g., newsletters, product promotions, or sale announcements) for all your site customers.
Q: Can I send different emails based on membership plan?
A: Sure thing – you can send one email to all members, or you can add rules to target one or more plans in particular. This is a great way to customize your content based on the interests of your plan members. For example, if you offer eLearning memberships, you might want to send very different content based on the types of courses included in each membership.