How to email WordPress users
There are many ways to get in touch with your users and email is certainly one of the best of them. Our goal today is to explore some different ways to email WordPress users. We’ll see how to use WordPress to send email to users via MailChimp and Constant Contact. We’ll also learn how to use some events, such as a new post or new product, to get in touch with users.
Even with the heavy social media focus, we have nowadays, email is still the king. It’s undeniable that email lists have a high conversion and click rate. They allow you to directly filter your users, instead of relying on a platform you don’t control. Additionally, email lists are future proof. Social media sites and accounts can just disappear overnight. While a good old email list is on your control, and you can have many exports and backups.
Looking more closely at our current topic, the biggest challenge if we want to email WordPress users is exporting them. We need to export different users lists depending on our goals. And for that, we’ll use the Users Insights filters and its export tool.
In addition to exporting our users, the user filtering tools are really important. That’s because we don’t want to spam our users. We want to send them information that is relevant to them. Thus, based on their interests, location, past purchases and other metrics.
Let’s get started!
How to send email to users
The process of sending emails consists of two main parts:
- Find the users to email and export their contact details
- Import the user contacts to a mailing service
Finding and exporting the users to email
As you may have noticed filtering is key to our success when we want to email WordPress users. Many times, you might want to target just a specific group of users, instead of sending an email to all of them. In this way, you can email your users based on their interests or activity on your website.
Targeted emails can also help you avoid increasing the unsubscribe rate by sending too many emails to all the users.
That’s why filtering your users and finding the best audience for your next campaign is very important. Let’s see some basic filtering and exporting before diving into more complex examples.
Let’s say you want to filter all your recent subscribers. First, we filter our users based on their “registered date” filter. In addition to filtering users who have registered X days ago, we can use other filters. For instance, you can filter users from a specific time range, or a certain amount of days after a date. Then, once you have your users you can click “export”. This is how it looks like:
Moreover, you can control which columns will be visible. This directly affects your export file. Hence, you can select your visible columns, and these are the ones you’ll see in your export file. Since we are going to send the data to a mailing service, it’s important to have the E-mail field enabled, so the user emails will be exported as well.
Once you have your desired users along with their custom fields just click on the Export button to export their data.
Importing the user contact details to a mailing service
Next, we import these users into your desired mailing software, such as MailChimp or Campaign monitor. Usually, the import process itself is quite simple. We have created detailed guides on how to do this:
After the import process, it’s time to email your WordPress users. Since our export file is already segmented, you can simply create a new campaign and drop them a line. Make sure to use the custom fields you’ve exported as well, to give your message a personal touch.
How to send email to WordPress users when there’s a new post
There are many ways to create different user segments. If you collect their job title, for example as user meta, you know their professional interests. It’s likely that you have different categories on your site, and each category can match different interests. Thus, posts about web development are likely to be read by web developers and designers. On the other hand, posts about entrepreneurship would be a good fit for managers.
Consequently, we can use different custom fields to email your WordPress users based on interest. Then whenever you have a new post that you judge interesting for this groups, just let them know.
Let’s say you have a new guide on the web development category. If you want to let your users know, just filter out relevant job titles that could be interested in it. Additionally, make sure to include columns that can be used later. For example, if you keep the name and job title columns visible it’s possible to customize your message with these fields:
Most mailing lists can deal with duplicates. Therefore, you can try different keywords and you won’t ever send copies of the same email to the same user. Let’s try a few other job title keywords then:
Furthermore, it’s possible to track down for these same users if they have visited your site. This information is important to help you track down the effectiveness of your campaign. Also, this helps you filter out users who aren’t interested in the categories you thought they would be.
Since this is a long filter, you can save some time by using the segments tool. This feature allows you to save a set of filters to be used with one click. You can save them with a meaningful name, making it easier to recall afterwards:
And similarly to the examples above, once you apply the selected filters or segment, just click on the export button to export these users.
Using WordPress to send email to users based on their location
Often store owners have brick and mortar stores in addition to their online presence. If that’s the case for you, gathering your user location may be a good idea.
That’s because you can improve your marketing campaigns by directing users to their nearest store. This is possible with the Users Insights GeoLocation API. By using it, you can email WordPress users based on their location.
For instance, if you have a product launch or upcoming sale for a certain store, it’s possible to filter users from that city, region or country.
If you don’t know from which cities your users are, the map view can help you. With it, you can zoom in and out to certain locations and find out their city or possible neighborhood. Due to the limitations of the GeoLocation API, this information won’t be perfectly accurate (e.g. it won’t show you the exact address and street number), but it’s a great starting point.
Furthermore, once you filter users from a certain store you may want to add them to a user group. For example, users near the NYC store can be added to the NYC group. Therefore, once you want to filter all users from them you don’t need to filter city by city.
Conclusion
Today we learned some different ways to email your WordPress users. In addition to emailing them, we learned many ways to segment users for customized experiences. We found many uses for your custom fields, and a few new options, such as the map and Geolocation tools.
We hope you enjoyed this article and see you again next time!