WooCommerce Segmentation and Email Marketing

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BobWP:
Hey, everybody, welcome to Do the Woo. And we are Bradless today. Uh, I don’t know if that’s actually a word, but I’m going to use it because, uh, Brad was not able to join us today, and it’s a crazy month. It’s August. Everybody’s doing a lot of stuff. I know that I was speaking with a guest beforehand, and she has actually, uh, I don’t know how you could say, carved this time to show up because she is extremely busy as well. But anyway, we have Beka Rice today. How are you doing, Beka?

Beka:
I’m doing great, Bob. It’s so good to see you. We haven’t chatted in a long time.

BobWP:
Yeah, it has been a long time. I was looking at all my different podcasts going on, and I thought, “We’ll have to have Beka.” I know you’ve been on my other one a couple of times, and that’s been a long time. So, um, I’ll be pestering you, so you can be reassured you’ll see me. It won’t be so long next time.

Beka:
laughs Great. Great. I’m glad to hear that.

BobWP:
Well, I’m going to, uh, yeah, just real quickly, you know, we were talking earlier. I was saying that it’s a busy month. I know you’re real busy. Um, and so it’s kind of in the latter part of the summer. Um, how’s your summer been going, and how are you staying busy?

Beka:
Yeah. The summer has been wonderful. I’ve had a fair bit of travel and have been doing a lot of different stuff compared to things I’ve done in the past. I’ve been working really hard on a lot of new features we’ve been working on with Jilt, as well as some stuff we’ve been doing with our WooCommerce plugins at SkyVerge. A lot of my time recently has been spent in customer interviews, talking to folks who are using email marketing for a variety of different things with their WooCommerce stores, Shopify stores, Easy Digital Downloads stores, and trying to get a better sense of how they use different WooCommerce plugins, how those things interact with their email, and kind of trying to see the shifting sort of landscape in Woo. Definitely different kinds of merchants are using Woo these days than they were, you know, three years ago or so, and before that. So it’s been pretty fun, and really fun to kind of dive back into that space myself, since that’s usually something we’ve shared among our team. Everybody’s talking to customers and whatnot, right? But I’ve focused a lot more of my time on that over the past few months, and it’s been a blast to get back into it.

BobWP:
Yeah. Cool. I probably should backstep here a bit. For those who don’t know, I mean, you’ve mentioned Jilt and SkyVerge, a little bit of what you do, I mean, it’s obvious from what’s keeping you busy, but how about the formal “What does Beka do?” laughs

Beka:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m our head of product at SkyVerge, where we have over 50 premium plugins on WooCommerce.com. One of our biggest products is Jilt, which is an email marketing app built exclusively for e-commerce stores. A lot of my time is devoted to working on how to improve our suite of plugins and how to make Jilt better for online stores that are trying to improve their email marketing. So, much of my time is spent on user research, UX testing, kind of understanding our product roadmap, and how that fits and aligns with our users’ needs.

BobWP:
Yeah, you’ve been pretty prominent in the space for some time. I’ve heard you speak at WooConf when that was going on, and I believe you’ve also spoken at WooSesh, right?

Beka:
Yes, yes. I’m very excited to do that again this year. So, if you’re listening, Brian Richards and Patrick Rauland are going to be doing that again in October.

BobWP:
Yeah, in fact, we’ll be having both of them as guests here real soon to talk a little bit more about that. Now, I know we want to, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing. I figure, since Brad isn’t here to interrupt us all the time laughs, that we could actually—no, Brad, if you’re listening to see how we handled it without you, I do miss you. There’s a big hole, a big gap in this show, but we’re plugging through it. But anyway, I know that you mentioned that Jilt can now send broadcast newsletters, announcements. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on? Because I believe that’s not brand new, but you kind of bumped that up as far as a feature in Jilt. Just give us a little bit more about what’s going on there.

Beka:
Yeah, absolutely. So, Jilt kind of came out of the plugin work we were doing in the WooCommerce space in a way, right? Trying to understand the challenges merchants typically encounter, what’s hardest for them to do. A lot of it was around email marketing—not understanding what they should be sending, what are best practices, how can I do this easily, when should I be emailing my customers, what kind of emails should I be sending, right? This has been a long process and evolution for us. What kinds of emails should folks be sending, and how do we make that really simple for them in a way that’s going to drive revenue and make a significant impact on their business?

So, we started with automated emails in Jilt, right? Things like cart abandonment, win-back emails, welcome emails, those sorts of drip series because those are super valuable. We did transactional emails, so things like order receipts, order shipment notifications—those kinds of order status emails, right? But newsletter sending, announcements, broadcasts—that was kind of the last frontier for us, and the biggest one, right? It takes Jilt from an app that you might use alongside another email service to something you’re going to use exclusively for all of your emails. The infrastructure to do that is massive laughs, right? There’s a lot that goes into that process, and a lot that changes about how you manage contacts, how you manage building a list, right? How you get into that entire email ecosystem.

A lot of the time I’ve been spending over the past few months is trying to deeply understand that problem, right? What are you doing when you’re sending a newsletter or broadcast? Are you sending it to everybody? Are you sending it only to particular customers? How are you segmenting what you’re sending to folks? Who are you communicating with and how are you doing it? What information are you sending? Then how do you want to manage those contacts, right? Because now, instead of just having only customers—people who have purchased from your store that you’re emailing—you have leads, right? People who aren’t necessarily customers yet, maybe you’re trying to convert them, or maybe they are customers and you’re trying to reengage them or meet them in person or find them at events. There’s this huge set of use cases for email that we’re now addressing. It’s been a super fun problem to dig into, and it is still relatively new. We’ve had a pretty extended beta period as we’ve been working through it with folks, and we’ve rolled that out to a lot of users now. It’s pretty much available for everyone, and it’s been awesome to see the success with that and to see the different kinds of stores using Jilt that weren’t using it six months ago.

BobWP:
Yeah, adding that piece into it, it’s interesting when you’re—I mean, it is huge, and I can’t even imagine, because a lot of these platforms exist only for that reason—email announcements. Adding it and being able to do everything in the box there with Jilt—that’s pretty cool. It just occurred to me—what are people, you know, okay, so you’ve got these—you’ve been listening and talking to a lot of people and trying to figure this all out. Not so much the small online store, but, you know, these bigger retailers that may be using something like Jilt, what are their unique challenges or what have you found to be the unique challenges that you had to address when you added this piece to the puzzle?

Beka:
Yeah, there is a huge diversity in the way larger brands are using email, which is super cool, right? It’s a very neat problem space to be in. We found a few different things. Segmentation becoming a lot more advanced is one thing that we found. A good example is, one of my teammates recently wrote a really great blog post on segmenting by your cart size. The broadcast or newsletter-type announcements that you’re going to send to people who have had large order values with your store—that’s going to be different than those who have had smaller order values, right? These big brands are doing some really cool stuff in identifying their ideal customer segments and personas, and speaking to those people more directly. For example, if your average order value is $50 per order, they’re talking to the folks who are under that very differently than those who are above that average order value. They’re sending them different kinds of things and trying to engage them in different ways.

So

, I’d say that as a brand grows, the way they think about their customers and personas definitely evolves. They go from talking to everyone the same way to talking to each of their customer personas individually. The second thing we’ve seen is that the type of site you are changes the types of emails you send. A good example of this has been with WooCommerce memberships, which has been super fun to take two of our largest products—Jilt and memberships—and see how they can play nicely together and do some cool and amazing things.

We’ve seen that brands running membership sites—whether that’s a purchasing club or whatever your membership is—have different needs for their automated emails as well as their newsletter and announcement emails. This ties back into the previous point about personas. You talk to your members differently, just like you talk to different customer personas differently. We’ve seen some really cool things with sites sending broadcasts where they’re sending different emails to their members based on membership level than they might send to their general customer base—people who are non-members, right? So, that segmentation becomes much more advanced as a brand gets larger and can spend more time tailoring email content to speak to different people individually, addressing their specific needs and experiences with the brand. It’s been pretty cool to see that these broadcast emails are being used very differently even within a single store. We’ve focused on giving people as much information as they can use for segmentation. That includes membership data from WooCommerce, subscriptions data, purchasing history, which product categories or specific products they’ve bought. We’ve tried to funnel all of that into broadcasts so folks who are leveling up their email can use that data effectively.

BobWP:
When you’re talking about segmentation, it seems like you could really go deep into it, right? I mean, for example, you could even segment by what customers are putting in their carts and the value of those items. So, it’s like if they’re adding high-end electronics compared to maybe kitchen appliances or something like that—it’s amazing how far you could go with it.

Beka:
You absolutely could. And that’s a part where I think our team has been super valuable for some folks who are trying to make the jump from sending one type of email to all customers to learning how to segment appropriately and figure out what’s going to be most impactful. A lot of it comes down to identifying the most important places to segment. For example, maybe you have one product that drives 80% of your sales. So, let’s take folks who have that product in their cart or who have purchased it, and let’s talk to them differently. Try to engage them more with your brand and suggest other products they might be interested in, or recommend items that pair well with the product in their cart.

It really depends on your store and your brand, and why customers are coming to you. If I’m running an electronics store and folks have electronics in their cart versus accessories, those lower-value carts might indicate that customers don’t trust your brand yet. If this is their first order, they might not be willing to make a bigger investment until they see how you handle a smaller order and what the process looks like with your store. It’s about understanding where your customers are coming from, what they expect when they get to your store, whether this is their first purchase, and how you should speak to them.

We encourage folks to add to their segmentation over time. You’re right, it can be a rabbit hole, and you could spend all day on it, but the best approach is to test and iterate. Maybe instead of sending one cart abandonment automation to everyone, start by splitting it into two. Pick what you think will be most impactful, whether it’s cart value or items in the cart, and create one version for those who have your best-selling product in their cart and another version for everyone else. If you see success with that, you can begin tailoring even further by segmenting the customers who don’t have the best-selling product. Maybe you segment them by cart value—do they have small accessories or high-value electronics? Talk to them differently. It’s something you can build on over time. Test it, let it run for a few weeks, see what happens, and then make adjustments as needed.

BobWP:
Based on everything you’ve said, let’s close out this part of the conversation with some advice for a WooCommerce site owner just starting out. Maybe they have 20 to 25 products. I know it depends on the products, and there are a lot of variables, so you can’t give a one-size-fits-all answer, but are there a couple of general tips for someone starting out with segmentation in a small store for the first time?

Beka:
Yeah, it definitely depends, but the key is to figure out what differentiates your best customers. What is it about them that makes them your best customer? For some, it might be lifetime value—they’ve spent a lot with your store. For others, it might be that you’ve met them at events, and you’ve tagged them in Jilt based on the event where you met them. Or, they might have purchased a membership or subscription from you, so they may not have spent the most money, but they’ve committed to an ongoing relationship. The first step is identifying what moves someone from being a good customer or a new customer to being a best customer. Then, focus on segmenting your communication based on that.

For those who are already your best customers, try to get more value out of them—encourage them to be promoters or brand advocates, get them to share things about your brand, or reward them for their loyalty. For customers who aren’t there yet, figure out how to move them toward that point. If they’re a one-time purchaser, maybe you can get them to subscribe or leave a review. The best advice is to identify one area that distinguishes your VIP customers from the rest and use that to start segmenting your communication.

BobWP:
So, probably no store owner can really afford not to dive into segmentation at some point.

Beka:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just good business. It’s about understanding your customer personas and your customer base. If you understand why people are coming to you, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking for, you’re always going to be better off by speaking more directly to those needs. When people feel like a brand understands what they want, they’re more likely to come back.

BobWP:
Exactly. Well, this is good stuff because we’ve been able to focus a little bit on segmentation, which is important. And also, the fact that you added this new component to Jilt—it’s impressive. I can’t even imagine the engineering and infrastructure involved. I know we probably don’t want to get into that right now, but it’s amazing. You mentioned it’s like the final piece you needed. Has this been on the roadmap for a while?

Beka:
Oh, absolutely. The engineering infrastructure to do this is substantial. We’ve been working on pieces of this architecture for over a year. It’s been an ongoing process. And, as you said, we could certainly get into the weeds about the engineering side of it, laughs but it’s been a fun process. We’ve also tried to deliver value early when we can. Even though there were parts of the infrastructure that we couldn’t deliver right away, we tried to dovetail it with other projects that could deliver value in the meantime. For example, the segmentation engine was necessary for broadcasts, but it was also useful for everything else, so we built it in a way that it could be used first on automations and then expanded upon. This has been the culmination of a long process, but it’s been a fun one. It’s certainly much bigger than what we could have accomplished in a few months, given our team size. We’re still a small company, and we’re bootstrapped.

BobWP:
Mm-hmm. I assume that since Jilt already had features like cart abandonment, the integration between those features and the new broadcast functionality would be a lot more seamless compared to having to use several different services and piece things together. Even though that process has improved over time, having everything in one place seems pretty sweet.

Beka:
Yeah, that was the goal. It’s difficult to set up these automations in some other email platforms that aren’t designed for online sellers. We come from a space of building integrations—that’s our lifeblood as a company. With the extensions we’ve built at SkyVerge, we’ve developed more than two dozen payment integrations, let alone other integrations like Avalara for sales tax automation, or FreshBooks, or Google Analytics. We understand the value of seamless integrations and how challenging it can be when an API or service doesn’t map well to the data in your e-commerce store. So, we’ve tried to be very mindful of that problem with Jilt. It’s really easy—you don’t have to add a bunch of stuff to the API just to segment your emails properly. It’s all there. You connect it via Jilt, and the data from your store is, for the most part, available in your emails.

We’re going to move on. Actually, just on the show, we typically try to pull in a

little bit of the news. And I think even the e-commerce people are taking August off because there’s not much news out there. But I did come across one article, and I don’t know if any of our listeners have seen it. The headline caught my eye: “Amazon’s $10 Per Person Attempt to Wriggle Off Privacy Hook.” What it is, is they’ve been offering to pay $10 for permission to track their customers. laughs I was like, “Whoa.” Okay, well, I guess this isn’t surprising in a way. We all know how security and privacy concerns can freak us out. They’ve had a growing problem, and they’re trying to find ways to solve it. It might be a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go. So, having just thrown this out there, what are your initial thoughts? You’re deeper into the e-commerce space than I am, but I talk to a lot of people about it. What do you think of this, and if it’s successful, what kind of precedent could it set for others?

Beka:
Yeah, this was a really interesting article to read. I get pretty deep into this kind of space. I’m actually working on building a house right now, and I was having a conversation this weekend about smart home appliances, like refrigerators that have a hub and everything. I come from the software industry, so I’m like, “I don’t want any of that!” laughs I don’t want my appliances joining the botnet, and I don’t want the contents of my fridge being sent to food retailers for advertising and tracking purposes. It does freak me out a little, understanding how that process happens. There’s just so much data collected about us, and while in some sense you give in and know it’s going to happen, on the other hand, I still kind of rail against it.

With this Amazon case, it’s interesting because we all know how much data Amazon records about us and how valuable that data is to them. They have these huge swaths of customer personas and an extensive picture of what people want and what someone like you would also buy. On one hand, it’s cool to see that this sounds like a way to give some of that privacy control back to you—to make it more opt-in and to compensate you for it. On the other hand, the risk is that people may not fully understand what they’re committing to when they give consent to be tracked, and just how much data is being collected. It feels like the $10 incentive is maybe trying to mask some of that reality—“Well, it’s $10, everybody’s happy,” but do you really understand what you’re signing up for?

BobWP:
Yeah. I’m picturing the page now. “Give us permission to track you,” followed by this fine print, and then, “Agree to this 1,600-page document that tells you exactly what that $10 is getting you.” laughs At first, I thought maybe it was a monthly thing, which would be insane, but it looks like a one-time deal for $10. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t do for $10, and giving away my privacy definitely isn’t one of them.

Beka:
Yeah, I think what they’re doing is understanding that people just want something in exchange. There’s usually a nominal or token amount that will tip the balance for a lot of people. But there’s always going to be a segment of folks who don’t care about that. I’d wonder if that value will change over time—$10, $25, whatever it is—it’s worth more to them than what they’re offering. But the fact that they’re offering to pay folks for their data shows that our interactions with these services have value. And maybe that’s the silver lining—it makes people more aware of that. When you look at companies like Facebook, Google, or other big tech firms, now that you see Amazon offering to pay you for your data, it could make people think more about the value of their data and how it’s being used.

BobWP:
Yeah. It’s kind of a goodwill gesture. And, of course, Amazon has the resources to make that kind of gesture. Some people might wonder if everybody will start jumping on this bandwagon. Is this something I’m going to have to worry about with my store? Do I need to start offering incentives, too?

Beka:
Right. Yeah. Can I do this as a small retailer?

BobWP:
Exactly. Maybe I’ll give them a free mug or something. Where do you draw the line? It’s interesting stuff. I just had to bring that up because it seemed like a fun summer treat. Well, the only other thing I want to mention is that most of our listeners probably know that WooCommerce 3.7 RC2 came out recently. They have a planned release date of August 12th, and from what I’ve seen, they’re usually pretty good about sticking to those dates. I haven’t really looked at what 3.7 is bringing to the table. Is there anything that stands out to you? I’m sure you guys are on top of it since you have to make sure everything works with your plugins. I didn’t see anything major, except maybe some updates to product blocks.

Beka:
Yes, product blocks are the biggest thing. Our team is working on compatibility across all of our plugins right now. The biggest update is the improvements to product blocks. It’s a neat way of embedding products elsewhere on your site. Before Gutenberg, you might have had to use a product shortcode to insert an add-to-cart button. But if you wanted to do something more advanced, like hero images or product galleries, you’d probably be working with a designer, creating that in Photoshop, and then dropping an image into your blog post or landing page. Product blocks make it easier to sell your products elsewhere on your site, giving you a more accessible way of generating product-focused content.

It’s certainly a cool feature. You can easily embed six products in a blog post or create a hero image to feature a product in a blog post or landing page. I think it helps DIYers who want to use their product content more creatively across their site. However, I’m not sure designers are adopting it as quickly because they have their existing tools and workflows—they’re still going to drop into Illustrator or Photoshop for a while. But it does make design more accessible for folks who weren’t already doing that, which is neat to see.

BobWP:
You know, this is a good way to wrap up. I saw a question on Twitter the other day. Someone asked why WooCommerce isn’t integrating blocks directly into the product post type. I responded by mentioning that I had Matt Mullenweg and Todd Wilkins on my other podcast, and I asked them about the future of that. They gave a few reasons why it probably wouldn’t happen. From your perspective, what would be good or bad about giving people the ability to use blocks directly to create their product pages?

Beka:
Yeah, I think Gutenberg isn’t quite there yet for product pages. There are a few things that are different about a product compared to something that’s purely content, like pages or posts. From our perspective, there’s a lot of ancillary data associated with a product that isn’t content-based. Things like inventory may or may not be displayed, or there’s hidden information about a product, such as subscription dates, shipping options, or reviews. Some of that can be managed through the Gutenberg side panel, but it’s not a great UX for editing significant amounts of product data.

We need to look at the product editing experience as something separate. There’s both the layout of the product page and the product data attached to it, and that data shouldn’t be surfaced in Gutenberg. There’s probably a better way to handle it. I think Gutenberg needs to evolve a bit more, and we need to separate the layout of product pages from the data associated with the product. It would be amazing to drag and drop elements around—move the image to the left or right, adjust the pricing above or below the fold, or change the placement of the description. That would be really cool, but it needs to be done in a way that plugins can hook into those sections. So, it’s more challenging than working with a blog post. You need to consider both the layout and the product data, and think about the backend experience more holistically.

So, I think it’s a good decision not to make the product page editable with Gutenberg just yet. It wouldn’t address the needs of people editing products in the same way it does for pages or posts.

BobWP:
That totally makes sense. Well, good stuff. I think we’ll go ahead and wrap this up. Is there anything coming up for SkyVerge or Jilt in the next few months that you’d like to share? Any exciting news or events you’re attending?

Beka:
Oh, there’s always something in progress. laughs Always something! As far as WordCamps, we’ll be working with Brian Krosgard at Post Status on something related to WordCamp US, so stay tuned for that. I’ll also be attending PressNomics for the first time in a couple of months, which is exciting. On the product side, we’ve got some cool stuff in progress with Jilt, particularly around integrations. We’re working on things with partners like Authorize.net, CyberSource, and Braintree, as well as focusing on compliance. A lot of merchants are going through PSD2 compliance right now, so we’re wrapping that up over the next month or two. We’re also working on some new features for memberships, but it’s still in the early

stages, so we’ll talk more about that later. If you’re a membership user, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @Beka_Rice—I’d love to chat about how you’re using memberships and how we can improve the product.

BobWP:
Awesome. It sounds like a lot of great things are coming up. I’m excited to hear what you and Brian come up with for WordCamp US. And as far as the memberships go, that sounds like a great topic for my other podcast, so I’ll be in touch with you about that!

Beka:
Absolutely!

BobWP:
You mentioned how people can connect with you on Twitter. I don’t have anything too exciting coming up, but I did want to share one quick thing. I started a list on Twitter called “Women in WordPress and E-Commerce.” It’s partly for my own sake, as I’m always looking for guests for my podcast and to follow and learn from. Of course, Beka was one of the first people I added to the list. But I also wanted to bring it to the forefront because I think there are a lot of women in the e-commerce and WordPress space who don’t get enough visibility. If anyone is interested or knows someone who should be on the list, feel free to let me know. Just go to @BobWP on Twitter, find the list, and ping me publicly if you want to be added or know someone who should be.

Beka, I really appreciate you taking the time to join me. We did manage to get through this without Brad. He thought it was 9 AM Eastern time—no big deal. We’re doing fine, but we did miss you, Brad!

Beka:
Thank you, Bob! This was fun.

BobWP:
Thank you, Beka! And thanks, everyone, for listening. Make sure to follow us on your favorite podcasting platform. See you next time