Set up the Email Marketing app

The Email Marketing app provides a channel of communication with your customers for non-transactional messages. This unlocks the potential to engage subscribers and previous customers to generate fresh visits, which should turn into conversions and sales.

Key features

The Email Marketing app includes the following key features:

Contacts list synced with Shopify
Automation funnels, with wait times
1. Abandoned Checkout recovery
2. Welcome message to new subscribers
3. Thank you for the purchase
One time campaigns, with schedule capability
Powerful visual editor for the email
HTML editor to use your own code
50+ professionally made templates covering 25+ categories

💡 Have specific questions about the app? See our list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) of the Email Marketing app here: Email Marketing App FAQs

First setup

The initial setup is effortless. With a few clicks, the app will be ready to send automations to recover abandoned checkouts and re-engage subscribers and customers.

Here's what you have to do in order to activate the default automation messages:

#	Setup step	Outcome
1	Go to the Email Marketing app and enable it from the top right switch	This will make new subscribers to be added to the subscriber list, using webhooks
2	Go to the Subscribers List tab and click the Import from Shopify button	This will add your existing Shopify customers to the list
3	Go to the Automations tab and evaluate which funnels are suited for your store	Here you will see the available trigger-based funnels
4	Enter the desired funnel and click Enable	This will effectively start processing the triggers and queue the messages
5	Repeat steps 3 & 4 for all desired Automations

Note that with the quick steps provided above, all the messages will be sent with the standard default values.

For the best results, you should optimize the values according to your store's design language.

Automations

Activation

After activating the Email Marketing app, the default status of the automation funnels is inactive.

	Inactive funnels have their icon grayed out and an Inactive label next to the name of the automation.
	Active funnels have a green icon and also, a green Active label

To activate an automation, you have to enter it and click the top right Enable radio button (see below).

Note that if your store already had Abandoned Checkouts, our app will not send retroactively the recovery emails.

Funnels

Message status

Automations are currently limited to maximum of 3 messages.
If you want to use only two or even one, instead of all 3, you can simply disable them from the top right corner of the individual message card.

Triggers

Customers do actions that activate triggers. When a trigger is set, it will set in motion the funnel.

Triggers list

Wait time

The wait time is the cooldown until the message is sent. The wait time is relative to the message before. The first message in a funnel is relative to the trigger.

For example, in the abandoned checkout case, the first message will be sent, by default, 1 hour after the customer reaches the checkout stage. The second message is scheduled 23 hours after the first one. So this is exactly 1 day after the initial trigger. The third message is set by default to be sent 2 days after the second message, meaning 3 days from the trigger.

Note that funnels will stop when the conditions no longer apply.

For example, the Abandoned Checkout messages 2 and 3 will be canceled if, after message 1, the customer finalizes the order.

Campaigns

Abandoned Checkout

In the first step of the checkout, the email is collected. When a customer reaches the second checkout step, the trigger is activated.

Note that if the customer did not consent to receive email marketing messages, the funnel will not be triggered.

Welcome

The trigger is activated when a new subscriber is added to the Email Marketing Subscribers List.

This action will occur as a result of these behaviors:

1. User subscribes from the Shopify Subscribe widget

2. User subscribes from any of the Vitals' Capture Leads apps

2.1. Announcement Bars

2.2. Spin the Wheel

2.3. Pop-ups

3. Any method that creates a new customer entry in the Shopify Admin>Customers section, including the manual addition of a new customer

Note that the import function does not trigger the Welcome messages retroactively.

Thank you

The trigger is activated when a customer which agreed to receive marketing emails finalized an order and reaches the Thank you screen.

Note that the Email Marketing app does not need to be enabled to send one-time campaigns.

The campaign list is sorted in descending order of the last modified campaign.

You can create one-time campaigns for specific clusters of customers, named Recipients.

Note that there is an internal cooldown for Email Marketing messages of 48 hours. If an Email Marketing message was sent in the last 48h, no other automated or one-time messages will be sent to that user.

The first Abandoned Checkout message is excepted from this rule because this message is mostly considered a transactional message, not a marketing one.

You can choose an internal name for the campaign, for easier later access. The internal name is visible only to you, in the Vitals internal admin.

Campaign settings

Recipients

1	New Customers	Customers with 0 orders
2	Existing Customers	Customers with >0 orders
3	Customer account disabled status	Customer has no account
4	Customer account enabled status	Customer has an account
5	Customer account invited status	Customer received an account invitation sent from Shopify admin but didn't accept it yet (see image below)
6	Customer account declined status	Customer received an account invitation sent from Shopify admin and declined it (see image below)

It is important to keep the email blasts focused on as few recipients as possible. Only target the recipients with the highest rate of success.

For example, if you want to make a re-engagement campaign, create one campaign for the customers who already purchased from your store (existing customers) and one for the ones that visited and subscribed, but never bought anything (new customers). Make sure you tailor the messages accordingly, where a good idea might be to provide further incentives for the new ones.

Campaign

Fill in the technical details of the email. The defaults are automatically populated with the values from the Shopify admin.

The preview text is usually visible in notifications and mail previews. They are most visible in mobile clients.

If the preview text is missing, the first part of the email body will be displayed. The preview text should be a continuation of the Subject, representing a summary of the email body content.

Content

The Email Marketing app currently supports two types of content:

Predefined template
Simple rich text and HTML editor

Predefined template

Start the email from one of the provided templates. Filter the templates using the categories filter from the left sidebar.

There are currently 50+ templates in 25+ categories.

Use the visual editor to customize the content of your email.

Use variables to create personalized content for your customers.

Note that if the unsubscribe variable is missing from the email, we will automatically add it, to avoid regulatory issues.

Simple rich text and HTML editor

This has 2 use cases:

A. Either copy-paste the HTML code provided by your marketing content team

B. Either compose a plain text message, for simplicity reasons

Schedule or send

Once you've finished tweaking the settings and content, you are ready to either send it effective immediately or schedule it at a later time.

Note that the schedule is done based on the reported browser time, at the moment of the Campaign Launch.

Cancel a campaign

If the campaign is scheduled for sending, you can cancel it from two places:

from the Schedule or send tab, using the Cancel campaign button
from the Campaigns List, using the Bulk actions command

You can delete a campaign from the Campaigns List, using the Bulk actions command

Duplicate campaign

You can duplicate a campaign from the Campaign details screen (see below).

Subscribers List

The subscribers list represents the total number of email contacts available for marketing emails.

Note that Hard bounces and unsubscribed users are automatically deleted.

Hard bounces are email addresses that cannot receive emails, due to permanent reasons, such as:

inexistent address
invalid address

Webhooks

When the Email Marketing app is enabled, new users which agreed to receive marketing emails are automatically added to the list, using a webhook at account creation.

Import from Shopify

Use the Import from Shopify button to add users from Shopify Admin>Customers to the Email Marketing app. Refresh the page after ~1 minute to see the list.

Import from CSV

Use the Import from CSV button to add contacts from an offline source.

Be cautious to use only addresses that explicitly agreed to receive marketing messages from you.

CSV file requirements

the CSV file must have comma separators
the column headers must be exactly as below (the labels are case sensitive, so please keep this exact form):
First Name, Last Name, Email, Total Spent, Total Orders, Tags, City, Province, Province Code, Country, Country Code, Zip
only the Email column is mandatory
the order of the columns is not relevant
only the maximum allowed contacts will be imported (for example, if you are only allowed to add 1 more contact, but the CSV contains 2, the first contact will be imported, and the second contact will be ignored)

Note that if you're using MacOS's Numbers app, when you export the CSV, it will break the separators and the file will be rejected when uploading it. You can replace the ; with , or, simpler, you can use Google Sheets or Microsoft excel to manipulate the CSV from the beginning.

Download the example from here.

Analytics

The Email Marketing app measures the overall generic metrics:

Subscribers: this is the count of the active emailable contacts. When a new Customer subscribes to your marketing emails, the indicator updates immediately. If a customer unsubscribes, the count will be decreased accordingly.
Orders: this is the count of orders initiated from email engagement. If the customer opens or clicks the email and finalizes an order in the next 5 days, the order will be attributed to a campaign. This indicator also updates instantly, following the order.
Sales: this is the total amount of sales generated through the Email Marketing app. It is the sum of all the Orders from point #2.

On the campaign level, the metrics displayed are:

Open rate: this is the percentage of the emails your customers opened, from the total number of delivered emails. This metric is updated hourly.
Click rate: this is the percentage of the clicks (or taps) your customers performed on links from your email. This metric is updated hourly.
Orders: this is the count of orders initiated from email engagement. If the customer opens or clicks the email and finalizes an order in the next 5 days, the order will be attributed to the campaign. This metric is updated hourly.

Note that the campaign-level analytics are aggregated hourly. The analytics are updated at minute 0 of the next hour, for the hour that just passed.

For example, an Order performed at hour 13:01 will be reflected in the campaign analytics at 14:00, when the calculation script runs.

Additional settings

Email cooldown

Email cooldown is an option that can be activated to any email, be it an Automated email or Campaign. The purpose of this option is to avoid sending more than one email to the same customer in a customizable time frame. This will reduce the number of contacts that unsubscribe from your marketing emails, or mark the messages as spam, which will protect the server's reputation and maintain the high deliverability rate of 98%+.

For example, when you shoot a Campaign, the customers that already received a Marketing Email in the past 16 hours (default value), will not receive the campaign (if the option is enabled). However, the customers that did not receive any Marketing Email from you in the past 16 hours, will receive the message. So the decision is taken on the customer level, not the campaign level.

You can control if you want this setting to be active or inactive, for each message, from the Settings tab of the emails, simply ticking the Skip sending to customers that are on cooldown checkbox:

You can control the length of the time interval from the global settings of the Email Marketing app: