Unleash the Power of Email Marketing with Mailchimp and Ecwid by Lightspeed

With the world’s economy moving rapidly online, e-commerce is growing like never before. And here at Ecwid, we want to give you the tools to make the most of that. Tools to better connect with your customers. Tools to deliver targeted marketing messages. Tools to grow your revenue. Tools like… well, tools like Mailchimp.

Introducing Mailchimp for Ecwid.

Thanks to our latest partnership with Mailchimp, now you can harness the power of email marketing by automatically sharing customers and purchase-data from your Ecwid store to build an email list, create targeted email campaigns, recommend new products, and more. Wanna grow your email list? Create a sign-up form to grow your list while you sleep.

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

What Is Email Marketing and What Does It Do?

As the name suggests, email marketing uses email messages to promote your business directly in your audience’s inboxes. Collecting customer email addresses and sending marketing emails is used to strengthen relationships with potential and existing customers, share updates about current offers, send discount coupons, increase loyalty, and more.

The time and effort required to create an email marketing campaign is also generally lower than similar promotions with paid advertising and traditional media, which makes it an attractive solution for small businesses looking to make a big impact with limited resources. Whether you’re short on time, cash, energy, or all of the above, email marketing is an amazing opportunity to drive significant revenue on a small business budget.

What Is Mailchimp?

Most ESPs (email service providers) limit the number of emails that can be sent from an individual account at any one time. So, to do email marketing effectively, you’ll generally need to use a specialized service — like Mailchimp — to build your email list and send campaigns in bulk. Just like Ecwid, Mailchimp is user-friendly and easy to set-up, making it one of the single most popular platforms on the market and an easy win for small business owners with limited experience looking to up their email marketing game.

Mailchimp is also powerful. Here are some of the coolest things you can do with Mailchimp:

• Build your email lists with email signup forms in your store
• Send manual and automated email campaigns
• Create customized email templates to complement your brand
• Segment your audiences to send targeted personal messages that resonate with your customers
• Advertise on Facebook and Instagram to reach even more people like your customers
• Schedule social posts
• And more!

How Do Ecwid and MailChimp Work Together?

Through our latest integration, Ecwid can seamlessly share store data — customers, orders, products, discount coupons, abandoned carts — to your Mailchimp account to automatically build email lists, create highly targeted email campaigns, and convert more sales.

By using your online store data with Mailchimp, you can:

• Passively build your email list from customer email addresses
• Promote live products in your email campaigns
• Use order data to segment your audience and personalize messages (for example, sending an email with product instructions after a customer completes their purchase)
• And recover abandoned carts with reminder emails that encourage customers to complete their purchases

Want some more details? Check out the detailed use cases below.

Build your email list

An email list is a list of people who gave you permission to send them updates and promotions from your business. These people opt in for your newsletter from your website, which means they’re already interested in what you have to offer. Conversions from email campaigns can be as much as 10 times higher than those from social media, so it’s a good idea to start building your email list as early as you can.

Ask customers for approval to send marketing emails during the checkout process by enabling the form in Control panel → Marketing → Newsletters. Customers who opt in to receive marketing emails will be automatically added to a Mailсhimp audience. Customers who don’t opt in will be added as non-subscribers and won’t receive your marketing emails, but their email addresses can still be used for retargeting ads.

To capture potential customers, you can add an email capture popup that will be displayed to visitors in your store. Customize the design, timing, and placement of your email signup form, and publish it in your Ecwid store without any coding.

Send email campaigns

After you export your customer email base to Mailchimp, you’ll be able to send robust email campaigns to your customers and prospects.

• Design an email template that strengthens your brand.
• Promote your products and discount coupons right in your emails
• Use smart targeting options for your messages to reach the right customers (more on this below).

Wanna put your emails on autopilot? No problem. You can set up an automated campaign in Mailchimp.

Once set up, these emails are triggered based on a predetermined event and sent automatically from Mailchimp. For example, a welcome email can be sent to new subscribers when they join your email list.

Quickly add products to emails

Products and variations are exported to Mailchimp to let you insert them right in your email campaigns and your customers — purchase them with just a couple of clicks. Promote your best-sellers, announce new arrivals, special offers, or anything else in between.

Send relevant messages with audience segmentation

Ecwid order data is sent to Mailchimp, so you can target your customers based on their purchase activity: products they bought, the number of orders they made, how much money they’ve spent in your store. Ecwid passes order data for the last six months.

To build a new segment in Mailchimp, create 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 Ecwid store are listed here:

You can amplify a variety of targeting tactics with these settings. Here are some ideas:

• • Reach out to everyone who has purchased a specific product to offer it again when it’s back in stock:

• • Thank your loyal customers with a special offer:

• • Activate inactive customers:

The list can go on depending on your specific needs. Here’s an example of an email that is aimed at activating an inactive customer that you too can use in your store:

Apart from e-commerce filters mentioned above, Mailchimp allows you to build segments by language, location, activity with your previous email campaigns so much more. Make sure to explore all the filters!

Recover abandoned carts

Abandoned carts received in the last six months are synced with Mailchimp, so you can automatically follow up with customers who haven’t completed their purchases to remind them about their orders and close these sales.

How is it different from Ecwid’s own abandoned cart recovery email tool?

Our tool is made for maximum simplicity and automation. You can enable sending automated abandoned cart emails with just a single click. Our predefined setup (the email is sent two hours after the cart was abandoned) and email content, as well as ability to add discount coupons have proven Ecwid abandoned cart emails to be effective. You don’t have to do anything extra to convert your abandoned customers.

However, if you want deeper customization of your email template, sending time, or want to send a series of abandoned cart emails rather than one, Mailchimp is at your disposal.

Run promotions

With active discount coupons synced with Mailchimp, you can embed them into your email templates to convert even more sales.

Uses of discount coupons are endless, but you can get started with a simple discount to every new subscriber. Adding a discount coupon to your welcome email can help you build your list and move potential customers through your sales funnel faster.

To give discounts to all your new email subscribers:

1. Create a discount coupon in your Ecwid store.
2. Create an email popup in Mailchimp.
3. Create an automated welcome email and add your discount code.

Ecwid’s discount coupon system is very flexible: you can create coupons with absolute and percentage discounts, free shipping, or even both at once. Note if you create a coupon that combines a discount and a free shipping, you’ll need to paste it to your email manually as this particular kind of coupon cannot be passed to Mailchimp.

And so much more

With your email list built in Mailchimp and store data synced, you can benefit from all the Mailchimp functionalities which go far beyond email. Run targeted Facebook or Instagram ads to people similar to your customers, do customer surveys, schedule social posts, or even send printed postcards automatically at regular intervals.

How Do I Connect MailChimp to Ecwid?

Ecwid makes e-commerce easy for everyone, and this feature is no exception. Connecting Ecwid and Mailchimp doesn’t require any coding skills.

To get started, you need to be on Ecwid’s Business plan or higher. Your Mailchimp account can be on any pricing plan, including forever free. The feature is currently enabled for Ecwid stores on Instant Sites, WordPress websites, and soon we’re rolling it out to stores created via partners like Wix.

Follow these simple steps:

1. Go to your Ecwid Control panel → Marketing → Newsletters.
2. Click “Connect with Mailchimp”. If you don’t have a Mailchimp account, click “Sign up free” first.
3. 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.
4. Ecwid 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.
5. Finally, enter your site domain name to be able to add an email sign up form.

Great! Now you can send your first newsletter, create an ad, or schedule a social post.

Scroll down that page to add an email form to your store for capturing potential customers and enable requesting customers’ approval for your marketing emails at checkout to add your customers to the email marketing list and comply with GDPR.

That’s it. You’re now set for success in email marketing. Easier than you thought, huh?

Can I Use MailChimp Alternatives?

Are you a fan of a different email marketing tool? No problem. Under Control panel → Marketing → Newsletters, you can export your email contact list in a CSV format and upload manually to any email marketing platform of your choice.