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Email Marketing for
Shopify Store Owners
Hello.
MailChimp makes it easy to design, send, and track email newsletters, but what does that have to do with your Shopify store? For
starters, your fans and customers probably want to hear from you.
After all, they dig the things you sell. Plus Chimpified, our integration with Shopify, makes it convenient for you to allow customers
to opt in to your list, send targeted campaigns, and measure how
those campaigns affect sales. Finally, along with social media and
blogs, email is just one more way to connect with your fans and
help you get to know and care about those people who know and
care about your business.
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Customizing Your Signup Form
Pro Tip: Tweet the eepurl to your signup form a few days before you
The first step to getting started with email marketing is building and
getting ready to send the latest issue and encourage them to opt in if
maintaining a list of high-quality, fully engaged subscribers. But bigger
plan to send out your next campaign. Let your audience know you’re
they’re interested. You can even link to your campaign archive so they
is not necessarily better. Instead of thinking of your subscribers as a list
can get an idea of what your newsletters are like.
of nameless, faceless dollar signs, think of them as your friends. They’re
Resources: Example Signup Forms
interested in you and what you’ve got to say, and you’re interested in
them—sounds like a budding friendship, right? Your friends are happy
to hear what you have to say, because, by being your friend, they’ve
essentially ‘opted in’ to a conversation with you. That’s exactly what you
want in your newsletter subscribers and is why permission-based lists
are so important.
The first step to building a high-quality list of subscribers is to set up
your signup forms and give your audience ample opportunities to opt
in. In MailChimp, you can customize your signup form, confirmation
email and welcome email so they match the look and feel of your
branding. You can even add your own CSS to the forms to make them
look exactly the way you want. Or you can use our integrations with
other form builders like Wufoo or Web Form Builder.
Once you’ve customized your form, you can embed it everywhere your
brand has a presence, like your website, Facebook page, blog, etc. With
permission-based email marketing, you only want subscribers who
want your content. But you want to give them ample opportunity to
opt in to receive that content. If you attend conferences or trade shows,
don’t forget to have a signup form with you there as well—either a
sheet of paper or an iPad app like Chimpadeedoo.
There are two options for adding a signup form to your Shopify store.
The easiest is to place a link in your Shopify theme that points to your
signup form. Another option is to place a signup form directly in your
store, rather than linking to an outside MailChimp form.
In addition to having a signup form on your Shopify site, you can also
give your customers the opportunity to opt-in to your newsletters
during the checkout process. Shopify makes it easy to add an opt-in
field to the checkout process in your store, and Chimpified lets you sync
those customers to your MailChimp list. We’ll get into the details of how
to do that later in the guide.
Defining Your Message
Now that you’re collecting subscribers, it’s a good time to take a step
back and think about your message. Spend a few minutes sketching
out a strategy using MailChimp’s guide to creating an email marketing plan. It’s only five steps, and you don’t have to do them all right
now. Read through the steps and fill out as much of it as you can.
Come back here when you’re done and we’ll go over some things that
might help you with the rest of it.
Steps one and two are to define your readers and determine your
purpose. As a Shopify store owner you actually have two different
audiences to consider: 1) the general public; and 2) your customers. The
general public are your friends and fans who want to stay up to date on
your store but haven’t made a purchase yet. Your customers are people
who have completed an order in your store. You may want to target
these audiences differently in some cases.
As you’re further defining the purpose of your email campaigns, think
about what makes your store totally unique. Finding your unique space
in the market will make it easier to find your voice when writing your
content. You’ll know what to talk about, how to talk about it, and to
whom you’re talking.
Resources: Stores That Have Found Their Niche
Sending Your Campaign
Now it’s time to take the plunge and send your first email campaign.
Still not sure what to say? That’s okay. Sometimes the hardest part is
getting started. Your first campaign can be very simple. You can simply
welcome your subscribers, introduce yourself, and share a little bit
more about your store. Maybe write about your favorite store item and
why you think it’s so neat. Think of it as introducing yourself to your
new friends. You can even use some of this content in your welcome
email (the final email that gets sent from MailChimp when someone
subscribes to your list via a MailChimp subscribe form) for subscribers
who sign up after you’ve sent your first campaign.
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Pro Tip: Being able to tell your story is an important piece in marketing your store. Shoppers want to know who they’re buying from. They
want to buy a product that is meaningful from a store with a story. The
burden of telling that story falls on you, and an introductory email is a
great opportunity to get the word out. Check out these tips from the
Shopify blog for telling your story.
Other Feedback and Experimentation
Don’t be afraid to continue trying new things with your campaigns.
Experiment with A/B testing to test different subject lines or the best
send time for your list. Take Dan Zarella’s advice and try sending on
different weekdays, and even weekends. Don’t be afraid to ask your
subscribers for feedback directly using a survey. You can even entice
I sent my first campaign. Now what?
You’re getting used to communicating with your subscribers
and they’re getting used to hearing from you. Maybe you’re even
getting some valuable feedback from them on what they like and
don’t like. This is all great information for you as you complete
your email marketing plan and determine how frequently you’re
going to send. You don’t want to wait too long between campaigns
because your audience may forget they opted in, and mark your
email as spam. You don’t want to send too frequently, either. It can
be difficult to create quality content on a daily or weekly basis.
Quality content is key to keeping your subscribers interested—
and attracting new subscribers. Don’t sacrifice quality for
quantity. Experiment with a few different sending frequencies
until you find a balance that works well for you and your readers.
You may find that once a month works great for your schedule
and keeps readers engaged. Or you may want to send a longer
campaign with more in-depth information every two months
them to answer with the chance to win something from your store.
Industry standards and best practices are great, but ultimately,
you’ve got to find out what works best for your specific audience
with your specific content. That’s why getting to know your
subscribers and treating them like humans is so important: You
become the expert.
Pro Tip: You can take reporting to the next level with the
Chimpified integration. If you subscribe to the Basic or Plus plans,
Chimpified will integrate with MailChimp’s Ecommerce 360 tools
so that you can target your campaigns to customers that have
purchased a particular product, spent a certain amount at your
store, or a variety of other sales-related options. Additionally,
when your orders are generated from an Ecommerce360-enabledcampaign, sales and conversion data will be made available in
your campaign reports, so you can see how much revenue each
campaign is generating.
while sending shorter, product-spotlight campaigns every two
weeks.
Let’s Get Sophisticated
Tracking Subscriber Response
Now that you’ve got some of the basics of email marketing down,
it’s time to dive depper into the ‘how-tos’ and learn a few fancy tricks
Your analytics and reports provide great information about your
to get even more from your campaigns. You can do some amazing
readers. You can get a lot of important insight when you look at the
things when you combine MailChimp’s features with our Shopify
reports for each campaign you send. Put a reminder in your calendar
integration, Chimpified.
to check your reports 24-48 hours after you send your campaign
to get a good picture of how your subscribers have responded.
MailChimp will show you how your stats compare to industry
averages, but what’s more important is how your stats compare with
your list averages (also included in your reports). Are your open rates
up or down? Did you get more unsubscribes than normal? How is
your click rate? Review your campaign content, when you sent, your
subject line, and more to to determine the reasons behind changing
response.
Adding a Sign Up Form to Your Shopify
Store
Before we jump into Chimpified, let’s go over how to embed a
signup form directly into your Shopify store. You may want to enlist
the help of your web designer, or a Shopify expert if you’re not comfortable with working with HTML.
If you are comfortable, here’s what you’d do:
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In MailChimp, select the list that you want your subscribers added to,
and then select For Your Website > Signup Form Embed Code
You can customize this form, including the CSS, to match the look
and feel of your store. Then simply paste the provided embed code
into your Shopify theme where you would like the form to be dis-
Under the collect information for email marketing section select
‘customer disagrees by default.’ This ensures that anyone added to
your list has actively opted-in to receive emails from you.
played. Here’s a video that goes into more detail about this process.
Some Shopify themes, such as the React theme, already include a
newsletter signup form that is wired to work with MailChimp. In this
case, refer to the specific theme instructions for connecting this form
to your MailChimp list. In most cases it is simply a matter of pasting
the form action URL into your Shopify theme settings under Themes
> Theme Settings in your store administration panel.
Sync Customers to Your MailChimp List
Now that you’ve added a signup form to your Shopify store, let’s go
over how you can sync the customers who have opted in to your
MailChimp list using Chimpified.
Now that Shopify is storing this information about your customers
As we mentioned earlier, you only want subscribers on your list who
that information automatically added to your MailChimp list using
have opted-in to receive emails from you, and as such you want to
give potential subscribers every opportunity to decide they’d like
to opt-in. Luckily, Shopify automatically asks your customers if they
who want to receive emails from you, let’s go over how you can have
Chimpified.
What Is Chimpified?
want to receive marketing materials from you during the checkout
process. To ensure that your list remains strictly opt-in (permission-
Chimpified is a Shopify application that connects your store with
based) we recommend that you navigate to Preferences > Checkout
your MailChimp account and provides tools to help streamline your
& Payment in your Shopify admin panel.
email marketing workflow. In addition to automatically syncing
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your customers (the ones that agreed to receive emails from you)
Once your MailChimp account is connected, Chimpified will auto-
Chimpified also integrates with MailChimp’s Ecommerce360 tools
matically begin moving order information from your Shopify store
so that you can send targeted emails to your customers based on
to your MailChimp account (Chimpified will sync up to 5000 existing
their buying behaviors, and also get reports on the sales that your
orders) so that data can be available to you for segmentation in
campaigns are generating.
MailChimp.
Installing Chimpified
Chimpified will ask you which MailChimp list you would like to sync
The first step is to install Chimpified into your Shopify store, which
fields” to your list. We recommend that you check this option so that
you can do by clicking “Install App” from the Shopify App Store, or
Chimpified will create fields on your MailChimp list to store addition-
you can visit chimpified.com and install the app from there. You will
al data that you can use later for segmentation. Finally, you’ll need to
be asked to approve the installation, and then you will be asked to
check the box that indicates that you understand what syncing a list
connect to your MailChimp account. Simply click the “Connect to
with your Shopify store means (for more detail, read the explanation
MailChimp” button and enter the username and password to your
provided there) and click Sync List.
your store with. You are also given the option to “Add customer
MailChimp account.
In addition to subscribing customers to the list you selected,
If you access your MailChimp account using Google Apps or another
Chimpified automatically creates a static segment on your list called
third party service, and don’t have a username and password then
“Shopify Customers” that it adds all of your customers to. Once your
you will need to provide an API key in order to connect Chimpified to
list has been connected, Chimpified will automatically begin adding
your MailChimp account. Navigate to Account > API Keys & Autho-
your existing customers to the list you selected.
rized Apps to generate an API key from your MailChimp account
then, back at Chimpified, click the link to enter your API key directly,
paste in your new key and click “save API key.”
Target Campaigns Based on Buying
Behavior
Now for the fun stuff. Chimpified order data will automatically be
passed to MailChimp for use in segmentation once payment has
been received. This is a great feature that allows you to segment
campaigns based on sales data from your Shopify store.
For example, you could create an email campaign that targets
customers who have purchased a particular product, like MailChimp
Supply’s Cardstock Freddie, to let them know you’ve just gotten a
few new Cardstock Freddie designs.
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Here’s how you’d do it.
Here’s how you’d do it.
First, create a campaign in MailChimp. Then, when selecting a list,
Navigate to that product in your Shopify administration panel and
click ‘send to segment.’ You will notice the new Ecommerce360 seg-
click the ‘Email with MailChimp’ link at the top.
mentation criteria at the bottom of the first drop-down menu. Add a
segmentation condition for Product Purchased.
Next select the product you want to target (in this case, Cardstock
You will be re-directed to Chimpified to name your campaign and
Freddies). Then finish creating your targeted campaign as you nor-
select the list you’d like to send to. Chimpified will automatically pull
mall would in MailChimp. Your campaign will send only to subscrib-
in product information and images from your Shopify store, create
ers who have purchased Cardstock Freddie from your Shopify store.
the campaign, and direct you over to your MailChimp account to
finish the process.
Now that you have Chimpified installed, be sure to always check the
box to add Ecommerce360 tracking to all URLs in your campaign
during the ‘setup’ step of the MailChimp campaign creation process.
MailChimp will then append special variables to the URLs in your
campaign (you’ll want to link to your Shopify store) that Chimpified
will pick up and track, allowing you to see how effective your campaigns are in terms of sales.
Easily Create Campaigns To Promote Your
Store
With Chimpified you can easily create MailChimp campaigns from
within your Shopify store administration panel. For example, let’s say
you wanted to create a campaign to promote MailChimp Supply’s
new plushies.
In addition to creating email campaigns to promote specific products, Chimpified also allows you to create campaigns to promote
your pages, blogs and collections. You can even select multiple products in your Shopify store administration panel, then select ‘Email
with MailChimp’ from the drop-down menu to create a campaign
promoting a customized product grouping.
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Automate Your Workflow With
Autoresponders
You can use MailChimp’s autoresponders to automate communication with your customers. For example, you might want to set up an
autoresponder requesting feedback on a product a few weeks after a
customer makes a purchase.
Here’s how you’d do it.
Log in to your MailChimp account and click on Autoresponders. Then
click the “Add Autoresponder” button.
Chimpified leverages MailChimp’s template language, so you can
customize your email campaign to match your store’s look and feel.
You can even save customized templates and use them again when
creating new campaigns.
Select the list that you synced with your Shopify store, and then
select when you would like to send the autoresponder. With Chimpified you can trigger your autoresponder a certain amount of time
after “signup” (when the person was first added to your MailChimp
list) or based on the LAST_ORDER_DATE field that Chimpified creates
(which is updated each time someone completes an order). In this
instance, we want to trigger the autoresponder to ask for product
feedback a certain amount of time after the customer’s last order.
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Name your Autoresponder and click “save.” Next, from the
Autoresponders dashboard, click “Create Email” to create your
autoresponder campaign, which is just like creating any other
campaign.
During the first step of creating your campaign, you can select “send
to segment” to select segmentation options for this campaign. This
is where we can target this autoresponder based on Ecommerce360
data or static segments.
Now you’ve got some info you can use to send them a more targeted
campaign. Create a follow-up campaign for each segment with
more information on the product or products in which they showed
interest. Your follow-up could feature more detail on how and why
you created that product or maybe a special offer to encourage them
to purchase. You could even send them a campaign with some new
product recommendations based on what they viewed from the
previous campaign (like Amazon’s “Recommendations For You”).
Remember that the idea is to provide better content for your
subscribers, not just more content. Goooal helps you gain insight into
what your subscribers are interested in so you can send them content
that is more relevant to their interests.
For example: Let’s say we’re creating a newsletter for MailChimp Supply.
In the newsletter we’re announcing that our Freddie Plushies have
arrived and that we’ve got new Cardstock Freddies.
You could configure Goooal so that it adds subscribers to static
segments based on whether they visit the plushies page in your
We want to ensure that this autoresponder only sends to your
customers, people who have actually made a purchase from your
Shopify store. To do this we create a segmentation rule that the
campaign be sent to subscribers who are members of the “Shopify
Customers” static segment that Chimpified automatically creates
when it syncs your Shopify customers to your MailChimp list.
Finally, create your campaign as you normally would. When you
are finished, activate the autoresponder and each time a customer
completes an order, they will be queued to receive the request for
product feedback campaign 1 week later.
Shopify store or if they visit the Cardstock Freddies page. Go to http://
gooo.al/home to set this up.
Here’s how you’d do it:
First enter your shopify store URL.
Then, Goooal gives you a tracking code you need to install in the
Shopify template.
Paste this tracking code into the footer of your Shopify theme. To
do this, navigate to the Template Editor under the Themes menu in
Shopify. Select the theme file (theme.liquid) under Layouts in the left-
Use Goooal To Target Your Content For Your
General Subscribers
hand menu. Scroll down to the Footer Tag .
Got subscribers but don’t know what products they’re interested in
because they haven’t purchased yet? Use Goooal to add subscribers
to static segments based on the products they view in your store from
your email campaign.
Goooal is a MailChimp project that allows you to create static
segments in your MailChimp list based on what pages a subscriber
visits from your campaign. If you’ve got subscribers in your list but
you don’t know what products they’re interested in because they’ve
never purchased, try creating a campaign that highlights a few
different products or categories. Then, use Goooal to put subscribers
in static segments based on which products they’re checking out
from your newsletter.
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This marks the beginning of the footer code. Scroll through until
Now we can set up the segments to which our subscribers should
you see the end of the footer designated by </footer>. Paste the
be added. In this example, we’ve created two segments based on the
tracking code just above the </footer> tag.
two products we’re featuring in our newsletter: MailChimp Plushies
and Cardstock Freddies. When a subscriber visits the plushies page
in our store, they’ll be added to the plushies static segment in our
MailChimp list.
All that’s left to do is send the campaign to your subscribers. Goooal will
add subscribers to your new segments based on their activity with your
Once that’s installed Goooal will double check to make sure
campaign. Then you can create separate campaigns that target each
everything’s working.
segment specifically.
Next, choose a draft campaign from your MailChimp account to track
using Goooal. Subscribers who click on links from this campaign will
be tracked and placed into segments based on which product they
view in your Shopify store.
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Example Signup Forms
These Shopify and MailChimp users have great signup forms on
their websites, social networks, and blogs.
Lorem (not Ipsum): A small Swiss shop with beautiful things.
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Chubbies: Awesome shorts for the discerning gentleman.
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Sweet Anthem: A microperfumery that has been bewitching minds
and ensaring senses since 2007.
Finding Your Niche
These online stores have a unique point of view and voice.
Freaker USA: A company that keeps bottles cool.
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Tattly: Designy temorary tattoos.
Coffee Joulies: Magic beans that cool your coffee and keep it there.
Kitty Pod: Authentic cat furniture and accessory solutions.
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