How to Create an Affiliate Marketing Program in WordPress

affiliate marketing program in WordPress featured

Not so long ago, I completed a project that involved running an affiliate marketing program on a Jupiter X website. I learned a lot about affiliates and how to integrate them into a WordPress website. I thought it would be useful to share what I learned with the readers of this article. If you want to run an affiliate marketing in WordPress and don’t know where to start, read on! 

Before we get into the details, let me explain what affiliate marketing is: it involves selling a product or a service and paying a commission to those who introduce your product or service to new buyers. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved: the product owner will sell their product or service, the affiliate will get rewards for sending real buyers to the seller and the buyer will get what they want. Many companies use affiliate marketing as their main marketing strategy with excellent results.

I’m not going to talk about why affiliate marketing is important or introduce ways to get the most out of it. Instead, I just want to guide you through what I did to set up an affiliate marketing program in WordPress.

The basics of affiliate marketing

The goal of affiliate marketing is to reward those who connect buyers to your brand. Based on this, to have an effective affiliate marketing program you need:

  • A place where you register affiliates and store their data.
  • A way to recognize and track affiliate income traffic and affiliate sales.
  • A method to pay affiliates upon request.

In this case, we’re choosing to store the data via a WordPress website, complete with a Jupiter X shopping templates theme. In order to run the affiliate marketing program, I will use the WP Affiliate plugin. This plugin has the basic features required to run an affiliate website and also include great addons that can add to the site’s overall functionality. In order to see the complete list of addons, check out this page.

The best way to recognize and track affiliates would be to generate a specific link for each of them. The affiliate would then use the link wherever they advertise your brand. The link would look something like:

https://shoppingwebsite.com/?ref=3

Here the “ref” query parameter is the referrer’s ID on the website. When a user visits via that link, a cookie value will be stored on the visitor’s browser containing the referrer’s ID. From then on, until the cookie expires or gets deleted, every activity that user completes on the site will be linked to that referral ID. If the user buys something, the website knows that this sale was made via a referral and therefore involves a commission fee. Based on the product or service, you may want to decide on how many days a referral link should remain valid. In my experience, more expensive services or products require more time for visitors to decide if they want to buy it. For such items, you’ll need to increase the cookie expiration interval in the plugin settings. By default, browsers will store cookies for 7 days, so if a user clicks on the affiliate link, leaves the website and returns at any time over the next 7 days, the commission still goes to that referral. Check out this page for the answers to some common questions about how this process works.

Image courtesy affilaitewp.com

Installing and activating the plugin

In order to use the Affiliate WP plugin, you need to purchase it from its developer’s website. Check the prices here and choose your plan, then proceed with the process and download the plugin package from the website. Next, go to your WordPress website admin area -> Plugins -> Add New, hit the Upload button and upload the AffiliateWP-x.x.x.zip package. After installing the plugin, simply activate it via the plugins list. I also recommend that you install the Affiliate Portal addon because it will give your affiliate page an excellent makeover.

Activating the AffiliateWP plugin

The next step involves activating the plugin by adding the license key to it. Do this via the Affiliate settings page.

Registering the AffiliateWP plugin license

Configuring the AffiliateWP plugin

The next thing you’ll need is a page to act as your affiliate area. Create a page and put this shortcode into it:

[affiliate_area]

Then, come back to the Affiliate Settings page and set that page as your affiliate area. Some other configurations may still be required to make it work as you want it to. In my case, I wanted users who were already registered on the website to have the option to register for the affiliate program as well. Below the settings page there is an option that allows you to choose whether you want to show only the registration form or login page or both. For my site, I chose the option to display only the registration form.

Setting the affiliate form registration method and fields.

Now if I check the affiliate area, the page would appear as follows:

Affiliate area page for registering as an affiliate

You can set the required form fields in the settings page. You can also modify the form fields using the hooks available on this github repository. (Snippet available here as of the date of writing this article)

After registering as an affiliate, the user will need to wait for the website administrator’s approval. While the affiliate is pending approval, they will see this notice on the affiliate area page:

Once an affiliate has registered, the administrator can approve them via the WordPress admin area -> Affiliates -> Affiliates.

Accepting an affiliate

Once approved, the new affiliate will receive an email notification. In order to change the email content, you can override the email template on your child theme. For more information, please read this article. You can modify the current email template and settings via Affiliates -> Settings -> Emails.

Overriding email settings and notifications

Each action has a corresponding email notification here that you can manage and customize.

Once you’ve approved the affiliate, if you have not installed the Affiliate Portal Addon yet, your affiliate page will look like this:

Affiliate area page

However, if you have installed the Affiliate Portal Addon, your affiliates will see this page:

affiliate marketing program in WordPress
Affiliate area after installing Affiliate Portal Addon

On the affiliate area page you can see your affiliate statistics, including visits, number of referrals and other handy figures. The affiliate can generate a link to the website and use it when promoting your brand. The links generated on the Affiliate URLs tab will all end with the “ref” query parameter. You can also add a specific campaign name so that the links look something like this:

https://shoppingwebsite.com/?campaign=summer-2022&ref=5

Adding a campaign name can help track visitors and will show which campaign was the most beneficial for affiliates.

affiliate marketing program in WordPress - URL generator
Affiliate URL generator

So far, so good. Now it’s time to integrate it all with your shop. You may use the affiliate model for all kinds of e-commerce. It doesn’t matter if you sell goods, run a learning website, a membership-based website or even a donation service. The biggest benefit of AffiliateWP is the long list of available plugins that you can simply integrate it with. In order to see the available integrations, navigate to AffiliatWP’s settings page and open the Integrations page.

affiliate marketing program in WordPress
Integrating WooCommerce and AffiliateWP

As you can see above, I’ve just enabled the WooCommerce integration. You don’t need to do anything else to integrate the plugin with WooCommerce. As soon as you check that box and save the settings, the integration will be complete. The rest of the process is as follows:

  • The affiliate will register and generate a link to your website containing a unique referral ID.
  • Visitors will click on that link included in affiliate ads.
  • The visitor will then browse your website and consider buying something.
  • The visitor then buys something via the same device they originally entered your website with over the course of the next 7 days (or whatever time interval you set for cookie expiration in the AffiliateWP plugin)
  • The commission will be added to the affiliate account and wait for the affiliate to request a payout.

There is another step before the commission goes to the affiliate. The visitors may add something to their cart, but pay for it later. Before the payment is complete, the visitor still counts as unpaid. As a result, there are 4 statuses for an affiliate transaction with the AffiliateWP plugin:

  • Pending – This is a referral that has been generated but has not yet been confirmed
  • Unpaid – This is a confirmed referral that is waiting to be paid out to the affiliate
  • Rejected – This is a referral that has been rejected
  • Paid – This is a referral that has been paid to the affiliate

“All referrals begin with a status of Pending and are then updated to one of the other three statuses when particular events occur. A pending referral means that it is waiting to be confirmed as valid. Referrals are confirmed when orders in the eCommerce platform are completed.

A referral is marked as rejected when the corresponding order in the eCommerce platform is refunded or deleted. In Affiliates → Settings → Misc, there is an option to automatically mark referrals as Rejected when orders are refunded or deleted. If enabled, AffiliateWP will mark referrals as Rejected for you. If disabled, or your eCommerce platform is not fully supported, referrals will need to be rejected manually.

Referrals are marked as Unpaid when the corresponding order or signup is completed in your e-Commerce or membership platform. Once marked as Unpaid, the referral is considered earned and should be paid out to the affiliate.

Referrals receive a status of Paid as soon as they have been paid to the affiliate. Once marked as Paid, a referral is considered closed and no further status changes are applied to it.”

Full documentation on the referral status is provided here.

Payouts

Your affiliates will get paid as soon as you generate a payout for them or pay them and then add the payment info as a bank transfer invoice to their payout list. There is currently no automatic paying out system. You can generate a form to get in touch with your affiliates and allow them to request payment. 

You can integrate your website with a payout service as described in this article. Using payout services allows you to pay affiliates in more than 30 different countries directly to their bank accounts in as little as 3 days. Learn more about using Payouts Service here.

There are other methods that allow you to pay your affiliates with PayPal, for example. Check the above article for more info. 

The payout workflow involves you, as your website administrator or affiliate manager, generating a payout. This payout then goes out to all users for referrals that are paid to you within a certain date range and for a minimum withdrawal amount.

affiliate marketing program in WordPress - create payout
Generating a payout to affiliates

After the payout is complete, the status for each referral within that date range will change to Paid and will not be considered for upcoming payouts.

Creative Banners

It’s possible to provide banners and visuals for your affiliate marketing program, complete with embed codes that let your affiliates use them for whatever promotions they run on their websites.
In order to add banners, you should navigate to Affiliates -> Creatives and add a new Creative. Here you need to add the title, description and, most importantly, an image that will serve as your affiliate advertising. Here you can find some marketing advice on how to get the most out of your banner images.

affiliate marketing program in WordPress - add new creative
Adding a new creative banner to the list of available creatives

After adding the creative material, your affiliates are able to see and copy the code through their affiliate area page and simply paste it to their website.

affiliate marketing program in WordPress - creatives
Creatives on the affiliate area page

Wrapping up

In this article we reviewed how to run an affiliate marketing program in WordPress with the AffiliateWP plugin. To be honest, when I accepted the project to integrate a WordPress website with this plugin, I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. The website that I was going to integrate it to wasn’t using any premade integration services. I had to find out for myself how affiliate marketing programs work and then try to implement one using actions and hooks. The key point I want to share with you here is that you need to know the status of each visit. What happens to a user that decides to buy a product after 10 days? What happens if they open the website using another device? What if the service you are selling requires two payment steps? These are the sorts of questions you should consider. Fortunately, the documentation of this plugin is great. The codebase is standard and you can find some samples in the github repository. This all adds up to make a great experience for both users and the developers who work with this program.

Please share your comments and questions below in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter.

5 Growth Hacking Tips with Simple Automations in WordPress

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In today’s era of online commerce, marketing jobs have increased like never before. This means that finding new tricks to gain customers is practically an art form and those who are not searching for new opportunities or not following best practices of online marketing and growth hacking may fall out of the running.

In this article, we will talk about several tactics for customer acquisition. More specifically, we will discuss 5 growth hacking tips with simple automations in WordPress.

Incentivized lead-generation

Something that motivates someone to take action can be defined as an incentive. In e-commerce marketing, the term intensive lead-generation is normally used. Intensive lead generation typically involves an attractive element, similar to a bonus, that stimulates a desired action, known as a sale trigger. 

Incentives or lead magnets can take several forms. Let’s discuss some examples:

  • Ebooks – It’s likely that you are already running a blog on your website, but publishing blog posts and publishing an ebook are completely different matters. Creating and promoting an ebook is one of the cheapest and most popular methods for generating leads online, and will definitely work if done intelligently. 
  • Webinars – Webinars are valuable content for any website or project, but it’s important to deliver exclusive information in a personal format. Peer to peer meeting is more powerful than any other method of communicating with your audience. Best practice may also involve inviting influencers to these events, as they will definitely improve the quality of your content.
  • Coupons – Who doesn’t love sales coupons? Coupons can change a customer’s mind, especially if they can’t decide whether or not to buy from your store. Offering them a good discount is the first step to securing a long-term relationship with your customer. 
  • Newsletter – Another great way to generate leads is to create a value-packed newsletter campaign that encourages new customers to connect with you. This method will not only allow you to stay in your customers’ minds but will also let you share promotions, coupons or other incentive campaigns with them. 

Apart from the methods mentioned above, you can use others as well. Some examples include , providing a freebie product or free trial, organizing a referral and reward system and many others!

Smart email automation

Email automation is not a new concept. It’s been around for quite some time, helping businesses reach audiences using the most advanced methods. Ultimately, it helps brands stay on customers’ radar longer, so more and more brands nowadays spend some of their budget on creating personalized and automated email campaigns.

Email automation is a growth hacking method in which you automatically manage all emails from different sources, like subscription lists, SMS, EMail, Viber, Web Push, etc. If this process is done properly, automation can increase your marketing performance and can free up a significant amount of time.

How does email automation work? Let’s say you want to send a company introduction message to new subscribers. Then, after a week, if they have not purchased anything from your store, you want to send them a discount coupon of 10%. If they still have not purchased something after another week, you want to send them a 15% discount. When they finally make a purchase, you want to send them a personalized thank-you message and a bonus discount for related products. 

How can you achieve this? Clearly it’s not possible to do this by manually tracking user behavior. Instead, you can set up a series of automated emails that can be triggered by different actions from users. You may divide your users into different segments and set up IF…ELSE logic to send them automated emails without any intervention on your part. Once you set up this system, it will run 24/7.

The tool you are using to run this system is crucial, because without this you can’t achieve your goal. It can be difficult to find the right all-in-one solution, but Growmatik is an excellent universal tool for smart email automation.

A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a user experience research methodology used when we want to know which page (or post type) is better and why. In general, retailers use their product page to sell products. These pages provide all the essential information that customers need: product images, descriptions, details, price, delivery information and more. There’s no doubt that all of this information is necessary and no one can shop without it. Sometimes, before making big changes to your site by adding a new design or removing some information, it’s a good idea to test these new features by running A/B testing to reveal how users interact with new changes.

Basically, this process involves a randomized experiment where two or more variants of the page (posts, product page, etc.) are provided for different segments of audience. The purpose of the experiment is to determine which version has the biggest impact in terms of sales or impressions.

A/B testing is generally performed to test special missions or campaigns. Let’s say you want to test new product images along with a video of one particular product, but you can’t directly make changes to your actual product page. Instead, you can create a separate product page with a new design and new data and randomly send visitors to that page.

Collecting information from your A/B tests is important. Your testing should reveal the advantages or disadvantages of your experiment, and based on this data you can decide whether or not to make the changes.

Using the right tool for A/B testing is also important, so if you don’t have one already you should consider Google optimize and Optimizely.

Affiliate program

growth hacking tips - affiliate program

Affiliate marketing is a business procedure where a person earns commission by marketing another person’s or company’s product or service. Affiliate people choose the product they enjoy and then promote that product or service to earn a portion of the profit from each sale. Sales are tracked via an affiliate link.

There are 3 key parts in the relationship between companies and affiliate marketers, so lets review them one by one:

Seller and product

The seller, brand, merchant, company or person who owns the product. Product can be a physical product, like household items, or a service, like programming tutorials. Sellers do not always participate in the active marketing campaign, but they may run a very active affiliate program.

The affiliate or advertiser

Known as a publisher, this can be an individual person or influencer or a company that markets affiliate products. The affiliate receives commissions when their marketing leads to sales. 

The consumer

Often, when you buy some product on the web, you may not realise that you are participating in an affiliate marketing program. When you do, both the seller and affiliate share the profits. The consumer is probably the most important part of this relationship, and without them this system will not work. 

Affiliate marketing is a great deal for all parties involved. For the seller, this is another stable channel for sales that doesn’t involve spending much time on marketing the product. It’s great for the affiliate as well, as they don’t produce a product but they are still earning money through sales. 

Now, you may ask, how does an affiliate get paid after linking the seller to the consumer? Well, there are several methods to do this. The most popular methods are:

Pay Per Sale 
Pay per Lead 
Pay Per Click
… 

It’s worth mentioning that, nowadays, social media influencers are major drivers of affiliate marketing. They have already carved out a saturated niche in the field and affiliate marketing works great with them.

There are many great tools to manage affiliate marketing programs for your WordPress, ranging from free to paid plugins. Some great choices include, WP Affiliate Manager (Free) and AffiliateWP (Paid).

Loyalty programs

growth hacking tips - loyalty programs

Loyal customers who buy repeatedly are more profitable than ones that buy once.

Costco’s business

This simple rule applies not only to Costco but to any business. You can easily turn your existing customers into loyal customers by offering high quality products and services as well as speedy delivery and customer support.

Customer loyalty programs were first introduced back in the 1950s, when grocery stores started giving out stamps to customers making repeat purchases. Customer loyalty refers to a customer’s willingness to buy from a brand again and again because of positive experiences and satisfaction. 

This kind of program offers several benefits to customers, such as discounts and rebates, rewards, free delivery, coupons, early access to new products and more.

Loyal customers are the most profitable segment of your business. This factor gives you the opportunity to align your business with this segment. You may choose to run a completely different marketing campaign for them, which may prove to be the most profitable compared to the other campaigns you run. Another challenge for any business is to extend the lifetime of loyal customers to be as long as possible.

Formulating new ideas about how to reward your customers or how to run a loyalty program is part of the job, but realizing these ideas and keeping this campaign running is another job. The right tool is necessary so choose one that will let you design it once and, once you start it, it should run fully automated without any interruption. When choosing a tool to run marketing automation for WordPress, consider if it offers features to run a loyalty program for WooCommerce. We recommend trying Growmatik, which offers universal methods to run such campaigns in a fully automated way.

Wrapping up

Incentivized lead-generation, email automation and affiliate programs are not new techniques in ecommerce marketing. However, they are still the most effective growth hacking tips for attracting new customers and keeping existing ones. Don’t forget that your promotion and strategy will be most effective if they are tailored to your audience’s expectations. Your success also depends on the tool you choose to run your email marketing campaigns. We highly recommend trying out Growmatik as an all-in-one solution for email marketing and automation.

Do you have any more growth hacking tips to share? Let’s talk about them in the comments below!

What is a Loyalty Program and Why Does it Matter for Growth

Looking to grow your WooCommerce store? The lifetime value of customers is a key factor for success. The fact is, finding new customers is costly, and existing customers are already familiar with your brand and, hopefully, interested in buying more from you. How can you cultivate this kind of loyalty from your customers? In this article, we’ll dive into how to use a loyalty program for WooCommerce to unlock the real lifetime value of a customer.

Why customer loyalty matters

Just how valuable is a loyal customer? The top 1% of your customer base can earn you up to 18 times more than your run-of-the-mill customer! These are the customers you want to cultivate true loyalty in, and building that loyalty should be central to your customer retention strategies. There are many ways to generate loyalty, but you must remember that the bond between your brand and your customers is a two-way street. Your customer is looking to get value out of your brand, and is willing to pay for it. The more value you give them, the more—and the longer—they are willing to pay.

giphy

A cognitive bias known as reciprocity bias is at the heart of this two-way relationship. If someone gives you a gift or does you a favor, you are far more likely to want to do something for them in return. In WooCommerce, this means that customers are much more likely to leave a positive review, buy from you again or actively promote you to their friends and colleagues provided that you do something for them first. This psychological principle is at the heart of many clever uses of cognitive bias in marketing.

Advantages of customer loyalty

What does a loyalty program achieve for your WooCommerce store? First, it cements the bond between your customers and your brand. Second, it creates a more motivated customer base, which is the first step to achieving the following goals.

Build relationships to increase stickiness

In Lean methodology, stickiness is a core engine of growth. The art of building stickiness is crucial for success, and some of the most successful businesses in the world have used it to create sustainable growth. Customer loyalty manifests itself in clients who visit your site regularly, interact with your products, and actively promote your content. At the very least, the increased time they spend on your site will improve your SEO, helping you rank higher thanks to the backlinks to your website from their shared content.

Use repeat or referral sales to increase conversions

You’ll notice this effect immediately upon implementing a loyalty program. By encouraging loyalty, you stand to sell more. These increased sales might come from the customers themselves buying more or from those they refer to your brand.

Save money–retain customers!

Your CLV-CAC (customer lifetime value versus customer acquisition cost) ratio is central to any argument for the value of loyal customers. With a loyalty program, this ratio goes up as you save money by focusing on retaining existing customers rather than just attracting new ones.

Get valuable referrals

Don’t mistake retaining loyal customers as forgoing growth! The fact is, a satisfied customer is the best marketing money can’t buy. A motivated customer base will actively promote your brand in their professional and personal networks. Soon you’ll be seeing exponential growth as your existing customers introduce plenty of new customers to your brand.

Kinds of customer loyalty programs

How can we trigger reciprocity bias? With rewards, of course! Here are three kinds of rewards you can use to encourage loyalty:

  1. One-off rewards such as point-based gifts, coupons and freebies. The point-based rewards program used by North Face is a great example of this. Each time you invite a friend or use a reusable bag when you shop generates points that customers can use as a discount for their next purchase.

2. To maintain loyalty over a longer period, design a tier-based loyalty program. Unlike one-off rewards, this kind of discount is not linear. Instead, it changes based on key engagement metrics like how much a customer buys. Mirenesse has a great designed tier-based loyalty program.

3. The third form of rewards, progress programs, combine elements of the first two with the mechanisms of gamification, the endowed progress effect and the Zeigarnik effect. This kind of program maintains motivation by accompanying individuals step-by-step through their customer journey. Nike uses this kind of program to build loyalty and get customers moving. Their core idea? “The more active you are, the more you get rewarded.”

We’ll use this third method as the central example for this article. Let’s learn a bit more about how loyalty programs work by diving into the concept of “gamification.”

Gamification and loyalty programs

Simply put, gamification is the addition of game elements to any process in order to create the desire to achieve more. If you’ve ever played a video game, you’ve probably noticed the ways that games encourage you to play more to unlock new skills or items. Let’s say you save a town from a ghoul in Fallout 4. What do you get? A bunch of appreciation messages, some fancy new gear and a great new skill to help you play further. How can you create this kind of rewards system within a loyalty program?

You can use gamification within your customer loyalty program by rewarding customers based on the frequency and level of interaction with your brand.

Rewarding repeat engagement through a tiered game-like loyalty program increases engagement and keeps customers motivated to “accomplish more,” ultimately helping your WooCommerce store grow more.

Plot out a milestone system based on the number of purchases, get the customer onboard through a simple registration process and give them a simple reward to get started. As they progress through each milestone, add in tempting rewards and promises to keep them buying to hit the next milestone.

Lastly, make the goal clearly in reach. People are more likely to stay motivated when they feel their goal is within reach.

This is what’s known as the endowed progress effect. It’s a key psychological trigger you can implement into your loyalty program to encourage sustained customer engagement.

How to measure customer loyalty

There are a couple of different metrics you can use to set the milestones in a loyalty program:

  • By total order value
    If a customer buys only a couple items, but chooses the most expensive items in your WooCommerce store, they can still climb the ranks of your loyalty program using the ‘total order value’ metric. This is a great way for enterprises to assess brand loyalty, especially if you deal in expensive merchandise.
  • By total count of purchased items
    If customers buy a lot, but don’t necessarily spend a huge amount of money in individual purchases, they can still make progress in your loyalty program if you opt for the ‘total count of purchased items’ metric. This is a great way to measure customer loyalty on e-commerce sites.
  • By total count of orders
    For some businesses, the number of placed orders is a more important metric than total spent or number of items purchased. Restaurants or other delivery businesses can benefit from using ‘total count of orders’ to assess customer loyalty.
  • By combination
    The most effective loyalty rewards program integrates all of the above metrics, covering the widest range of shopping habits among loyal customers. We’ll use this combined rewards technique in the sample rewards program we’ve created in this article. 

Build a WooCommerce loyalty program

The following three steps are the main parts of crafting any loyalty program:

  1. Designate your loyalty tier segments.
  2. Design the marketing materials you plan to use for each segment. Some examples could be a personalized homepage, emails or popups.
  3. Create the automations you need to deliver the marketing materials to each segment.

Growmatik is a great one stop-solution that can help you build a working WooCommerce loyalty program. Other tools and plugins that can help you build loyalty programs include WooCommerce Points and Rewards, YITH WooCommerce Points and Rewards.

Final Thoughts

As you embark on the journey of building customer loyalty, keep one thing in mind: your products and services should bring real value to your customers if you want your loyalty program to work. Loyalty programs are not a trick to rope in customers, as using it as such can ultimately hurt your brand’s reputation. Loyalty and reward programs are just part of an effective business strategy to cultivate stickiness and customer engagement.

In this article, we covered the theory and psychology behind loyalty programs and explored several different kinds. Let us know about your experiences running loyalty programs for your e-commerce business down in the comments below!

15 Marketing Automation Recipes to Turn your WooCommerce Customers into Evangelists

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Whether we like it or not, our lives are becoming more fast-paced each day. Automation helps us keep up, but it never seems to be enough, so we are always searching for new ways to save time. This applies to the world of marketing, too. Better and faster automation methods emerge on an almost daily basis, and one of the newest methods is something known as “automation recipes.” Just like food recipes, marketing automation recipes are sets of instructions, or rather formulas. Unlike food recipes, automation recipes are used to design campaigns to acquire, activate, and engage customers.  

What are marketing automation recipes?    

The Cambridge dictionary defines a recipe as “a set of instructions telling you how to prepare and cook a particular food.” In marketing, recipes instruct you on how to implement meaningful automation rules to achieve tangible results .

For example, when using email automation software, you typically have to decide to whom and when an email should be sent. Planning and implementing this can take a fair amount of time. Picking a pre-constructed recipe and following its instructions could save you that time.

How to get marketing automation recipes

Googling “marketing automation recipes” can help you find a number of tools. Some are quite interesting. Choose a recipe that fits your business needs and follow the instructions to design a campaign using your automation software.

In this article we will use Growmatik to practice different marketing automation recipes. Growmatik is a Cross-channel Marketing platform for WordPress & WooCommerce. It gives you recipes to choose from AND does the cooking for you too! Just pick a recipe, and Growmatik does all the heavy lifting. 

Let’s take a look at some essential marketing automation recipes that suit most businesses in driving engagement and customer conversion. All of these recipes are part of the Growmatik database and are just a click away.

1- Scroll behavior popup

If your customer keeps scrolling down the page, pique their interest with this pop-up and offer an incentive to keep them engaged.

2- On-exit popup

Offer your site visitors a deal they can’t refuse by displaying this pop-up when they attempt to navigate away from your website.

3- Christmas discount popup 

Offer coupons to your site visitors via this pop-up promoting a calendar occasion such as Black Friday, Christmas, Easter and so forth.

4- Page personalization for mobile traffic

Engage your mobile audience with responsive and relevant content, like adding a WhatsApp link to your homepage banner.

5- Geolocational page personalization 

Cater to your audience by offering localized services specific to their region on your landing page.

6- Page personalization based on time of the day 

Personalize your landing page content to match the time of day. For example, a food delivery service could greet customers with a “good morning” and a peek at the breakfast menu.

7- Page personalization based on purchase history 

Help your online store match customer needs by using their record of purchases to personalize your landing page with the content and products they’re looking for.

8- Personalized greeting on the homepage 

Address your audience by name with this personalized welcome on your homepage.

9- New customer welcome email

Use a cheerful, personalized email to welcome new subscribers.

10- Cross-sell items email

Send customers a personalized email that includes listings of products similar to those they’ve viewed to encourage them to buy more from you.

marketing automation recipes - cross selling

11- VIP customer appreciation email

Send a personalized email to your most loyal customers, complete with a discount coupon to encourage them to keep buying from you!

marketing automation recipes - vip appreciation

12- Annual report email

A great opportunity to remind customers of their relationship with your brand! These highly personalized report emails summarize how the customer has interacted with your business over the past year.

marketing automation recipes - annual report

13- Cart abandoner follow up emails 

Do you have customers leaving the site with unpurchased items in their shopping carts? Send them a reminder email encouraging them to come back.

marketing automation recipes - cart abandoners email

14- Reactivation email

Re-engage customers that have been away for a while with this follow-up email. Choose exciting content to encourage them to revisit your website.

marketing automation recipes - reengage with away customers

15- New customer appreciation email

Show your appreciation to first-time customers with this personalized email, recommend related products and offer a discount coupon to encourage future purchases.

marketing automation recipes - thank you email

Wrap up

As you can see, marketing automation recipes can save you hours of work. However, remember that these are merely templates that can be made more effective by customizing them to match your own brand and business criteria. They’ll save you plenty of time with brainstorming and implementation, but it’s up to you to make them your own!

With Growmatik, a single click can activate any of the above 15 marketing automations, plus so much more. Pre-built email and popup designs are just a few of our other time-saving offerings.

Good luck cooking up successful marketing campaigns 🙂

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10 Tips to Avoid the Spam Filter When Sending Marketing Emails in WordPress & WooCommerce

Throughout its existence, email marketing has experienced some major changes. This is particularly true for the past 10 years with the appearance of several new tools and standards that have fundamentally altered email marketing. An email campaign from the early 2000s would look completely different from one today. An email that would have a high likelihood of being opened might not even make it to a user’s inbox today. This is because email providers and services have rolled out several quality measures in an effort to ensure recipients get emails that are most relevant to them.

In this post, we’ll take you through these standards so that you can take the necessary steps to ensure that your email campaigns avoid the spam filter and land in a recipient’s inbox.

1- Send emails with your own domain

When sending out marketing emails, it’s always a good idea to use your own domain. ISPs (which refer to the major email providers: AOL, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo and others) tend to take a negative view of free email campaign providers such as Mailchimp. For instance, someone who uses Mailchimp might take advantage of the service and send out low-quality, irrelevant emails, which would lower Mailchimp’s general score for Gmail. As a result, if you use Mailchimp, you could be negatively affected as well. If recipients have engaged with emails you’ve sent out before (such as transactional emails), then there will be a better chance that the ISP will direct your email to the recipient’s primary inbox. 

Avoid the Spam Filter

Certain email marketing tools have white labeling features. You can check out this documentation to find out more. For instance, Growmatik allows you to add custom outbound emails in site settings and utilize them in various email campaigns.

2- Correctly utilize your authentication records

The first thing that a recipient’s ISP looks at when deciding whether an email goes to their inbox or spam folder is authentication records. Authentication records are parts of code embedded in the header section of your email and serve as a digital signature that verifies your identity and will work toward increasing the delivery rate. Your email server must support the two main protocols of DKIM and SPF.

SPF (Sender ID)

SPF – which stands for Sender Policy Framework – enables the ISP to authenticate the identity of the party sending the email. By making it clear that YOU are the sender instead of anyone else, SBF lowers the chance that someone else pretending to be you would send out emails. This increases your email delivery rate.

DKIM

DKIM – which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail – sender’s coded authentication message that connects the email with the server’s DNS of origin and validates the domain is in fact real. In other words, this provides a type of identification for the emails that you are sending your targeted recipients, which will also go a long way to help you avoid the spam filter and boost those email delivery rates.

Avoid the Spam Filter

Authentication records are vital if you send out emails from an email automation platform as it allows that platform’s servers to send out emails on your behalf using your own domain. This means that you need to ensure the platform you select offers email white-labeling services and provides support for these protocols. For instance, in Growmatik, after the tenant adds and verifies custom outbound addresses, then SPF and DKIM are automatically inserted into the header of your email.

3- Look up the reputation of your sending domain

If your sending domain has tons of spam reports from their users, then their email service provider will rank them poorly. In turn, this will greatly impact your email’s quality score, and your email might be rejected or directed into the spam folder. It’s always a good idea to regularly stay up-to-date on your sending domain’s reputation and to make changes if their reputation is either low or starts to fall. Several tools on the market that provide a sender score and information on how to boost it include Sender Score, Barracuda Central, Thalos database, MXToolbox and Google Post Master and Mail Tester

Mail Tester

4- Focus on transactional, not broadcast emails

Marketing emails can be categorized as either transactional or promotional (also known as broadcast). Transactional emails are sent out to a recipient after they have made a particular action when engaging with your business. On the other end of the spectrum, promotional emails are set out en masse to all your leads or subscribers. As you’d expect, these types of emails are less customized and relevant, thus more likely to get tagged as spam or land in the promotional emails tab.

One of the best ways to avoid the spam filter or the promotional tab is by sending email campaigns that combine both transactional and broadcast emails.

Avoid the Spam Filter

The best way of going about this is by adding a personalized touch to promotional emails. The personalization needed here extends beyond simply inserting the user’s name to the subject time and at the beginning of an email. A tool like Growmatik offers up several dynamic keywords that help in personalizing an email’s content with personal attributes that have to do with in-site behavior and purchase activity. 

In addition to the text of the email itself, the products you’re promoting should also vary for each recipient and depend on their purchase history. An excellent way to customize promotional emails is by sending out cross-selling emails or cart abandoner follow ups. You can easily do this in Growmatik by using the Product Element in the tool’s email builder to add personalized product lists in the email based on the recipient’s shopping behavior.

5- Include address and unsubscribe options for broadcast emails

A tool that is compatible with CAN-SPAM and GDPR will make you add your legal physical address in the footer section of each broadcast email. For instance, in Growmatik, its email builder will automatically insert the address section in the footer of an email.

6- Utilize sign-up forms that are double opt-in

It’s no secret that doubt opt-in is one of the best ways to build and sustain a robust mailing list. This holds particularly true when making a list for broadcast emails as double opt-in hinders additional expenses and goes a long way in sustaining a decent domain sender score. You can also use tools such as Email Verifier to verify authenticity of recipient email addresses individually or in bulk.

Let’s say that your targeted recipient is a customer, and you’d like to keep them in the loop about particular events or things. The best thing to do to avoid the spam filter is to send them transactional emails that you know are relevant to them and that they want to receive. Keep in mind that you should only send broadcast emails if the recipient has allowed for marketing emails from your business.

Giphy

8- Add quality content following CAN-SPAM guidelines

The content in your emails should completely comply with CAN-SPAM content guidelines, as well as the guidelines (e.g., pornography, phishing, cyberbullying, etc…) set out by your email marketing platform. Furthermore, if you don’t want your email to be tagged as promotional, you should not overuse certain marketing terms in your email subject and body. These terms include discount, sales, action, apply now, call now, unbelievable (and of course viagra!)

Best price❌Dear friend❌
#1❌Winner❌
100% free❌Weight loss❌
Billion❌Deal❌
Free gift❌Debt❌
Giveaway❌Lifetime❌
Guaranteed❌Score❌
Risk-free❌Unlimited❌
Apply now❌Urgent❌
Get it now❌Become a member❌

9- Stay away from HTML content and use a good image/text ratio

Simply put, you won’t have a shot of making it to the primary inbox tab if you send out an HTML email. Most ISP have algorithms that flag HTML content as promotional emails, therefore funneling them to the promotional tab. Emails that are most likely to land in the main inbox are ones with plain text and not that many links and images.

Avoid the Spam Filter

Following from this, the content of your emails needs to have a good image/text ratio. Content that doesn’t contain an image has a higher chance of going to the primary inbox (that is, if the email meets the other criteria), and content with a lot of images or text is more likely to be directed to the promotional tab. Furthermore, content that doesn’t have any text will probably land in the spam folder. 

If your email contains a call-to-action button, you should link it up to the same domain of the From address found in your email’s header in order to avoid the spam filter. If not, the recipient’s ISP may assume that you’re sending the email as an affiliate marketer attempting to make sales for affiliate earnings for another business or brand.

Bonus tip! Closely track the performance of your campaign 

This is the final step, and it is probably the only step that should be taken consistently. After implementing the above tips into your email campaigns and sending them out, you should closely follow how each is doing by referring to its performance analytics as well as the sending reputation of your domain. For the former, you can look at the analytics provided by our email marketing campaign.

For instance, in Growmatik, you can see how well each email campaign is performing by going to the Report section in the automation dashboard. To check the sender reputation over time, you can utilize tools such as Mail Tester.

Closely following your email campaigns will enable you to notice any potential issues, such as low engagement or delivery rates, so that you can make the necessary changes at the appropriate time. This is crucial so you can minimize any potential damage to your email campaign and your sender reputation.

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Introducing Odise: Personalized Marketing Automated

UPDATE
On May 2020 we relaunched Odise with a new brand title Growmatik. With this release, we applied the first round of changes and improvements to the product based on feedback we got from our early users. Most important of which was user onboarding from WordPress admin. We solved and smoothed out onboarding obstacles with this release and also collected an enormous amount of feedback from users to reflect on for future releases, including some very exciting new features coming up.

Jupiter X has been around for about 7 years now. More than 130,000 websites from a wide range of niches have been built with Jupiter X. But is that it? What is it you should do after building a professional WordPress website?

What comes after a WordPress website is built? Growth

Once you build a WordPress website for your business your next move is obviously to expand your website audience. This means collecting and nurturing leads, making sales and retaining your customers. You could spend money for outbound marketing campaigns such as Google and Facebook Ads – but to do this organically, your best bet is your content.

By content, we’re referring to your website content, marketing campaigns, pop-ups, emails – essentially, anything and everything you use to promote your business to your audience. If you use a one-size-fits-all content policy, your audience engagement will be minimal. In other words, you need to give each segment of the audience the content they want.

Marketing is no longer one size fits all

Marketing is no longer a same-for-all reachout mechanism. In the near future, the only marketing that will be  relevant is personalized marketing.

Imagine that you can have a massive eye that watches over the journey of our site’s visitors from the moment they arrive until they are a loyal customer. And now imagine that this eye can provide visitors with different versions of your homepage based on their background, smart pop-ups tailored to their behavior and exclusive email campaigns suited to their purchase history.

For both personalized marketing campaigns and website content, you’ll need to incorporate many tools. Unfortunately, there are too many tools out there that are overly complicated and expensive.

Personalization is a cluttered and expensive space

Looking at the tools that help with main website content personalization, Segment is for enterprises, and Optimizely and Proof are also for enterprises but are relatively expensive for small-to-medium sized businesses.

Solutions in the personalized email marketing space exist such as Mailchimp, which personalizes based on audience behavior and engagement. However, this happens abstractly regardless of the global behavior of users on the website inside the app and so forth.

Pop-up creators such as Unbounce Popups or Sumo are also mere creators but fail to offer much in the way of personalization.

The bigger problem at hand is that these tools are not able to work together for personalization as part of a whole.

The closest solution for this is Intercom, which allows journey-based personalization but only through a chat widget and email notification. There’s no possibility to personalize in-page content, and again it’s fairly expensive for a small-medium businesses.

So, an all-in-one solution that makes it possible to personalize creation, monitoring and management based on global user behavior is sensible.

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Meet Odise: Personalized Marketing Automated

Two years ago at Artbees, we thought of a tool that facilitates the personalization of marketing content (website, emails, pop-ups) in an all-in-one environment. A marketing assistant that can automatically personalize all marketing content based on user attributes and behavior.

We worked on Odise for about two years and recently released the beta version entirely for free on ProductHunt.

Odise is a marketing assistant that reveals the behavioral patterns of users across their journey on your website from acquisition to retention and automatically provides personalized website content, marketing campaigns, emails, pop-ups and more based on each user’s stage, attributes and preferences.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
Automation Dashboard

1- Discover and oversee your customer journey

Odise provides multi-dimensional insight into your website users’ journey across your website in different stages – from acquisition to nurturing to conversion and retention.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
A Customer Journey Sample

Select one or multiple dimensions and see what those users did on your website.

Multi-dimensional Customer Journey

2- Automate all your marketing activities in a ‘If This Then That’ dashboard

Having discovered different working and failing funnels, define automation rules to serve each funnel (as broadly or specifically as you want) as its own personalized experience.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
Rule-based Marketing Automation

Automate marketing actions such as sending emails as well as showing or personalizing content for your visitors based on the stage in their journey.

3- Personalize your website content

The Webpage Personalizer helps you show everyone their own version of your website based on their stage, attributes and preferences.

This Odise personalizer tool allows you to make changes as well as add or remove content to your page without touching the source code.

Webpage Personalizer

4- Build and send personalized email campaigns

Create highly personalized emails for your leads and customers and contact them across their journey on your website.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
Personalized Email Builder

Use Odise’s powerful email builder to create smart email templates or use one of its various carefully-crafted readymade templates.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
Readymade Email Templates

5- Build and serve personalized pop-ups

Create personalized pop-ups to collect and nurture leads, as well as to convert and retain your customers.

Personalized Pop-up Builder

Or use one of Odise’s various readymade templates in different categories such as lead generation, discount, cart abandonment, giveaways, events and more.

Personalized Pop-up Templates

6- Get human-made analytics reports about your marketing activities

Enough of useless attribution and analytics reports! See tailored performance reports about your website performance and automation. Odise’s analytics reports will allow you to make decisions about your next move – nothing more or less.

Automation Reports

Define a timeframe and see a list of your topmost items in each dimension such as location, landing pages and sources.

Introducing Odise - Personalized Marketing Automated
Actionable Analytics

What’s next? A.I. enters the scene!

Our next step is enabling artificial intelligence, which will take a load off the shoulders of the website tenant by monitoring their website, suggesting the right practice and eventually taking over all marketing activities from ideation to execution to reporting.

Try out for free and help us shape the future of marketing

You might be surprised to learn that Odise is now totally free! We’ve invested two years at Artbees to make a bootstrapped and independent product that solves problems we think many small-medium businesses have with marketing on their own. We deliberately released it totally for free at the beginning to collect honest user feedback and shape its future before we start monetizing it.

Our aim is to make personalized marketing an affordable, easy and mainstream marketing activity – not a marketing luxury carried out only by big brands and corporations.

We cannot wait for our community to try this on their WordPress websites and let us know what they think about it. Does it help them grow their business? What is missing? And what direction should we take going forward?

Start growing your WordPress website for free