Make Your Online Store Stand Out with Product Ribbons

February 24, 2021

A Set Up Guide for Existing Netcash Customers

March 4, 2021

March 1, 2021

A monkey knows what tree to climb: Netcash Shop & Mailchimp

With the global economy moving rapidly online, eCommerce is growing like never before. We want our Netcash Shop owners to have the right tools to make the most of the growth spurt and better connect with customers, helping you deliver targeted messages to grow your revenue and build your online shop.

Thanks to our latest partnership with Mailchimp, Netcash Shop owners can harness the full power of email marketing by automatically sharing customer and purchase-data from your Netcash Shop to create targeted email campaigns, build email lists, recommend new products and more.

Read on to learn more about our latest integration with Mailchimp and what email marketing can do for your online store.

Our topics for this post will cover:

What is email marketing?
What is Mailchimp
How Netcash Shop and Mailchimp work together
How to connect your shop to Mailchimp
How to use other email marketing tools with Netcash Shop

Email Marketing, what is it and what does it do?

Email marketing, as the name suggests, is the use of email messages to market or promote your business directly in your audience’s inboxes. There are various ways to collect email addresses so that you can use marketing emails to strengthen relationships with potential and existing customers, share updates about current offers, send discount vouchers, increase loyalty, and more.

It generally takes less time and effort to create an email marketing campaign than it would for similar promotions with paid or traditional media, which makes email marketing an accessible and inexpensive way for small businesses to make a big impact with limited resources. If you want to save time, money, energy, or all of the above, email marketing is a no-brainer to drive significant revenue with a small business budget.

What Is Mailchimp?

Your day-to-day ESPs (email service providers) limit the number of emails that can be sent from an individual account at any one time, which is why it is necessary to use a specialised service like Mailchimp to build your email lists and send your general newsletters or targeted email campaigns.

Just like Netcash Shop, Mailchimp is easy to set up and simple to set-up, making it one of the most popular platforms available across the globe and the perfect solution for small business owners with limited experience looking to step up their email marketing game.

Have a look at some of the cool features available from Mailchimp:

Create customized email templates aligned with your brand
Set up signup forms in your shop and build your email lists
Set up automated email campaigns or send manual emails
Segment your audiences and send targeted personal messages to your customers
Schedule your social media posts
Advertise on Facebook and Instagram to reach even more people like your customers
The list goes on!

How Do Netcash Shop and MailChimp Work Together?

The latest integration with Mailchimp allows you to share your shop data, including customer data, orders, products, vouchers and abandoned carts with your Mailchimp account to automatically build and segment your email lists. By doing this, you are creating highly targeted and data driven email campaigns so that you can convert more sales.

Connect the platforms and use your online store data with Mailchimp to:

Create email lists using customer email addresses
Add live products to your email marketing campaigns
Segment your audience to send personal, relevant emails to specific customers. (for example, you could send an email with washing instructions after a customer completes their purchase)
And recover abandoned carts by sending reminder emails that encourage customers to complete their purchases

Build your email list

Through various channels, your customers have signed up or given permission for you to send updates and promotions from your business. These customers have been added to your database which we refer to as an email list. These customers opt in for your business newsletter by completing the Mailchimp sign up form on your website which means they are already interested in your offering. The conversions from an email campaign could be 10 times higher than your traditional social media campaigns, so it is a good idea for your business to start building your customer email list as soon as possible.

It is a requirement that you ask your customers for approval to send email marketing material and one of the best places to collect customer information is during the checkout process by enabling the form in your shop Control Panel à Marketing à Newsletters. The customers that give you permission will automatically be added to your selected email list. Customers that don’t opt in will be added to the database as non-subscribers, so you will not be able to send them marketing emails, but their email addresses can still be used for retargeting adverts and any order related communication.

You can add an email capture popup to capture potential customers visiting your site. You can set up the popup to appear at different times in the site visitors journey, for example, 5 seconds after the visitor lands on your website or when the visitor tries to exit the website. The popup is fully customisable so you can align it with your website design and publish it to Netcash Shop without any coding.

Send email campaigns

As soon as you have exported your customer data to your Mailchimp email base, you can get started with your targeted email campaigns or general customer communication:

Start by designing one or many email templates to strengthen your brand
Communicate your products, launches, seasonal updates and discount vouchers directly from your marketing emails
Use audience segmenting and smart targeting options to reach the correct audiences and send customers the product they want to see. (more on this below).

If you like to fly with autopilot, you can set up automated Mailchimp email campaigns.

The automated emails will trigger automatically from Mailchimp on a predetermined event. For example, a welcome email can be sent to new subscribers when they join your email list.

You can quickly add products to emails

Your product catalogue and variations can be exported to Mailchimp so that you can add them directly to your emailers and campaigns. With a couple of clicks, you can promote your best-sellers, launch new brands and products, run promotions or anything else in between.

Simply drop and drag to add products to your email.

Segment your audience to make sure your emails are relevant

The order data from your Netcash Shop sales is sent to Mailchimp automatically so that you can send data driven email campaigns and target customers based on their purchase history and site activity. You can create customer segments based on products purchased, number of orders made and how much money they’ve spent in your shop. Netcash Shop passes the order data for the last 6 months to Mailchimp, making the data relevant and current.

Try build a new segment using Mailchimp by creating a new email campaign. Find the “To” section, select your audience and choose “Group or new segment” in the drop-down.

Segmentation parameters that are synced with your Netcash Shop are listed here:

You can use these settings to amplify your targeting tactics. Some of our favourite ideas:

Reach out to all customers who purchased a specific product and offer it to them again when it is back in stock:

Activate inactive customers:

The list is endless depending on your specific needs. Have a look at this example of an email aimed at turning a dormant customer into an active customer:

Besides all of the above e-commerce filters, with Mailchimp you can also build segments by location, language, shopping behaviour data from previous email campaigns and SO MUCH MORE! Make sure you explore all filters before you get started.

Recover abandoned carts

Netcash Shop will sync all abandoned carts received in the last six months with your Mailchimp account, so it is simple for you to automatically follow up with customers who haven’t completed their checkout and remind them about their order or offer an incentive to help seal the deal.

If you do not use MailChimp, Netcash Shop also has an automated abandoned cart recovery email tool.

This tool is made for maximum simplicity and automation. You can enable sending automated abandoned cart emails with just one single click using the predefined setup. This auto email is sent to customers two hours after they abandoned their cart. Everything you need to convert your abandoned shopping carts in 1 place. Mailchimp is more flexible in terms or customised email templates, sending times, or sending a series of abandoned cart emails rather than one.

Find out how to automate abandoned cart recovery emails here.

Run promotions

You can sync your active promotion vouchers with Mailchimp and embed them into your email templates to convert even more sales.

There are so many uses of discount vouchers, we believe that a good place to start is to send a simple discount voucher to every new email subscriber to encourage them to make their first purchase. Add the voucher code to your welcome email to help build your list and convert potential customers faster.

To set up a discount voucher to send to all your new email subscribers:

Create a discount coupon in your Netcash Shop control panel.
Create an email popup in Mailchimp.
Create an automated welcome email and add your discount voucher.

The Netcash Shop discount voucher system is very flexible. You can easily create vouchers with a rand value discount or a percentage off. Add free shipping, or both at once. It is important to note that if you are creating a voucher that combines both a discount and free shipping, you’ll need to paste it to your email manually as this particular kind of coupon cannot be passed to Mailchimp.

How do I get started and connect my Netcash Shop to Mailchimp?

We have made eCommerce easy for you, and the Mailchimp integration is no exception. You can connect your shop to your Mailchimp account without any coding skills.

Upgrade your Netcash Shop plan to Business or higher to get started. Your Mailchimp account can be on any pricing plan, including forever free. These features are all available and enabled for Netcash Shop Instant Sites, WordPress websites, and soon we’re rolling it out to stores created via partners like Wix.

Follow these simple steps to get started:

Go to your Netcash Shop Control Panel > Marketing > Newsletters
Click “Connect with Mailchimp”. If you don’t have a Mailchimp account, click “Sign up free” first.
Choose a Mailchimp audience to connect with your store. After you do that, all new customer emails (those who made a purchase in your store or opted in for your marketing emails) will be exported to your contact list in Mailchimp.
Netcash Shop will suggest exporting your existing store data. Agree to export, or click “don’t export”, if you want to start building your list from scratch.
The last step in the process is to enter your site domain name so that you can add your email sign up form.

And that’s it, you are ready to set up your first newsletter, schedule a post on social media or create a targeted advert.

If you happen to be a fan of one of the other popular email marketing tools, you can navigate to the Netcash Shop Control Panel > Marketing > Newsletters to export your email contact list in a CSV format and upload manually to any email marketing platform of your choice.