Overview
WooCommerce Subscriptions has a few standard emails built into the plugin. These emails notify your subscribers about subscriptions events, such as renewal orders or failed payments. However, WordPress isn’t really a great tool for sending emails, as its scheduling mechanisms aren’t robust, and email deliverability from your site is not ideal (using a dedicated email service is better).
While Subscriptions does cover basic emails, you can use Jilt for advanced subscriber emails. Jilt can send a single email or series of emails for subscription events, automating your subscriber lifecycle emails.
Comparison
| EMAILS BUILT INTO SUBSCRIPTIONS | EMAILS USING JILT | |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome new subscribers | – | 1 or more emails |
| “Trial ending soon” reminder | – | 1 or more emails |
| Pre-renewal reminder | – | 1 or more emails |
| Renewal order notification | 1 email | – |
| Processing or completed renewal | 1 email | – (coming soon!) |
| Renewal invoice | 1 email | – (coming soon!) |
| Customer payment retry | 1 email | – (coming soon!) |
| Subscription switch complete | 1 email | – |
| “Ending soon” notifications | – | 1 or more emails |
| Pending cancellation notification | – | 1 or more emails |
| “Subscription expired” notifications | – | 1 or more emails |
| Post-cancellation win-back | – | 1 or more emails |
| Post-expiration win-back | – | 1 or more emails |
Requirements
In order to use Jilt with WooCommerce Subscriptions, your site must meet the following requirements.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions v2.1 or newer
- You must have a Jilt account (free accounts are available)
- PHP 5.6 or newer (you can see this on your site under WooCommerce > Status)
Jilt for WooCommerce v1.5 or newer
Setup
- Follow the guide here to connect your store to Jilt.
- Once connected, if WooCommerce Subscriptions is active on your site, you should already have subscriber emails available!
If not, you can manually enable this integration in your Jilt account. In Jilt, go to Settings > Integrations and click “Enable” for WooCommerce Subscriptions.
You can now use subscriber emails. When Jilt connects to your site, it automatically starts to sync your member data, and it will get updates from your store via the WooCommerce webhooks for subscriber updates. Therefore, it’s very important that the webhooks Jilt has registered for subscription events are not deleted.
Email types
Jilt supports several subscriber emails with pre-built templates. These campaign templates can let you send 1 or more emails for different subscription lifecycle events.
Each campaign has a set of default rules and emails to get you started, and these rules and emails can be customized for your store.
Welcome new subscribers
You can send an email or series to welcome new subscribers as subscriptions are created. You can target specific subscription products or product categories (collections) as well to scope the audience for this campaign.
This email can insert subscriber data dynamically as well. See the notes on email content below for more details.
Trial ending notifications
You can notify subscribers in a trial period when their trial end date is approaching. This lets you answer any questions before the initial subscription payment is processed, and can target subscribers hours, days, or weeks before the trial ends.
Pre-renewal reminder
Need to keep customers informed before a payment processes? You can use a pre-renewal notification email or series to let them know of an upcoming payment. This is especially helpful for subscriptions with longer billing intervals.
Pending cancellation notification
When a subscriber cancels a subscription, it’s helpful to let them know when their access will end, and confirm that they won’t be charged going forward. The pending cancel notification is able to do this for you, and will email subscribers when their subscription is set to the “pending cancellation” status.
Post-expiration win-back
The “post expiration” template in Jilt can be used to win-back expired subscribers. Some sites use a single campaign to notify subscribers immediately as a subscription expires, then create a new campaign to send emails with a longer delay, or you can combine these into a single campaign with several emails.
If the subscription status changes due to renewal, Jilt will automatically exit the subscriber if your site uses Subscriptions 2.3.5 or newer, so they won’t receive any further emails as soon as their subscription is re-activated. This is helpful, for example, if you include a discount code, so subscribers won’t see this after they’ve already renewed.
Post-cancellation win-back
Post-cancellation emails can be sent after a subscription has been changed to the “cancelled” status. These emails can be used to win-back subscribers, or get feedback as to why the subscriber cancelled.
If the subscription status changes due to renewal or repurchase, Jilt will automatically exit the subscriber if your site uses Subscriptions 2.3.5 or newer, so they won’t receive any further emails as soon as their subscription is reactivated. This is helpful, for example, if you include a discount code, so subscribers won’t see this after they’ve already become active again.
Ending soon notifications
An Easter egg template! If you subscription has an end date or set number of billing cycles, you can repurpose the welcome template, and turn it into an “ending soon” notification by removing the “date created” rule, and swapping in an “end date” rule instead.
While the “after subscription created” text is misleading in this case, the delay is essentially “send this X time after someone enters this campaign (matches these rules)”.
Email content
Jilt’s email builder support blocks, such as buttons, images, or text. However, it also supports HTML blocks and liquid (a template language). This means that emails can use liquid tags to insert content, while developers can do advanced customizations like conditional content.
If you want to learn more about liquid, check out this cheat sheet from Shopify. While Jilt doesn’t support everything in that cheat sheet, it shows you the basic syntax of liquid. If you don’t want to learn it, that’s okay! You can reach out to Jilt support — they’ll help you get set up.
Want to dig in? Check out the full reference with examples here.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can I send different emails based on subscription products?
A: Absolutely! By default, templates apply to all subscribers. However, you may want to change your content based on the subscription product — your welcome email is a great use case for this. If so, you can add a “products” rule, and pick which subscription products to target. This limits the subscribers who receive this campaign based on what they’ve purchased. You can use “product collections” rules to target categories as well.
You can then add multiple campaigns to reach other subscribers. For example, if I have three subscription products, I could have three separate welcome campaigns to target each one.
