Uncanny Automator | The Blog Pros

February 21, 2024

How to Set Up WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails (+ 3 Alternatives)

Do you want to set up WooCommerce abandoned cart emails?

Around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned by the customers in your online store. By sending abandoned cart emails to these potential buyers, you can improve the customer experience and boost conversions.

In this article, we will show you how to easily set up abandoned cart emails in WooCommerce. We will also show you different ways to reach out to these customers and get their sales.

Set up WooCommerce abandoned cart emails

Why Send WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails to Customers?

When users visit your online store, they usually start adding products to their shopping carts but some of them abandon the items before finishing their purchases. This can happen due to multiple reasons, including high shipping costs, a slow checkout process, or needing to create an account on your website.

However, you can easily recover your abandoned cart sales by sending emails to these potential buyers. These abandoned cart emails will remind customers about the items in their cart and urge them to revisit your WooCommerce store to make a purchase.

It is a cost-effective marketing strategy that can improve your brand perception, strengthen your customer relationships, and increase your conversion rate by up to 30%.

Having said that, let’s see how to easily set up WooCommerce abandoned cart emails, step-by-step. We will also cover abandoned cart SMS, popups, and notifications, so you can use the quick links below to jump to the method you want to use:

Set Up WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails
Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment SMS
Create WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Popups
Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Notifications
Bonus: Use WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

Set Up WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails

You can easily set up automated WooCommerce abandoned cart emails using FunnelKit Automations.

It is the best marketing automation tool for WooCommerce stores that comes with a drag-and-drop builder and pre-built email sequences that you can set up in a few minutes. You can even design your own emails from scratch and design workflows without needing any code.

First, you need to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations plugin. For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: FunnelKit Automations also has a free plan that you can use for this tutorial. However, upgrading to the paid plan will give you access to more features like smart delays, unlimited automation, SMS marketing, and more.

Upon activation, you need to visit the FunnelKit Automations » Settings page from the WordPress admin sidebar and switch to the ‘Cart’ tab in the left column.

Once you do that, check the ‘Enable Cart Tracking’ box. You will not be able to run an automated workflow for abandoned carts until you allow FunnelKit Automations to track the product carts on your website.

You can also configure other settings here, including the waiting period to mark a cart as recoverable, blacklist emails, and GDPR consent.

After that, just click the ‘Save Settings’ button to store your changes.

Next, head to the FunnelKit Automations » Automations page from the WordPress dashboard.

Here, click the ‘Add New Automation’ button in the top right corner of the screen.

This will take you to the ‘Add Automation’ page, where you can select from premade templates that have abandoned cart email examples and workflows.

For this tutorial, we will choose the ‘Abandoned Cart Reminder’ workflow that will send users 3 abandoned cart emails over time.

Choose the abandoned cart reminder template

You will now be taken to a new screen where you can see the trigger, action, and delays for this workflow.

From here, click the ‘Import’ button at the top right corner of the screen to save this template.

Once you do that, an ‘Add Automation’ prompt will open up on your screen.

Here, type in a name for the workflow according to your liking and click the ‘Create’ button.

FunnelKit will now open the template in its automation editor, where you can edit your workflow’s trigger, delay, and actions.

You can even add other actions and delays by clicking the ‘+’ button.

Here, the trigger has been set to ‘Cart Abandoned’, meaning that the automation will start once a customer abandons their cart.

Now, you must click on the ‘Delay’ action to configure its settings.

This will open a prompt on the screen where you can configure the time for your first abandoned cart email.

For example, if you want to send the first email two days after the cart abandonment, then you can type ‘2’ and select ‘Days’ from the dropdown menu.

After that, click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

Add delay time for the action in the workflow

Next, move to the ‘Action’ step in the workflow and click on it to open the prompt.

From here, you can change the subject and text for the cart abandonment email you want to send to your users. You can also use merge tags to add dynamic content like the user’s name and the items in their cart.

Once you are done, click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

Add abandoned cart email content in the action prompt

Next, you can configure the second and third delays and action emails for cart abandonment in a similar way.

Finally, toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’ to activate your automated workflow.

The potential customers who abandoned carts in your store will now be sent these emails after multiple delays.

Here is an automated abandoned cart email example from our testing site:

Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment SMS

Other than abandoned cart emails, it’s also a good idea to send cart abandonment SMS to users. This is because open rates for SMS messages are significantly higher than email marketing, so your messages are more likely to reach your potential customers.

Plus, sending SMS ensures that your messages will be seen instantly compared to other communication channels.

It is super easy to set up WooCommerce cart abandonment SMS with FunnelKit Automations.

First, you need to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations plugin. For details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: You will need the premium plan of the plugin to unlock the Twilio SMS feature and send automated messages to users.

Upon activation, visit the FunnelKit » Automations page from the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Add New Automation’ button.

You will now be directed to the ‘Add Automation’ page, where you will see a list of premade automated workflow templates.

However, since FunnelKit Automations does not have a template for sending SMS messages, you need to click the ‘Start from Scratch’ button.

This will open a prompt on the screen asking you to name your automation workflow.

Simply type in a title and click the ‘Create’ button.

This will open the automation editor on the screen where you have to click the ‘Select Trigger’ button.

The ‘Select an Event’ prompt will now open on the screen. From here, switch to the ‘WooCommerce’ tab and select the ‘Cart Abandoned’ option as your trigger.

After that, click the ‘Done’ button.

Now, click the ‘+’ button in the automation editor.

This will expand the ‘Add Step’ tab, where you must select the ‘Delay’ option.

Once you do that, the ‘Delay’ prompt will open up on the screen. Here, you can configure the time for sending the abandoned cart SMS.

For example, if you want to send the cart abandonment message a week later, then you can select that option from the dropdown menu.

After that, click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

Now click the ‘+’ button in the automation editor again to expand the tab and then choose the ‘Action’ option.

This will open another prompt on the screen where you have to select the ‘Send SMS’ option under the ‘Twilio’ section.

Note: The automation won’t work if you don’t have a Twilio account and phone number. For details on creating an account, you can see our tutorial on how to send Twilio SMS notifications from WooCommerce.

Once you select that option, you can start typing the text message that will be sent to the users once they abandon their carts.

You can also use merge tags to add dynamic content. After you are satisfied, just click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

Finally, toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch at the top right corner to activate the automated workflow.

Now the users will be sent an SMS message a week after cart abandonment from your Twilio phone number.

Save workflow for sending cart abandonment SMS messages

Additionally, we recommend setting up abandoned cart popups on your website.

This method is a bit different from sending emails because cart abandonment popups will be immediately triggered when a visitor adds items to their cart and then attempts to leave your website.

Overall, opting for this method can encourage users to take immediate action and can be highly effective, as popups have a conversion rate of over 30%.

To create cart abandonment popups, you will need OptinMonster, which is the best WordPress lead generation and conversion optimization tool on the market.

It comes with a drag-and-drop builder and premade templates to create popups and banners for your website. OptinMonster even has Exit Intent technology that will only display the popup when a user is about to leave your website.

First, you must visit the OptinMonster website and sign up for an account by clicking the ‘Get OptinMonster Now’ button.

Once you have done that, you must connect the account to your WordPress site using the OptinMonster plugin. For details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, a welcome screen will open up on your website. Here, click the ‘Connect Your Existing Account’ button.

Once you have connected your WordPress site with OptinMonster, you will also have to connect it with WooCommerce.

To do this, visit the OptinMonster » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Auto Generate Keys + Connect WooCommerce’ button.

The WooCommerce and OptinMonster plugins will then be connected to each other.

Auto generate keys and connect WooCommerce

Next, visit the OptinMonster » Templates page from the WordPress admin sidebar.

From here, you can select any of the premade templates to create a cart abandonment popup for your store.

Once you do that, a prompt will open up on the screen, asking you to name your campaign.

Simply type in a name and click the ‘Start Building’ button.

This will open OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder, where you will notice a popup preview on the right with blocks in the left column.

Here, you can add images, videos, CTAs, dynamic content, social media buttons, and more by simply dragging and dropping blocks.

For more detailed instructions, you may want to see our tutorial on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

Once you are satisfied, switch to the ‘Display Rules’ tab from the top and expand the ‘current URL path’ dropdown menu.

This will open up a list of different settings. Now, select the ‘Exit Intent’ option.

After that, you can select the type of device where the popup will be displayed and configure its sensitivity.

Choose the exit intent option as the display rule

Next, choose the ‘Page Targeting’ option from the second dropdown menu on the left. Then, pick the ‘exactly matches’ option from the menu in the middle.

Once you do that, you must add the URL of the product checkout page in the field on the left.

Now, the abandoned cart popup will only be displayed once the visitor starts leaving the checkout page.

Finally, switch to the ‘Publish’ tab from the top and click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings.

The exit intent popup will now be displayed when the visitor tries to leave your WordPress website.

Here is a preview of how the abandoned cart popup will look in your WooCommerce store.

Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Notifications

Finally, another way to reduce cart abandonment is to set up push notifications on your website. These messages will be displayed inside the browser for users who have already left your online store.

Unlike emails or popups, push notifications don’t require you to collect additional user data like email addresses or phone numbers. This means that users may be more likely to opt in to the notifications, but you won’t be able to ask for their contact details.

To send WooCommerce cart abandonment notifications, you can use PushEngage, which is the best push notification service on the market.

PushEngage has a custom-triggered campaigns feature that can send users abandoned cart push notifications. It also comes with powerful features like A/B testing, automatic drip campaigns, and smart opt-in reminders, and supports all devices and browsers.

First, you have to visit the PushEngage website and click the ‘Get Started For Free Now’ button.

This will take you to the pricing page, where you have to select a plan for your online store. Keep in mind that the triggered campaign feature is only available in the Growth plan.

After that, create your PushEngage account and provide website details like your domain name, industry, company size, and more.

Upon account creation, you will then be taken to the PushEngage dashboard, where you must provide your website URL and name.

You also have to add an image that will be used as a site icon in your push notifications.

Once you do that, visit the Campaign » Triggered Campaign page from the PushEngage dashboard.

Here, you need to click the ‘+ Create New Triggered Campaign’ button.

This will open another screen where you will see a list of premade templates by PushEngage.

Go ahead and click the ‘Create’ button under the ‘Cart Abandonment’ template.

Choose the cart abandonment push notification template

You will now be taken to another page where you can start by adding a name for the triggered campaign that you are creating.

Once you do that, click the ‘>’ icon on the right to configure push notification settings.

Edit the cart abandonment push notification template

This will expand the tab and you can start by adding a notification title and message in the prompt.

You will notice that the ‘Notification URL’ and ‘Image URL’ fields will already have variables. We recommend leaving these settings as they are.

When the user sees this notification, they will also see an image of the product they added to their cart in the image section, while the notification URL will direct them to the checkout page.

Upon configuring these settings, switch to the ‘Trigger Settings’ tab from the top.

Here, you will see that the conditional logic for the campaign has already been configured. It will send a push notification to a user once they have added an item to the cart and left your website. The notification will stop displaying once the user is back on the checkout page.

Next, you have to click the ‘Activate Triggered Campaign’ button. After that, you also have to click the ‘Integration Code’ button.

This will open a prompt on the screen displaying multiple code snippets for your website, including the add-to-cart event, checkout event, and goal tracking.

Simply copy these snippets and paste them on your WordPress site. Keep in mind that you will need a developer to fill out these snippets with the variables used on your website.

If you don’t want to hire a developer, then you can also contact the PushEngage Customer Success team, and they will set up the campaign for you.

Finally, click the ‘Activate Autoresponder’ button to store your settings.

Now, the customers who abandon their carts will be sent a cart abandonment push notification.

Here is an example of a cart abandonment notification sent to a user.

As you can see, the notification has a photo of the product and a link to the checkout page.

You can also connect the PushEngage software with your WordPress site to create different kinds of push notifications, including sending notifications upon a sale, successful transactions, and more.

For details, see our tutorial on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site.

Bonus: Use WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

Apart from sending cart abandonment emails, you can also use other automated workflows to increase your WooCommerce sales.

An automated workflow is a sequence of tasks that is executed once an event is triggered on your website. You simply set up the trigger and the action, and the automation will take care of the rest.

For example, you can send automated coupons to bring back users to your website or create personalized email marketing strategies.

You can do all of this using Uncanny Automator, which is the best WordPress automation plugin on the market.

It is super easy to use and can connect your WooCommerce store with over 150 tools like WPForms, Zoom Meetings, Facebook, Twilio, and WhatsApp to create automated workflows.

With Uncanny Automator, you can send emails and SMS messages to users upon a failed transaction, product statuses, coupons, product reviews, and so much more.

You can also create, update, and delete users based on various triggers, like user registration or form submissions.

For detailed instructions, you can see our tutorial on how to create automated workflows in WordPress with Uncanny Automator.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use WooCommerce cart abandonment emails push notifications, SMS, and popups. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page and our expert picks for the best WooCommerce plugins for your online store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Set Up WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails (+ 3 Alternatives) first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 5, 2023

8 Best Zapier Alternatives to Automate Your Website

Are you looking for a Zapier alternative to automate your website?

Zapier is a popular web service that allows you to connect different apps and services to automate workflows. However, you may be looking for an alternative due to pricing, advanced features, ease of use, or more.

In this article, we will share the best Zapier alternatives that can be used to automate your WordPress site.

Best Zapier alternatives for your website

What Is Zapier and Why Use a Zapier Alternative on Your Website?

Zapier is a cloud-based automation tool that lets you connect different apps and services with your WordPress website. It enables users to create ‘Zaps’, which are workflows that trigger one event in one app when another event happens in another app.

For example, you could create a Zap that will automatically add new customer information to your CRM every time someone fills out a form on your website.

Zapeir can connect with many applications, including HubSpot, WooCommerce, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

However, you may be looking for an alternative because Zapier’s free version offers limited Zaps, only supports the English language, does not offer some of the native apps, and is not as affordable as other solutions.

If you have a small business website and need to automate a lot of workflows, then you can use a Zapier alternative that offers affordable pricing and more workflow customization options.

Having said that, here is our list of the best Zapier alternatives that you can use to automate workflows on your website.

1. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin on the market that makes it super easy to create workflows without using any code.

It can integrate with 140+ WordPress plugins and third-party tools like Twilio, Instagram, Google Sheets, and Zoom, making it the best Zapier alternative for your website.

With Uncanny Automator, you can easily set triggers and actions to create a recipe and also use conditional logic to control when and how your automation runs.

To create an Uncanny Automator recipe for your website, just head over to the Automator » Add new page from the WordPress admin dashboard and click the ‘Everyone’ option as the recipe type. After that, click the ‘Confirm’ button.

The Everyone recipes can be triggered by any user, while logged-in recipes can only be activated by users logged in to your website.

Next, type a name for your recipe and choose an integration for the trigger. Keep in mind that the trigger is the event that will start the recipe, and the action is the task that runs after the trigger takes place.

For example, if you want to post a tweet every time a new post is published on your website, then you will have to select ‘WordPress’ as the trigger integration.

This will open a list of WordPress triggers on the screen from where you have to select the ‘A post in a taxonomy is published’ option.

Next, open the ‘Post type’ dropdown and choose the content you want to share on Twitter.

After that, you will have to choose an integration that will perform the action of the recipe. Here, you can choose Twitter as the platform and then connect it to Uncanny Automator by providing your credentials.

Once you’ve done that, choose the ‘Post a status to Twitter’ option from the list of Twitter actions.

For more detailed instructions, please see our tutorial on how to create automated workflows in WordPress using Uncanny Automator.

Pros

It is super easy to use and provides unlimited recipes and actions.
Uncanny Automator has a free version.
It has advanced features, such as delays, scheduling, and user creation.
If you have multiple WordPress sites, then you can also connect them using Uncanny Automator.
It can integrate with popular plugins like WooCommerce, WPForms, and MemberPress.

Cons

The free version allows you to create only a limited number of automations with a limited number of app integrations.

Why we recommend using Uncanny Automator: It is the most powerful Zapier alternative that allows you to create detailed workflows in just a few clicks, is easy to use, and is super cost-effective. We recommend using Uncanny Automator if you have a small business website and need to create a lot of automated workflows.

2. Thrive Automator

Thrive Automator is a powerful and free WordPress automation plugin that allows you to connect your website with 40+ apps. These include Constant Contact, HubSpot, and WooCommerce.

With this plugin, you can create complex workflows to add a customer to your mailing list upon a purchase, create a user account, tag your email subscribers when they post a comment, and so much more.

Thrive Automator also has an easy-to-use interface, amazing customer support, and a list of premade actions and triggers, making it a great alternative to Zapier.

Pros

Thrive Automator is a completely free WordPress plugin.
It allows you to add filters to your automation workflows.
It comes with the conditional logic feature to help create complex automations. This means that the tool checks for certain conditions before performing an action.
Thrive Automator is a part of the Thrive Themes Suite, which is a set of plugins that can improve lead generation and boost conversions on your site. It includes popular plugins like Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, Thrive Quizzes, Thrive Optimize, and more.

Cons

All of the other plugins in the Thrive Themes Suite are paid plugins, meaning that if you want to unlock other features, you will have to buy them.

Why we recommend using Thrive Automator: We recommend picking Thrive Automator if you are on a budget. This tool is super powerful, allows you to create unlimited workflows, integrates with numerous apps, and is completely free.

3. HubSpot Automation

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software that also comes with an automation tool that connects with 47+ apps and platforms.

It is an amazing Zapier alternative that lets you automate repetitive tasks and workflows across your marketing, sales, and service teams.

With HubSpot Automation, you can send automated emails, publish social media posts, update landing pages, assign leads to sales reps, create deals, and send follow-up emails.

Additionally, you can also use HubSpot to create an automated chatbot that can open support tickets, notify customers of updates, and send surveys.

Pros

HubSpot offers a free plugin that you can use to create automated workflows.
It lets you create and manage automation with a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface.
HubSpot has its own built-in CRM, help desk software, a self-service customer portal, form builder, and other powerful marketing tools.

Cons

HubSpot does not integrate with all third-party systems.
Its premium plan can be a bit expensive for some users.

Why we recommend using HubSpot Automation: It has a free version, a drag-and-drop interface, and allows you to integrate with numerous tools, making it a great Zapier alternative. We recommend using HubSpot Automation if you are looking to manage all your marketing and sales tasks in a central place.

4. FunnelKit Automations

FunnelKit Automations is the best marketing automation platform for WooCommerce websites.

If you have an online store, then FunnelKit Automations can act as a great alternative to Zapier by allowing you to easily set up automated email and SMS campaigns for abandoned carts, win back coupons, lead nurturing, purchase anniversaries, and more.

FunnelKit Automations can integrate with over 200 plugins, comes with a drag-and-drop interface, and also offers ready-made email sequences from its built-in library.

Pros

It allows you to create no-code workflows by setting a trigger and action along with conditional logic.
FunnelKit Automations offers A/B testing, contact profiles, broadcast campaigns, email and SMS marketing, and more.
It provides detailed analytics and reports for your automated emails.

Cons

FunnelKit Automations is a paid plugin.
It does not integrate with as many third-party tools as some other automation plugins.

Why we recommend using FunnelKit Automations: This is the go-to Zapier alternative if you have a WooCommerce store. That’s because FunnelKit Automations easily integrates with WooCommerce, connects it with other plugins, and allows you to send automated emails to all your customers.

5. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the best WordPress email marketing service for small businesses that allows you to manage all the emails on your website.

However, it can also act as a Zapier alternative by letting you create automated email sequences to build customer relationships, sell products, remind customers about abandoned carts or anniversaries, and so much more.

Constant Contact can integrate with more than 300 tools, including WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, and Salesforce.

If you are looking for a tool that allows you to create automated workflows for email marketing, then Constant Contact is the best choice.

Pros

With Constant Contact, you can create drip campaigns where a series of automated emails are sent to subscribers over time.
You can also create workflows for event-triggered emails that will be sent to users upon taking a certain action.
The software also offers a list of other tools, including CRM, A/B testing, list-building tools, SMS marketing, social media marketing, and more.

Cons

Constant Contact’s automation interface can be difficult to use for beginners.
It does not offer a free plan.

Why we recommend using Constant Contact: Constant Contact is the best Zapier alternative if you are looking to send automated emails to your users. It will allow you to manage and automate your emails effortlessly.

6. IFTTT

IFTTT is also an amazing Zapier alternative that lets you automate workflows without using any code. It offers a free version, is super easy to use, connects with over 700 services, and also comes with a library of pre-built applets, which are automated workflows.

You can use IFTTT to create WordPress posts from YouTube videos, post new Instagram photos to WordPress, and much more.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to automate WordPress and social media with IFTTT.

Pros

With IFTTT, you can use conditional logic to control how your automation runs.
It offers a number of advanced features, such as loops, delays, and variables.
You can run an unlimited number of workflows with applets.

Cons

Some of IFTTT’s applets can be unreliable and do not work as expected.
Creating a custom applet can be difficult for beginners.

Why we recommend using IFTTT: Overall, IFTTT is a great choice if you are on a tight budget, as its free version has all the features required to create an automated workflow.

7. Make

Make is an automation tool that allows you to create advanced automated workflows for your site.

It is a great Zapier alternative that integrates with over 1000 apps and services, including Gmail, Slack, Twitter, Asana, and more. Make also offers around 100 premade templates that let you set up workflows on your site in minutes.

It is a great choice if you want to use automated workflows for your sales, marketing, HR, and operations teams.

Pros

The tool provides detailed analytics about the performance of your automations.
It is super easy to use and comes with a visual builder to create and manage automations.
It can help you create advanced automated workflows like setting up a new user account and updating product statuses.

Cons

The free version of Make has some limitations.
It reserves priority support for premium plans only.

Why we recommend using Make: We recommend opting for Make if you want to create advanced workflows or use a lot of apps. It is also a good choice to create different workflows for your support, sales, and marketing teams.

8. Pabbly Connect

Pabbly Connect is a popular Zapier alternative that comes with a user-friendly interface and highly customizable workflows.

It offers 1000+ integrations, comes with a visual builder, and even has a library of pre-built automation templates that you can use to get started quickly.

Additionally, Pabbly offers advanced features like automation scheduling, delays, and routers.

Pros

Pabbly offers a free plan.
It can also act as an email marketing platform, form builder, subscription billing, and affiliate marketing platform.
Pabbly provides detailed analytics on the performance of your automations, email campaigns, and subscription plans.

Cons

Its free version has some limitations.
It does not offer any live chat support.

Why we recommend using Pabbly: You should pick Pabbly if you want to create highly customizable workflows, as it comes with pre-made templates, a visual builder, and integrations with over 1000 apps.

Which Is the Best Zapier Alternative for Your Website?

In our expert opinion, Uncanny Automator is the best Zapier alternative for WordPress websites. It has a user-friendly interface, integrates with more than 140 tools, offers a free version, and lets you create unlimited recipes.

However, if you have an online store, then you could pick FunnelKit Automations instead. It is specifically built for WooCommerce and even lets you set up email and SMS marketing for customers.

Similarly, if you only want to send automated emails to users, then Constant Contact and HubSpot Automation are also great choices.

Finally, if you are on a budget, then IFTTT and Thrive Automator are also good Zapier alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions About Zapier Alternatives

Here is a list of some questions frequently asked by our users who are looking for Zapier alternatives.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is a no-code automation tool that integrates with over 4000 apps and allows you to automate tasks such as sending emails, creating new tasks in project management tools, and posting updates to social media.

However, even though Zapier is popular, it is not the only automation tool on the internet.

To create automated workflows, you can also use tools like Uncanny Automator, Constant Contact, Make, Thrive Automator, and Pabbly, which are more reliable, cost-effective, and easy to use.

Why should I use a Zapier alternative?

You might want to use a Zapier alternative because Zapier’s premium plan isn’t affordable for everyone, and its free plan does not offer all the features you will need to automate your workflows.

Additionally, Zapier can also be slow and unreliable, especially when running complex automations.

Which is the best free Zapier alternative?

If you are on a shoestring budget and looking for a free alternative to Zapier, then Thrive Automator is the perfect choice.

It is a free WordPress plugin that is super powerful, has an easy-to-use interface, integrates with 40+ apps, has amazing customer support, and so much more.

Best WordPress Guides for Automating Your Website

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 8 Best Zapier Alternatives to Automate Your Website first appeared on WPBeginner.

November 30, 2023

11 Best ChatGPT WordPress Plugins (Compared)

Are you looking for the best ChatGPT plugins for WordPress?

A WordPress ChatGPT plugin allows you to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into your website. This can provide a more interactive and personalized experience to your users, increasing engagement and traffic. It can also help you generate content and increase your productivity.

In this article, we will share our list of the best ChatGPT WordPress plugins on the market.

Best WordPress ChatGPT plugins on the market

Why Use a ChatGPT Plugin in WordPress?

ChatGPT is a well-known AI chatbot software that is based on the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 language models. It is developed by OpenAI, who is also responsible for software like DALL-E and Whisper.

ChatGPT allows you to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer any questions you may have about a topic.

In simple terms, ChatGPT plugins are WordPress plugins that support integration with the artificial intelligence software. When using the plugin, it will send a prompt to the ChatGPT software and show a response to your query on your website.

For example, you might use the plugin as a chatbot where the responses come directly from ChatGPT. This can increase lead generation by engaging with visitors and telling them about your products or services.

Additionally, if you have an online store, then you can also use ChatGPT plugins to provide 24/7 customer support, improve content quality, or boost the user experience.

Plus, ChatGPT plugins can help you improve your own workflows and boost your creativity. You can generate meta descriptions and post titles, come up with blog post ideas, and more.

Having said that, here is our list of the best WordPress ChatGPT plugins on the market.

1. All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market that comes with an AI title generator via ChatGPT. Its AI title generator tool can generate post titles and meta descriptions for your post with its OpenAI integration.

Aside from AI title generator, AIOSEO offers tons of comprehensive SEO tools to help your website rank higher in the search results. The plugin has features like a link assistant, XML sitemaps, a headline analyzer, FAQ schema, and more.

To integrate ChatGPT with AIOSEO, all you have to do is click the robot icon in the Meta Description or Post Title box in the block editor.

Once you do that, a prompt will open up on the screen, asking you to provide an API key to connect OpenAI with the plugin. To do this, you will need to create an OpenAI account and then generate an API key.

Upon adding the key, simply click the ‘Connect’ button to move on.

AIOSEO can now generate SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions for your post using artificial intelligence.

You just need to click on the ‘+’ button next to a title or meta description to use it, or you can ask the software to generate more ideas.

These headlines are written to contain keywords relevant to your content, which can ultimately increase your click-through rates.

For detailed instructions, you can see our tutorial on how to write powerful headlines using AI.

Pros

All in One SEO has a built-in headline analyzer tool to improve your headlines. It provides data-driven insights and suggestions for creating engaging and click-worthy titles.
It has on-page SEO features to improve website content and titles for search engines.
AIOSEO comes with built-in integrations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
It has a free plan.
It comes with a robots.txt editor, social media integrations, and a redirection manager.

Cons

Some of the features of the plugin are only available in the pro plan.

Why we recommend using AIOSEO: We recommend using AIOSEO because it is the best WordPress ChatGPT plugin on the market. It easily integrates with OpenAI using an API key and generates suggestions for post titles and meta descriptions. It also comes with a WooCommerce integration and other SEO tools that can help your website rank higher.

For more details, you can see our complete AIOSEO review.

2. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin that lets you connect your WordPress site with ChatGPT. It allows you to create comprehensive workflows by connecting two different platforms.

With Uncanny Automator’s ChatGPT integration, you can generate content for your blog posts from a prompt or list of keywords.

With Uncanny Automator, you can use different actions and triggers to create an AI-generated image, social media posts, personalized emails, product descriptions, and answers to customer queries.

The best part about using Uncanny Automator is that it also allows you to connect ChatGPT with other services other than your website, like Facebook, Drip, Zapier, Brevo, Instagram, Google Sheets, and more.

For detailed instructions, see our tutorial on how to create automated workflows in WordPress.

Pros

Uncanny Automator can connect with 140+ WordPress plugins and third-party apps to create automated workflows.
You can use Uncanny Automator and ChatGPT together for email marketing.
It has a free plan.
It has advanced features like delays, scheduling, and user creation.

Cons

The free version allows you to create only a limited number of automations with a limited number of app integrations.

Why we recommend using Uncanny Automator: We recommend using this plugin if you want to connect your ChatGPT account with third-party platforms or plugins. Uncanny Automator is a super powerful tool that you can use to generate content, publish social media posts, send emails, and so much more.

3. WPForms

WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin on the market that comes with a ChatGPT integration. Its ChatGPT integration helps you perform different tasks.

By connecting WPForms and ChatGPT using an automation plugin like Uncanny Automator, you can create smarter forms for your website.

For example, you can make a form that asks for a blog topic and a brief description for the post, and every time you submit the form, ChatGPT will automatically create a blog post for you on that topic.

Other than that, you can use WPForms and ChatGPT to build an outline for your articles and send automated email notifications upon form submission.

Pros

The plugin’s form builder makes it super easy to create and publish forms on your website.
It has a free plan.
You can easily connect WPForms with ChatGPT without using any code.
You can also use WPForms as an AI writing assistant after its integration with ChatGPT because it can generate content for you.
Some of its other features include spam protection, conditional logic, payment gateway integration, geolocation, and more.

Cons

You will have to use an automation tool like Uncanny Automator or Zapier to connect ChatGPT and WPForms.
Some of its premium features are locked in the free plan.

Why we recommend using WPForms: WPForms is the ideal ChatGPT plugin if you want to send automated and personalized emails to users upon form submission. Its integration with ChatGPT can further improve your form quality. You can even use both tools together as an AI writing assistant.

For more details, you can see our complete WPForms review.

4. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is an advanced form builder plugin that can easily integrate with ChatGPT to help you create interactive forms.

It comes with a drag-and-drop builder and premade template that lets you create any type of form you want, including surveys, polls, quizzes, and more.

You can also add a ChatGPT field to your forms so that it will act like an AI assistant and help users through the form submission process.

This field will be able to answer customer queries in real time, generate personalized responses to user questions, provide feedback, and automate tasks based on user input. It will basically guide your users through the entire form-filling process.

Pros

With Formidable Forms, you can create a searchable database for your form entries.
It also comes with a shipping calculator feature that can estimate the total cost of a product you will have to pay with delivery.
Other than the ChatGPT field, you can also use AI templates offered by the plugin to create interactive forms.

Cons

It has limited functionality in the free plan, and its paid plan can be expensive for small businesses.
The ChatGPT field in the form cannot create content for your blog posts.
Formidable Forms has a learning curve and can be difficult to navigate for beginners.

Why we recommend using Formidable Forms: We recommend using Formidable Forms if you are looking for a ChatGPT plugin that can help your users fill out forms on your website. With its built-in ChatGPT field, Formidable Forms adds an AI assistant to your form that can provide suggestions, answer queries, and direct users to suitable options.

5. Thrive Ovation

Thrive Ovation is the ideal ChatGPT plugin if you want to automatically display positive testimonials on your social media platforms.

It is part of the Thrive Suite and is a well-known testimonial plugin that allows you to easily collect, manage, and display testimonials in WordPress.

Once you connect this plugin with ChatGPT, the software will perform a sentiment analysis on each new testimonial submitted on your website.

With the help of an automation tool, ChatGPT will then automatically publish any positive testimonial on your social media platforms. This will help build social proof and encourage potential customers to check out your website.

Pros

Thrive Ovation comes with a drag-and-drop builder and also lets you turn WordPress comments into testimonials.
Using its integration with ChatGPT, the plugin can help drive traffic from social media platforms.
The tool comes with a dashboard where you can see an overview of your testimonials, including the ones that are ready for display, pending approval, or rejected.
It is a part of Thrive Suite, which contains other plugins like Thrive Leads, Thrive Architect, Thrive Theme Builder, and more.

Cons

Thrive Ovation is a premium plugin.
It does not have built-in ChatGPT features. You will need to connect the plugin with ChatGPT using automation tools like Uncanny Automator or Zapier.

Why we recommend using Thrive Ovation: Thrive Ovation is the best WordPress ChatGPT plugin if you want to automatically publish positive testimonials on social media platforms. Upon integration, ChatGPT will run an analysis to find positive testimonials and use an automated workflow to share them on Facebook.

6. AI Engine

AI Engine is a free WordPress plugin that easily connects with ChatGPT to help you generate content for your website.

It is a great choice if you want to use ChatGPT for customer support. This is because the plugin lets you add ChatGPT as a chatbot using a shortcode.

The chatbot can then answer customer queries, solve any minor issues in your services, direct users to your support team, and help you provide support 24/7.

Pros

AI Engine lets you control the structure of your AI-generated blog posts by allowing you to determine the number of sections and paragraphs per section.
It also uses ChatGPT to generate meta descriptions, excerpts, images, product descriptions, and more.
If you have a multilingual website, then you can also use AI Engine for translations.

Cons

The plugin has a bit of a learning curve and can be difficult to navigate.
It relies on ChatGPT to perform most of the functions, which may have occasional outages or downtime.

Why we recommend using AI Engine: We recommend using this plugin if you want to provide customer support. AI Engine comes with premade templates for chatbots and popup models, and it makes it super easy to add chatbots to your site using a shortcode. AI Engine can also act as a writing assistant, making the plugin a good choice for a WordPress blog.

7. AI Chatbot

AI Chatbot is a great free ChatGPT WordPress plugin if you want to add a chatbot to your website.

This plugin easily connects with ChatGPT and shows a chatbot with text responses you created from the WordPress backend. It also displays some FAQs and asks users to provide their email or phone numbers so you can contact them later.

You can also use the AI Chatbot plugin to create a chatbot that collects user feedback for your products, services, or website.

Pros

You do not need to use any code to add a chatbot using this plugin.
Its integration with ChatGPT software is seamless.
The tool can help you build an email list by asking users to drop in their email addresses.

Cons

The plugin cannot be used to produce AI-generated content.
The chatbot is completely reliant on ChatGPT. This means that if the software is experiencing downtime, then the chatbot on your website won’t work either.

Why we recommend using AI Chatbot: Overall, AI Chatbot makes it super easy to add a chatbot that can ask for feedback or help you build an email list for your newsletter.

8. AI Power

AI Power is a free WordPress plugin that connects with ChatGPT to use its content generator, image generator, and audio converter for transcripts.

It also comes with an auto content writer where you just have to provide a prompt or relevant keywords and AI Power will generate content for you.

Additionally, the plugin also offers premade ChatGPT-based form templates, which have two ChatGPT fields that can read a user’s input and provide answers to guide your users through the form-filling process.

Pros

AI Power has a WooCommerce product writer tool that creates product descriptions, titles, and marketing materials for your WooCommerce store.
It also comes with built-in SEO features to help your website rank higher. It can even integrate with tools like AIOSEO, Rank Math, and Yoast SEO.
AI Power can build and integrate chatbots on your website.

Cons

It is a complex plugin not suitable for beginners.
AI-generated content or chatbot responses used by AI Power can sometimes be misinterpreted by users, leading to confusion.

Why we recommend using AI Power: Overall, AI Power is an ideal ChatGPT plugin if you want to generate content using AI. It is also a good choice for WooCommerce stores because its product writer tool lets you generate product descriptions and titles in just a few minutes.

9. AI Post Generator

AI Post Generator is a free WordPress plugin that uses ChatGPT to generate high-quality content for your website.

It is a great choice if you run a WordPress blog because the tool makes it super easy to create relevant blog posts for your audience.

The plugin saves you a lot of time by automatically creating a new post as a draft once you enter a prompt or relevant keywords into the field.

Pros

AI Post Generator can improve your WordPress SEO by using keywords and phrases that are relevant to your target audience. It can also generate meta descriptions.
The plugin can generate content in any language, making it an ideal choice for a multilingual blog.
The plugin automatically finds and adds relevant images and heading tags to your posts.

Cons

It offers limited customization and personalization options for AI-generated content.
If you use this plugin for generating blog posts on your site, then you must verify the originality of the content first. This is because AI-generated content may contain similarities to existing text.

Why we recommend using AI Post Generator: We recommend using this plugin if you have a WordPress blog and want to publish content on your website daily.

10. AI ChatBot with ChatGPT

AI ChatBot with ChatGPT plugin comes with a built-in chatbot that uses ChatGPT to help you write custom code for your website right from your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin can also be used to generate content for your blog, while its chatbot can answer customer queries, showcase FAQs, and ask for user feedback on your website.

Additionally, the plugin can also use a text-to-speech response feature to give a more authentic customer support experience to the users on your WordPress website.

Pros

The plugin allows you to automate workflows for your chatbot.
It also comes with customizable options for the bot and lets you connect it to your website’s knowledge base.
The plugin uses ChatGPT to analyze user behavior and then provides personalized recommendations for products, services, or content.

Cons

The plugin’s chatbot’s responses can sometimes oversimplify complex issues with products or services.
The plugin sometimes provides incorrect information. We recommend double-checking any content you produce using this tool.

Why we recommend using AI ChatBot with ChatGPT: It is a great ChatGPT plugin for providing customer support for minor issues. Using this plugin will provide free time to your support members that they can use to focus on more complex problems.

11. AI Mojo

AI Mojo is a free WordPress plugin that uses artificial intelligence to generate content, images, and forms for your website.

The plugin can easily create content for your blog posts, social media posts, or product descriptions once you provide a prompt or keyword.

Acting as a great AI writing assistant, AI Mojo can also convert audio files for easy text transcription, optimize your content for search engines, and make GPT forms that generate personalized responses.

Pros

AI Mojo has a library of pre-made prompts for a variety of content formats.
It lets you create chatbots for your website.
It can convert your existing website data into formats compatible with AI models.

Cons

The plugin does not offer great customer support.
You will need an API key to connect ChatGPT with the plugin.
It offers limited customization for AI-generated content and images.

Why we recommend using AI Mojo: The free plugin is a great choice if you want to add chatbots and generate AI content for your blog.

Which Is the Best ChatGPT WordPress Plugin?

In our expert opinion, All in One SEO is the best WordPress ChatGPT plugin on the market. It offers seamless integration with the AI software and makes it super easy to generate post titles and meta descriptions for your blog posts.

However, if you are looking for a plugin that allows you to connect ChatGPT with WordPress as well as other third-party platforms, then Uncanny Automator is the best option. The plugin can integrate with over 140 tools and automate workflows with ChatGPT.

If you have a WordPress blog and just want to easily generate content, then WPForms should be your go-to choice.

Similarly, if you are looking for a plugin that supports a ChatGPT integration in forms and allows the software to help with form submissions, then we recommend using Formidable Forms.

But if you are on a shoestring budget, then AI Engine and AI Power are great choices, too, because they use ChatGPT to generate content, images, and even a chatbot.

Frequently Asked Questions About ChatGPT WordPress Plugins

Here is a list of some frequently asked questions asked by our readers about using ChatGPT and OpenAI in WordPress.

What is the best ChatGPT SEO plugin for WordPress?

All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market that also supports ChatGPT integration.

The plugin acts as a writing assistant and uses ChatGPT to create titles and meta descriptions for your blog posts. AIOSEO also optimizes your content so that it can rank high in search engine results.

Does ChatGPT generate SEO-friendly content?

ChatGPT can generate SEO-friendly content for your website by adding relevant keywords and phrases, writing concise titles and meta descriptions, structuring content, and avoiding keyword stuffing.

However, we still recommend proofreading all the content that you create using ChatGPT because the AI tool sometimes uses existing content on the internet, which can be interpreted as plagiarism. This can hurt your website rankings.

Best Guides for Using AI in WordPress

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The post 11 Best ChatGPT WordPress Plugins (Compared) first appeared on WPBeginner.

November 10, 2023

Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Email Marketing Automation

Do you want to learn about WordPress email marketing automation?

Email marketing automation in WordPress allows you to save time by automating tasks, creating drip emails, and using tools to grow your email list.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk you through WordPress email marketing automation with tips, tricks, and tools that you can use.

WordPress email marketing automation guide for beginners

What is Email Marketing Automation in WordPress?

Email marketing automation is a marketing technique that allows businesses to send pre-written emails automatically when user activity matches a trigger.

For instance, you can send an automated email when a new user registers on your website or signs up for your email list.

Instead of manually writing emails, you only write them once and set up triggers. After that, when a trigger is matched, the email goes to the user automatically without you taking any action.

80% of businesses that utilize email marketing use automated emails.

Not only does it save time, but it also improves the effectiveness of your emails. You can use automation to send personalized emails based on user activity, which is proven to be 320% more effective.

Here are some more examples of when you can use automated emails to boost your business.

Send an email when a user completes a purchase.
Send notification emails when a new post is published.
When a user abandons a shopping cart, send a reminder.
Sending drip email campaigns to specific users.

We will be going over a lot of topics in this guide, so you can jump to any of them by clicking one of the links below.

Why Automate WordPress Email Marketing?
How to Set up Email Marketing Automation in WordPress
Make Sure Your WordPress Emails Can be Delivered
Sending Automated Emails via Constant Contact
Automate WooCommerce Emails Using FunnelKit Automations
Automate WordPress / WooCommerce Emails Using Uncanny Automator
Ideas for Email Marketing Automation with Examples

Why Automate WordPress Email Marketing?

Automating your WordPress email marketing allows you to be more efficient and effective. Following are some of the top reasons that make email automation compulsory for your marketing strategy.

Automation Saves Time by Reducing Repetitive Tasks

By applying email automation, you can reduce the repetitive manual tasks, saving you time that you can spend on growing your business.

Instead of writing emails and manually sending them, you can write your emails once and then set up triggers to automatically send to your users.

Makes Your Emails More Personalized

Email marketing automation also lets you make your emails more personalized for each user.

Instead of sending the same email to each user, you can send them more relevant messages based on their activity on your WordPress website.

Personalized automated emails have a much higher open rate of 70.2% and have 152% higher click-through rate than manually sent and non-personalized emails.

Email providers like Constant Contact use merge tags so that you customize emails to use the person’s first name, for example. This can make them more likely to open the email than if it were addressed to the overall list.

Convert Leads into Customers and Boost Sales

Don’t let customers and potential leads wait for a reply to hit their inbox. You can set up automated emails to let customers know that you got their information and will get back to them.

For instance, you can send an automated email to users who fill out the contact form on your website. By setting up a simple automation to send a confirmation message, you can build trust with your visitors.

Similarly, you can set up automated emails for users who sign up or fill out a form on specific landing pages on your website.

You can reach out to customers who abandoned carts on your online store and convert them into customers.

Offer discounts to customers on special occasions like holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and more.

Using automation, you can set up email drip campaigns to stay in touch with users and create personalized email marketing funnels that drive more sales.

Let’s look at how to apply email marketing automation on your WordPress website and what tools you’ll need to do that.

How to Set up Email Marketing Automation in WordPress

There are multiple ways to set up email marketing automation in WordPress.

You can combine different tools and platforms to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Let’s look at the best ways to set up automated emails on your WordPress website.

Make Sure Your WordPress Emails Can be Delivered

First, you would want to ensure that the emails sent from your WordPress website aren’t in the spam folder.

You need to use SMTP to send out your emails to ensure that.

SMTP (Secure Mail Transfer Protocol) is the industry standard for sending emails. It uses proper authentication (username and password) to ensure that an authorized sender sends emails.

This is where you’ll need WP Mail SMTP.

It is the best WordPress SMTP plugin on the market and enables you to easily send WordPress emails using SMTP.

Note: There is also a free version of WP Mail SMTP, which is fully functional and works with any SMTP or email service provider.

For details, see our article on how to set up WP Mail SMTP with any host or SMTP service.

Choose an SMTP Email Service Provider for Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are messages sent to users as part of their interaction with your website, such as registration confirmation or online store receipts.

Remember, transactional emails are not handled by an email marketing service MailChimp, as they are not part of marketing campaigns, promos, or newsletters.

For example, when new users make an account on your website, they are sent an email to verify their email address and set a password. This is a transactional email.

Similarly, a WooCommerce store may send users their order details and shipping notifications.

PRO TIP: You can use a business email address to send these emails to avoid being sorted into your customers’ junk mail or spam folders.

However, some business email service providers don’t allow you to send many emails and may flag your account for misusing the service.

For that reason, you need to sign up for a transactional email service provider to ensure email deliverability for those essential email messages.

We recommend using SendLayer. It is the best SMTP service provider for WordPress and WooCommerce users.

SendLayer specializes in sending transactional emails at scale with high deliverability.

You can connect to SendLayer API using the WP Mail SMTP plugin, which comes with built-in integration so the two can work together seamlessly.

Once connected, all your WordPress emails will be sent using SendLayer API, ensuring higher delivery and scalability for your transactional email messages.

Now that you have ensured that your WordPress emails are delivered to the user’s inbox. Let’s look at the best email marketing automation tools you can use with WordPress.

1. Sending Automated Emails via Constant Contact

An email marketing platform allows you to send your users promotional and marketing email messages.

There are a ton of email marketing services out there, but not all of them have email marketing automation features.

We recommend using Constant Contact. It is one of the best email marketing services for small businesses.

It comes with professionally made email templates, email list growth tools, customer segmentation, and powerful marketing automation tools.

You can also set up drip campaigns to automatically send out emails to your users with a pre-scheduled frequency.

This allows you to onboard new customers and drive them to conversions without doing any manual work.

To get started, visit the Constant Contact website to sign up.

Once you have signed up, follow the instructions in our article on how to create an email newsletter to set up your first email list.

After creating your email list, you can set up your automation campaigns by visiting the Campaigns page and clicking on the ‘Create’ button.

This will bring up a popup where you can select from different campaign types.

Click on Email Automation to continue.

From here, you can select single-step automation or multi-step automation.

Single-step automation sends just a single email, such as a welcome email.

Multi-step automation lets you create a series of emails that are automatically sent to your subscribers. This way, you can let them know about your products and services, send special offers, and more.

In this tutorial, you’ll create a multi-step automation for when new subscribers join your email list. Go ahead and select the ‘A contact joins a list’ option.

Next, you will have to enter a name for your campaign.

Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button.

Constant Contact will then ask you what activity will trigger the email.

For instance, the drip series is automatically triggered when a user joins your email list, opens an email, clicks a link, or buys a product.

You can use the default ‘Contact joins a list’ option as the trigger type. Then you can choose the email list you created earlier.

Go ahead and click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done.

Creating Emails for Your Drip Campaign

Now that you have set up the campaign, you can start adding emails you want to send.

Simply click on the Create New Email button to write your first email.

This will bring up the email wizard where you can select a template, write your email, and save it.

Follow the on-screen instructions to write your email. After that, you can select the time delay between emails by clicking on the Edit link above the saved email.

Repeat the process to create more emails by clicking on the Add to Series button at the bottom.

For more details, see our complete tutorial on how to send automated drip notifications in WordPress.

You can also learn how to send automated emails in WordPress.

2. Automate WooCommerce Emails Using FunnelKit Automations

Automation is the easiest way to boost sales on your eCommerce store.

If you run a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails.

These help them get order confirmations, track their order status, get invoices, and find more information about your online store.

You can customize and automate these emails or create new campaigns using FunnelKit Automations, a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation. It is a sister product to FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels), a powerful sales funnel builder for WooCommerce.

FunnelKit Automations is the must-have toolkit for any WooCommerce store, membership website, or other businesses.

It allows you to automate lead generation, manage contacts, and recover abandoned carts. This helps you boost productivity and sales for your business.

First, you need to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once you have activated the plugin, go to the FunnelKit Automations » Automations (Next Gen) page and click on the Add New Automation button.

Next, the plugin will ask you to choose a template.

These templates are pre-made automation for the most popular campaigns. You can also start from scratch if you want.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will be using the ‘Post-Purchase sequence’ template.

Click on the template to open and preview it.

You’ll see this automation’s trigger, delay, and action on the preview screen.

It may not be exactly what you have in mind. For instance, you may want to run this automation for purchases above a certain amount.

Don’t worry. You’ll be able to edit it as much as you like later.

For now, click on the Import button at the top right corner of the screen to start using this template.

You will be asked to provide a name for this automation. You can enter anything that helps you easily identify it and click the Create button.

FunnelKit will now import the template and open it in the automation editor.

You’ll see the trigger that will launch this automation at the top. Followed by the delay and the action it will perform.

You can click the Add (+) button between these steps to add a condition, delay, goal, action, jump, or exit the automation.

Don’t forget to edit the Action step. For this campaign, the action is to send an email to the user.

Click on the ‘Action,’ and it will open up. From here, you can edit the email you’ll send to the user.

You can use Merge Tags to add dynamic elements to your email message.

Once you are finished editing, click on the Save and Close button to exit the action editor.

Finally, click on the toggle at the top to switch from Inactive to Active. This will activate the automation on your website.

Feel free to create as many automations as you need.

FunnelKit works with all essential WordPress plugins. Plus, you can connect it to Zapier and perform actions on more than 5000+ other web apps.

3. Automate WordPress / WooCommerce Emails Using Uncanny Automator

Research shows that users are more likely to engage with a marketing email when it is personalized and timely.

You can automate this by sending users targeted messages based on their activity on your WordPress website.

For instance, you can recommend products to customers who have ordered a specific product.

Now, what if you also wanted to create a one-time coupon for that customer, send customer data to your CRM, or remind a sales staff to give them a call?

This is where Uncanny Automator comes in.

It is one of the best WordPress automation plugins, allowing you to create automated workflows for your WordPress website.

It works with popular email marketing platforms, WordPress contact form plugins, eCommerce platforms, and more.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the free Uncanny Automator plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to the Automator » Add New page to create your first recipe.

In this tutorial, we’ll send an automated email to WooCommerce customers who have placed an order, asking them to leave a review.

You’ll be asked to select which type of recipe you want to create. You should choose ‘Logged-in users’ and then click the ‘Confirm’ button.

This will bring you to the Edit recipe page.

First, provide a title for your recipe. It could be anything that helps you identify this recipe.

Next, you need to choose an integration where your trigger will run. Depending on the plugins installed on your website, this list may change.

Select WooCommerce to continue.

The Automator will now show you a bunch of WooCommerce triggers that you can use to launch your recipe.

For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll be using ‘A user completes, pays for, lands on a thank you page for an order with a product.’

After choosing a trigger, you can click on the highlighted conditions to change them if needed.

For instance, instead of all products, you can click on ‘a product’ to choose a specific product

Once you are finished, click on the Add Trigger button.

Next, you will create an action. This is the task that you want to perform as the result of the trigger you set above.

Clicking on Action will show you a bunch of integrations that you can use. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll be using the ‘Emails’ integration.

Next, it will show you the actions you can perform for your selected Integration.

Since we selected Emails, there is only one action available which is to send an email.

This will bring up the email editor.

From here, you can fill out all the fields like the ‘from’ address, recipient email address, subject, and more.

Click on the star (*) next to a field to insert a dynamic value.

For instance, you can add the customer’s billing email for the ‘To’ field, use the product title in the subject, or use the customer’s name to greet them.

Want to add a delay between the trigger and the action?

Click on the Delay button at the top of the action.

After that, you can choose a delay time.

For the sake of this tutorial, we are setting the delay to 1 week (7 days).

Setting a delay makes your email more effective.

For instance, in this scenario, you would want to set enough delay to ship the product and give the customer a couple of days to try it out.

Once you are satisfied with your recipe, don’t forget to switch to the ‘Draft’ toggle to ‘Live.’

Your recipe is live and will run the next time a customer purchases.

To learn more about the Uncanny Automator and all the cool things you can do with it, see our tutorial on how to create automated workflows for your WordPress website.

Ideas for Email Marketing Automation with Examples

Wondering how best to use email marketing automation on your WordPress website? Following are some examples of automated emails that can give you ideas for your own emails.

1. Automated Welcome Email Example

You can send an automated welcome email to new customers or users who sign up for your mailing list.

Here is how MonsterInsights, a popular WordPress plugin, welcomes new users.

Not only does the email greet users, but it also points them to make the best out of their purchase with helpful links.

2. Automated Abandoned Cart Email Example

Did you know that over 60-80% of the users who add products to their carts don’t complete the purchase?

This phenomenon is called abandoned cart sales. It shows that users are interested in the product, but something prevents them from placing the order.

Here is an example of an abandoned cart email from Pacsun. It uses urgency by mentioning that the products may run out of stock.

According to OptinMonster, abandoned cart emails have about twice the open-rate of traditional marketing emails.

3. Automated Sale Email Based on User Interest

Another common type is the automated sale emails sent to the users based on their interests.

Here is an example from the Emirates informing users about more choices that they can avail.

4. Automatically Send Win Back Emails

You can schedule automated emails to users who haven’t logged in or made another purchase.

Here is an example from Buffer. Notice how they inform users what new features users are missing out on.

We hope this article helped you learn about WordPress email marketing automation and how to use it to grow your business.

You may also want to see our pick of the best WordPress coupon code plugins or see our guide on how to grow your business online with practical tips.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Email Marketing Automation first appeared on WPBeginner.

November 9, 2023

How to Use AI to Boost Your Marketing (13 Expert Tips)

Are you wondering how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help market your WordPress website or online store?

Generative AI technologies are changing the way we work, and many website owners are looking for new ways to use them.

In this article, we will share some expert tips on how to use AI for marketing.

How Can AI Be Used on WordPress Websites?

Artificial intelligence technologies like OpenAI show a lot of promise for small business owners, freelancers, online stores, and anyone who works online.

Using a simple chat interface, you can ask the AI to answer questions, generate content, and repurpose existing content. You can also automate tasks on your WordPress website that normally need human intelligence by using AI plugins.

For example, you can use AI in WordPress to detect spam comments, improve SEO, translate your website content, identify plagiarized content, scan for malware, and much more.

There are also a ton of ways you can use it to market your products and services.

With that being said, let’s take a look at some expert tips on how to use AI for marketing.

This article will cover a lot of topics, so you can click on any of the links below to jump to a section that you are interested in:

Come Up With a Catchy and Memorable Business Name
Generate Content Marketing Ideas
Prepare and Research Your Articles
Write Draft Blog Posts
Come Up With Titles and Meta Descriptions
Optimize Your Content for Search Engines
Improve the Grammar and Readability of Your Content
Write Compelling Email Copy
Create Blog Post Summaries for Social Media
Generate Ad Copy and Product Descriptions for Your Online Store
Write Better Landing Page Copy
Create Images for Your Blog, Social Media, and More
Optimize the Copy on Your Popups
Bonus: Provide Excellent Customer Service and Support

1. Come Up With a Catchy and Memorable Business Name

Marketing starts early. Choosing a catchy and memorable name for your business is an important first step. It plays a crucial role in your blog’s branding, marketing, and SEO.

Of course, you’ll want to use your business name in the address for your website. So, you need to make sure the domain name is available.

This is where artificial intelligence can help.

All you need to do is visit our free Business Name Generator tool. Simply type in a few words related to your business and then click the ‘Generate’ button.

The Free WPBeginner Business Name Generator Tool

Our tool will use AI to choose dozens of suitable business names. It will then automatically check to make sure the domain name is available before presenting you with a convenient list.

If you like one of the names, then you can simply click the ‘Buy’ link to register the domain name with Domain.com or get it with a Bluehost hosting package.

2. Generate Content Marketing Ideas

Now that you’ve chosen a business name and set up your WordPress website or online store, you can start planning your content marketing. This means the interesting and helpful blog content that you will write to attract new visitors to your website.

Brainstorming content ideas can be hard work. But it’s surprising how quickly AI can generate a list of fantastic blog post ideas.

Rather than typing prompts directly into ChatGPT, you can use Uncanny Automator to automate the process from your WordPress website using a recipe like this:

Automator and OpenAI content ideation recipe

This will let you type your prompt into a WPForms form on your website, such as ‘Give me 5 fun blog posts on pediatric dentistry’. The prompt will be passed along to OpenAI, which will generate content ideas for you.

These ideas can then be sent anywhere you like, such as a Google spreadsheet.

You can learn how to combine AI and automation to come up with blog post ideas in our guide on the best ways to use OpenAI on your WordPress website.

3. Prepare and Research Your Articles

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be very useful when planning and researching new blog posts. That’s because they have learned and stored vast amounts of information by going through what is publicly available on the internet.

They can use this information to answer your questions. The trick is knowing what is possible and using specific prompts that give you the results you need.

For example, if you ask the simple question, ‘How do you care for a parrotfish?’, then ChatGPT will generate a long list of guidelines. But it’s often helpful to use more specific prompts.

For instance, if you are planning to write different blog posts on the specific pieces of equipment needed to care for a parrotfish, then you can use this prompt instead:

‘Create a list of the most popular equipment needed to care for a parrotfish along with the pros and cons of each one.’

This will give you much more helpful information. You will get a list of tools and equipment you can write about on your WordPress blog, such as an aquarium tank and filtration system. You will also learn some pros and cons of each tool that you can talk about in the article.

Once you choose a topic to write about, you can even generate an outline of everything that should be covered in the blog post. Here is an example question:

‘Write an article outline for the following topic: live rock and decorations for a parrotfish.’

For even more ideas, just see our detailed guide on the best ChatGPT prompts for bloggers, marketers, and social media.

4. Write Draft Blog Posts

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT can also write full blog posts. However, we recommend you treat these as first drafts and spend some time checking and improving the content before you publish them.

While the articles are well written, the information provided may be out of date. Also, some of the information could be inaccurate or completely false.

You can create content using prompts on the ChatGPT website. For example, you can ask it to ‘Write an essay about black holes at a 6th-grade reading level.’

Here are a few detailed ChatGPT prompt examples you can use for inspiration when creating content for your blog:

‘Write an article on the following topic: [TOPIC]. The article should be at least [NUMBER] words in length. Use a persuasive tone and pretend to be an expert on the topic.’
‘I want you to write a motivational blog post about overcoming [FEAR/FAILURE/CHALLENGE].’
‘I want you to pretend to be a topic expert and compare [ITEM 1] vs [ITEM 2] with pros and cons. I need you to show that [ITEM 1] is better than [ITEM 2] and persuade the reader to have a positive feeling about [ITEM 1].’
‘Write an article based on the topics covered in the following article: [COMPETITOR URL]. Make the article more comprehensive than the URL provided by adding details that the source URL has missed or didn’t cover. Answer the most frequently asked questions about the topic at the end of the article.’

However, you may prefer to generate AI content directly from your WordPress admin area. You can do that by installing and activating the GPT3 AI Content Writer plugin.

You can learn how to use this plugin, as well as the pros and cons of using AI to write blog posts, in our guide on how to write content using AI content generators in WordPress.

5. Come Up With Titles and Meta Descriptions

One of the most important things to do when writing blog posts is to come up with irresistible headlines and descriptions. This will encourage more users to click on your articles, which will grow your visitors, conversions, and sales.

You can ask generative AI services like ChatGPT to help with post titles and descriptions. Here is an example of an effective prompt:

‘Suggest at least 5 SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions for the following blog post: [POSTURL]. Use a persuasive and intriguing tone.’

However, you can also do the same thing directly from your WordPress dashboard using a plugin.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and uses artificial intelligence to help you optimize your content, such as generating post titles and meta descriptions for your content.

You can connect AIOSEO to OpenAI and generate title ideas for your post. The plugin will display 5 post title suggestions that use up-to-date best practices for writing effective headlines.

AIOSEO OpenAi SEO post title suggestions

You can learn the best way to do this in our guide on how to write powerful headlines using AI.

It can also generate SEO-friendly meta descriptions in a similar way. Simply click the robot icon next to the ‘Meta Description’ option. Then, All in One SEO will come up with 5 different meta descriptions to pick from.

6. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

Besides helping you write effective titles and meta descriptions, there are some other ways AI can help optimize your content for search engines.

For example, you can improve SEO on your website by adding more links to your own content. These are called internal links, and they help search engines discover your content and rank them higher in search results.

However, if there are a lot of posts on your WordPress website, then you may not always be aware of all the relevant articles you can link to. This means that you are missing out on opportunities for your posts to rank higher in search.

This is another area where AI can help. We recommend using All in One SEO because it includes a unique Link Assistant feature that lets you add links to your old and new content without having to open up the post.

You can learn more in our ultimate guide on internal linking for SEO.

7. Improve the Grammar and Readability of Your Content

WordPress does not offer its own grammar and spellcheck tool. You may be worried that your marketing content contains embarrassing grammar and spelling errors or that it’s difficult to read.

Luckily, there are many WordPress plugins and online tools to help check your grammar and improve your writing. Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that automatically checks spelling and grammar as you write and highlights the errors so that you can fix them.

There is a free Grammarly browser extension for all major web browsers. This will give you instant proofreading for your posts, emails, social media, Google Docs, Slack, and more. There is also a pro version that will help you with tone, formality level, and word choices.

To see how to use Grammarly in detail, please see our guide on how to check grammar and spelling mistakes in WordPress.

You can also use ChatGPT to check your spelling, grammar, and more. Here’s an example ChatGPT prompt for proofreading an article:

‘I want you to act as SEO editor and copywriter. I need you to proofread and analyze the following text and optimize it for the focus keyword. I also need you to correct any grammar mistakes you find in the article. Ask me to provide you with the article text and focus keyword.’

8. Write Compelling Email Copy

ChatGPT can write draft emails or improve existing ones in seconds. You can use it when you are responding to questions from your customers, writing email newsletters, or reaching out to potential clients.

Simply ask the AI to write an email for you, giving it as many details as necessary, like this:

‘Write a 300-word marketing email promoting a Black Friday sale on limited edition clothing.’

You can even specify the tone that should be used in the email:

‘use a persuasive tone and pretend to be an expert on the topic.’
‘use a sympathetic and kind tone.’
‘use a professional and trustworthy tone.’
‘use a casual and conversational tone.’

Alternatively, you might have already written an email, but you want to polish it to sound more effective and professional before you send it out. You can use a ChatGPT prompt like this:

‘Fix this email. Write it as someone with a charismatic personality in perfect English. Use extremely professional and concise language. Also, give at least three samples to use as the email subject. [EMAIL TEXT]’

Promoting your blog posts on social media is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. But it can be challenging to write blog post summaries that make people want to see more of your content.

Social media summaries need to be the correct length, accurately summarize the post’s contents, and use compelling language that will encourage clicks.

That’s where artificial intelligence can help.

In our guide on the best ways to use OpenAI on your WordPress website, we show you how you can combine ChatGPT with Uncanny Automator to automatically create and post effective summaries with hashtags to social platforms.

For example, here’s a screenshot of an Uncanny Automator action that sends a complete blog post to OpenAI and generates a summary that can be shared on Twitter.

The next step would be to get Uncanny Automator to send the summary, complete with hashtags, to WhatsApp. This will let you review and edit the tweet before you publish it.

Alternatively, Uncanny Automator could just post the summary directly to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

For more inspiration, you can see our guide on how to create automated workflows in WordPress with Uncanny Automator.

10. Write Ad Copy and Product Descriptions for Your Store

If you have an online store, then you already know how much work it can be to create descriptions and ad copy for all of your products.

ChatGPT can help you do this quickly and easily. You just need to use the right prompts. Here are some examples that you can modify to suit your own needs and store.

Writing product descriptions and short descriptions:

‘I want you to pretend that you are an eCommerce SEO expert who writes compelling product descriptions. I will provide you with one product title and I want you to come up with three distinct content sections for product descriptions, and each section should have its own headline.’

‘I want you to pretend that you are an eCommerce SEO expert who writes compelling product descriptions. I will provide you with one product title and I want you to come up with a short product description of between 250-300 characters.’

Writing ad copy for your products and services:

'I want you to act as a professional copyrighter with experience in writing high-converting Facebook ads. I want you to write Facebook ad copy for the following products/services: [PRODUCTS/SERVICES]. Produce ad copy that is between 100-150 words, with an attention-grabbing headline and a strong call to action. I want you to research the potential target audience and optimize the ad copy so that it appeals to that particular target audience.’

You can even use ChatGPT to help plan your content marketing strategy and calendar:

'I want you to act as my social media manager promoting [PRODUCTS/SERVICES]. I need you to provide me with a two-week content calendar for Facebook posts that are highly engaging and generate emotional responses from the readers. Add one post for each day, using hashtags and emojis.’

You might also want to see our guide on how to add a short product description in WooCommerce.

11. Write Better Landing Page Copy

When you are running a marketing or advertising campaign, you can use a dedicated landing page to get more conversions and sales.

The simplest way to create a landing page is using SeedProd. It is the best page builder on the market and comes with more than 180 professionally designed templates, including pages that are designed to help you get conversions.

How to create a landing page in WordPress with SeedProd

We take you through the process step-by-step in our guide on how to create a landing page with WordPress.

Now, you will need to write the copy for the landing page. You can create written content within seconds by using the right ChatGPT prompt:

'I want you to pretend to be a copywriter specializing in writing landing page copy for better SEO rankings and higher conversions. I need you to write the landing page copy for [PRODUCT]. I want you to start with an intriguing headline to captivate the target audience followed by a call to action button. Below that I want you to add three content sections with different headings each targeting a specific keyword for the product. I need you to end the landing page copy with a FAQ section answering at least 5 customer questions about the product.’

Once you have added the copy to the landing page, you can also use ChatGPT to generate call-to-action ideas:

'I want you to come up with 5 effective call-to-action button ideas based on the contents of the following URL: [LANDING PAGE URL].’

Images make your content more interesting and improve the user experience on your WordPress blog and social platforms. If you can’t create your own artwork or take professional photos, then you might consider paying for stock images or using royalty-free images. However, these graphics can look generic.

Luckily, you can use AI. DALL.E 2 is an artificial intelligence tool made by OpenAI that can create unique images for your website and social media.

You can see some of the recent images it created when you sign up for a free account.

To create your own image, just type in a text description of what you want. If you are out of ideas, then simply click the ‘Surprise Me’ button to see examples of some of the prompts you can use to generate an image.

You can make life even easier by using Uncanny Automator to automate the process of creating a new DALL.E 2 image and pulling it into your blog post.

You will find instructions in our guide on how to use AI to generate images in WordPress.

13. Optimize the Copy in Your Popups

OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation and popup plugin that you can use on your WordPress site. It offers powerful features that can help you increase sales, grow your email list, and get more leads.

There are lots of different professionally designed templates included in the app. This makes it quick and easy to create your lead forms using the drag-and-drop builder.

This plugin also has a new feature called Smart Suggestions AI. It takes the text you added to your campaign’s popup and asks ChatGPT to suggest improvements.

You will be given a list of alternatives to your copy. You can select your favorite version or ask for the tool for further variations.

When you click the ‘Select’ button next to one of the variations, it is added to your popup.

Note: At the time of writing, this feature is being beta-tested.

Bonus: Provide Excellent Customer Service and Support

After all your marketing efforts, potential customers have arrived on your website or online store. But they might still have some questions about your products and services before they are ready to buy.

As users reach out to you via email, help desk, and chat, it’s more important than ever to interact with them effectively. Luckily, artificial intelligence can help you provide excellent customer service and support.

This is where you can use OpenAI’s emotional intelligence. It can perform sentiment analysis by identifying the mood of your customer’s feedback as negative, neutral, or positive.

This can be useful for flagging negative feedback and prioritizing message urgency. If you address negative feedback quickly, then you will keep your customers happier.

You can start to unlock the real power of AI by combining it with automation. With Uncanny Automator, you can use a negative response as a trigger for any action you like, such as notifying your team or creating a ticket in your help desk software. You can even have OpenAI automatically draft a reply.

See our guide on how to automate customer support with AI sentiment analysis for details.

You can also use artificial intelligence within a chatbot. It can automatically chat with your customers and answer their questions using the answers you provide, letting you offer 24/7 customer support.

For example, chatbots can ask questions about a customer’s preferences and suggest suitable products or help customers with making a payment. They can also explain how to install software updates, guide users through common technical issues, and much more.

For step-by-step instructions, see our guide on how to add a chatbot in WordPress.

Expert Guides on Using Artificial Intelligence

Now that you’ve read our tips on how to use AI for marketing, you may want to see some of our other guides on using artificial intelligence with your WordPress site:

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to use AI for marketing. You may also want to see our guide on how to build an email list or our expert picks of the best email marketing services for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Use AI to Boost Your Marketing (13 Expert Tips) first appeared on WPBeginner.

September 12, 2023

How to Optimize the Customer Journey for WooCommerce Store

Are you looking to improve the customer experience in your online store?

When you take time to understand your customers’ needs, you can improve their journey from first discovering your site to making a purchase. By optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and boost profits.

In this article, we will show you how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store, from beginning to end.

What Is a WooCommerce Customer Journey?

‘Customer journey’ refers to a customer’s entire experience when they visit your WooCommerce store, including all of their interactions with your brand.

Optimizing the customer journey involves understanding each stage and ensuring that the customer has a seamless and enjoyable experience throughout.

These are the five stages of the WooCommerce customer journey:

Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
Loyalty stage: Build long-term relationships with customers through excellent customer service, personalized recommendations, and loyalty rewards.

In short, you should simply look at your online store from your customer’s point of view and then make it awesome.

How to Optimize the Customer Journey for Your WooCommerce Store (12 Tips)

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store.

We will share actionable tips on how you can improve the customer journey at each stage. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of our tutorial:

Build Customer Awareness
Help Customers Consider Your Products
Help Customers Complete Their Purchases
Provide Great Customer Service
Build Customer Loyalty

Build Customer Awareness

Here are some tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the awareness stage.

1. Understand How Your Customers Find You

The first thing you need is to see the journeys your users take before they make a purchase in your online store. This is where customer tracking can help.

The best way to set up WooCommerce customer tracking in Google Analytics is using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress and has a User Journey addon that can help you plan how to improve the user journey in your online store.

You can learn how to install the MonsterInsights plugin and addon in our guide on how to track user journeys in WooCommerce.

After that, you can see the path each customer took before buying your product. You get to view the pages they visited, where they clicked, and how much time they spent on a page.

This is really useful information to better understand your customers. You can see which product categories are performing the best and where customers are leaving your store during the purchase process.

Using the data, you can then fix these issues and optimize your site for more conversions. For example, you can use the tips in our guides on how to convert WooCommerce visitors into customers and how to make a high-converting sales funnel.

2. Make Your Store More Visible Online

It’s important to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products and solutions that you offer.

Improving SEO involves writing SEO-friendly product titles and descriptions, using product categories and tags, adding alt text to product images, and much more.

We recommend using All in One SEO because it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is used by over 3 million websites. It will help you to optimize your entire store for SEO and get found by more customers.

You will find step-by-step instructions in our guide to WooCommerce SEO made easy.

Help Customers Consider Your Products

Here are some tips for optimizing the customer journey in your WooCommerce store during the awareness stage.

3. Design an Eye-Catching Product Page

When a visitor clicks on a link to your website on Google or Facebook, you want to give a good first impression. You can do that by creating product pages and landing pages that are optimized for sales.

This is where SeedProd comes in. It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and even completely custom WordPress themes.

SeedProd's professionally-designed templates

SeedProd comes with dozens of ready-made templates that are already optimized for higher conversions. Plus, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that you can use to customize your landing pages.

SeedProd also includes a WooCommerce integration that allows you to add eCommerce elements to any page.

For example, you can display featured products that you want to upsell, product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and more.

An Add To Cart button on an online store

You can see how easy it is to use SeedProd in our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product pages.

4. Make It Easier for Customers to Find Products

You can also customize your WooCommerce product search results to help your customers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

By default, WordPress and WooCommerce have a limited search function. That’s a problem because if your customers can’t find what they are looking for, then they may not come back to your online store.

We recommend using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites.

Add Custom Fields and Taxonomies to the Search Engine

We show you how to use this plugin to give your customers the best product search in our guide on how to customize the WooCommerce product search results page.

You may also want to learn how to enable search by product SKU in WooCommerce.

5. Keep Your Visitors Coming Back With Push Notifications

Push notifications are automated messages that show up in your customers’ browsers even after they have left your WooCommerce store.

You can use drip campaigns with multiple push notifications over time to promote products, build a relationship with your customers, increase sales, and get visitors to return to your store.

The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.

Push notification abandoned cart example

We take you through the whole setup process in our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

6. Show Off Your Positive Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can make your business seem more trustworthy and encourage people to buy from your online store.

But collecting, managing, and formatting customer reviews takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why we recommend using a customer review plugin to add different types of reviews to WordPress.

Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro allows you to show reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google, and TripAdvisor. That way, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.

Example of customer reviews using the Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro plugin

For more details, see our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Help Customers Complete Their Purchases

Next, you will want to help customers get through your checkout and buy your products. Here are our tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the decision stage.

7. Improve Your Checkout

You can easily personalize the purchase experience in your WooCommerce store using FunnelKit, a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin.

For example, it comes with a One-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.

You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout for increased conversions.

FunnelKit lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.

We have written a detailed guide on how to create a custom WooCommerce cart page that’s full of ideas for how to personalize your shopping cart for more conversions.

8. Show Custom Offers to Your Customers

On average, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy the products. This means that if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.

Often when a customer has added a product to their shopping cart, they will need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. This often leads to cart abandonment.

That’s why we recommend using OptinMonster. It is the best WordPress lead-generation software and has an Onsite Retargeting feature that can help reduce cart abandonment.

It allows you to create beautiful popups, countdown timers, slide-in forms, and more to nudge users in the right direction.

For example, OptinMonster can tell when a customer is about to leave your website and display a popup offering free shipping or a discount before they do.

You can learn how to grab your customers’ attention with targeted messages at just the right time in our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup.

Provide Great Customer Service

After customers have bought items from your WooCommerce store, you will want to give them great customer service to keep them coming back. Here are some tips for optimizing the service stage of the customer journey.

9. Follow Up With Your Customers

When running a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails. These emails help them get order confirmations, track their order statuses, get invoices, learn about how to return a product, and find more information about your online store.

By default, the design and layout of emails sent by WooCommerce are plain and generic. When you customize these emails, it helps to build trust with your customers, boost brand awareness, and get them to return to your store.

You can set up smart, automated follow-up emails and workflows using FunnelKit Automations, which is a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation.

It includes a growing library of pre-built WooCommerce email templates that are proven to get results. And you can use the visual email automation builder to make any changes that you need.

What makes FunnelKit Automations really powerful is the custom goals-driven email automation builder. It shows you in-line analytics for each email.

For example, here is a screenshot of a workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer’s first order.

Autonami Marketing Automation Email Analytics for WooCommerce

For more details, you can see our guide on how to customize your WooCommerce emails.

10. Engage With Customers in Real Time

As your online store grows, it’s important to provide good customer service. This leads to repeat sales, which means more profits for your business in the long run.

One way to do that is to add live chat to your website. This will let you interact with the people who visit your website, answer their questions, and solve their problems in real time. This can get you more sales and encourage existing customers to stay loyal to your brand.

The easiest way to add a live chat feature to your website is by using LiveChat Inc. It is one of the best live chat solutions for WordPress, and we use it on our own OptinMonster site.

The LiveChat WordPress plugin is free, although you will need to buy a paid subscription to the LiveChat service.

Another option is to automate live chat by using Chatbot.com, the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills to use it.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to add live chat to your WooCommerce store.

Build Customer Loyalty

Finally, it’s important to turn your users into long-term and happy customers. Here are a few ways to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for the loyalty stage.

11. Reward Loyal Customers

Creating a loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.

You can give customers points for buying products and services, but also for creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, and spending over a certain account.

It’s super easy to create a WooCommerce loyalty program using the Loyalty Program for WooCommerce plugin. It allows you to set up a loyalty program in just minutes and reward customers for buying products, leaving customer reviews, and more.

You can also inspire loyalty to your brand by:

Adding a points system that lets customers earn a reward like a coupon or discount.
Adding gamification so that your customers are rewarded after they take certain actions on your website, like leaving a product review, posting a comment, or buying a product.
Creating a WooCommerce contest to boost loyalty and engagement.

12. Automate Your Store and Focus on Your Customers

There’s a lot to keep track of when running an online store. Luckily, you can automate tasks to save time and money so you can focus on your customers while growing your business.

For example, you can use automation tools and plugins to send SMS messages to your customers, automate your payment processes, use social proof to increase conversions, automatically display your best product reviews, and much more.

You can see our complete list of tips by visiting our guide on the best WooCommerce automations to increase sales.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for your online store. You may also want to see our guide on how to add wholesale pricing to WooCommerce, or our expert picks for the best WooCommerce WordPress themes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Optimize the Customer Journey for WooCommerce Store first appeared on WPBeginner.

September 11, 2023

How to Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites

Do you want to share users and logins between multiple WordPress sites?

Sharing customer, member, or visitor information between multiple sites can improve the user experience, by allowing them to log into multiple sites with the same account. It can also save you a ton of time if you need to add employees, students, or other users to several sites.

In this article, we will show you how you can share users and logins between multiple WordPress websites.

Automatically share users and logins between multiple WordPress sites

Why Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites?

If you have multiple websites, then you may want to share users and login information between them.

This can save your visitors time and effort since they only need to complete the user registration form once. For example, you might have a WordPress blog and a website where you sell online courses.

If someone purchases a course from your blog, then you can automatically add them to the site that has the learning management system (LMS). The user can then log into the LMS and start working on their course, without having to register using their email address, username, and other information.

If you’re a WordPress development agency or you work on multiple client sites, then you may need to manually create several accounts for each developer, tester, and other staff member. Instead, you can save time by registering each person once and then sharing login information between all the client sites.

With that in mind, let’s see how you can share users and logins between WordPress websites.

How to Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites

The best way to share users and login information is by using Uncanny Automator. It’s the best WordPress automation plugin and helps you create automated workflows that can save you a ton of time and effort.

When it comes to connecting several sites, many people assume you need to set up a WordPress multisite network. However, it’s often easier to use webhooks. These are bits of code that allow different tools and apps to share information in real time.

After installing Uncanny Automator, you can use webhooks to share information between WordPress websites, including user accounts and login details.

To start, you’ll need to install Uncanny Automator on the website where users will create their original account. We’ll call this the ‘source’ website.

You’ll then need to install Uncanny Automator on every website that should receive data from the source site.

Finally, you’ll use automation recipes and webhooks to send user information from the source to all the other websites that need this information.

With that in mind, let’s walk through the steps in more detail.

Add Uncanny Automator to the Source Website

The first thing you need to do is install and activate Uncanny Automator on your source website. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: There is a free Uncanny Automator plugin that lets you automate many common tasks and comes with 300 automation triggers and actions. However, we’ll be using Uncanny Automator Pro because you need it to use the ‘A user is created’ trigger.

Upon activation, you’ll be asked to install the free version of Uncanny Automator core. The free plugin has limited features, but it’s used as the base for the Pro version.

With that done, you need to head over to Automator » Settings and enter your license key.

The Uncanny Automator automation WordPress plugin

You can find this information under your account on the Uncanny Automator website.

After entering the key, click on the ‘Activate License’ button.

Create a New Automation Recipe

Upon activation, you’re ready to create automated workflows in WordPress. Uncanny Automator calls these workflows ‘recipes.’

You’re going to create a recipe that sends information to a webhook, every time a user registers with your WordPress website.

To get started, simply head to Automator » Add New. Uncanny Automator will now ask whether you want to create a ‘Logged-in’ recipe or an ‘Everyone’ recipe.

Logged-in recipes can only be triggered by logged-in users, but anyone can trigger ‘Everyone’ recipes. With that being said, select ‘Logged-in’ and then click on ‘Confirm.’

Creating a new automated workflow in WordPress

You can now give this recipe a title, by typing into the ‘Title’ field.

This is just for your reference, so you can use anything you want.

How to share login information between multiple WordPress websites

Add Triggers and Actions to the Automated Workflow

Each recipe in Uncanny Automator has two parts called Triggers and Actions.

A trigger is any event that starts the automated workflow, such as adding new users and authors to your WordPress blog. Actions are the tasks the recipe will perform, such as sharing information with another website, blog, or online store.

To start, you’ll need to set the trigger by choosing an integration.

Uncanny Automator supports many popular WordPress plugins including WPForms, WooCommerce, and OptinMonster. The options you see may vary depending on the plugins you’ve installed.

To get started, select ‘WordPress’ and then click on ‘A user is created.’

How to share user information between multiple blogs or websites

Next, you need to tell Uncanny Automator what it should do when the recipe gets triggered.

To do this, click the ‘Add action’ button.

Sharing data between WordPress websites using a webhook

Uncanny Automator will now show all the different integrations you can use in the action.

To send data to a webhook, click on ‘Webhooks.’

How to create user accounts automatically using Uncanny Automator

This adds a new dropdown menu.

Here, select ‘Send data to a webhook.’

Sending data to a WordPress webhook using Uncanny Automator

You’ll now see a new section where you can set up the webhook.

For now, scroll to the ‘Body’ section.

Sharing usernames and emails between multiple websites

Here, you need to specify the data Uncanny Automator should pass to the receiving WordPress blogs or websites. As an example, we’ll show you how to share the user’s email address, first name, and username. We will not be sharing the user’s password via Uncanny Automator.

Instead, Uncanny Automator will generate a random temporary password. Later in this guide, we’ll show you how to send an email containing a password reset link, so users can easily create their own password.

Pro Tip: It is best practice to use a unique password for every account. For more on this topic, please see our ultimate WordPress security guide.

To go ahead and share the user’s email address, click on the field under ‘Key’ and type in ‘Email.’ You’ll be using the key in your webhook, so make a note of it.

Retrieving the user's email address from a webhook

Under ‘Data Type,’ choose ‘Text’ if it isn’t already selected.

Now, click on the asterisk next to ‘Value.’

Getting data from a webhook using an automation plugin

This opens a dropdown with all the different data you can share. For example, you might share the person’s username, first name, and last name.

To share the user’s email address, click on ‘Common’ and then select ‘User email.’

Adding dynamic tokens to an automated WordPress workflow

You’ll typically want to share additional information, such as the user’s first name and last name.

To share more information, go ahead and click the ‘Add Pair’ button.

Adding additional key/value pairs to an Uncanny Automator workflow

Then, type in a key, select the data type, and choose a value from the dropdown menu by following the same process described above.

For example, in the following image, we’re sharing the email, first name, and username.

Adding key/value pairs to an automated workflow

This recipe is almost complete, but you still need to type in the webook’s URL. To get this link, you’ll need to set up Uncanny Automator on the website that will receive the data.

With that being said, leave the source website open in a background tab, and open a new tab.

Receive User Login Information using a Webhook

In the new tab, log into the website, blog, or WooCommerce store that will receive the user information and login data. You can now install and activate the Uncanny Automator plugin by following the same process described above.

With that done, it’s time to create a recipe that’ll retrieve the data from the webhook, and add it to a new user account.

To get started, head over to Automator » Add New. In the popup that appears, click on ‘Everyone’ and then select ‘Confirm.’

You can now type in a title for the automated workflow.

Once again, this is just for your reference so you can use anything you want.

How to receive data from a webhook on your website or blog

Under ‘Integrations,’ select ‘Webhooks.’

In the dropdown that appears, select ‘Receive data from a webhook.’

This adds a new section, with the ‘Webhook URL’ already filled in. In a later step, you’ll add this URL to the source website.

For now, scroll to the ‘Fields’ section. Here, you’ll need to configure all the information you’ll retrieve from the webhook. These are simply the key/value pairs you created in the first automation recipe.

Under ‘Key,’ type in the exact key you used for the first piece of information. If you capitalized ‘Email’ earlier, capitalize it here, too.

Adding keys to a WordPress website or blog

After that, open the ‘Value Type’ dropdown and choose ‘Text.’

To configure the next key/value pair, click on ‘Add Pair.’ You can now simply repeat these steps to add all the key/value pairs.

With that done, click on ‘Save.’

Set the User Data in Uncanny Automator

If you’ve been following along, then Uncanny Automator will now share the user’s email address, username, and first name with this new website.

As we already mentioned, the recipe will create a password at random, so you’ll need to give visitors an easy way to reset their password.

The easiest way is by sending an email containing a link to your password reset page. You can also include other useful information, such as the person’s username, a link to your website, and your contact information.

To get started, click on the ‘Add action’ button.

Adding actions to an automated recipe in Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator will now show all the different integrations you can use.

Go ahead and click on ‘Emails.’

In the dropdown that appears, select ‘Send an email.’

This adds a new section with some settings already filled in. For example, by default Uncanny Automator will send all messages from your WordPress admin email. It will also use your site name as the ‘From name.’

Automatically send emails using an Uncanny Automator recipe

To change any of these settings, simply delete the default value.

Then, either type in the value you want to use instead, or click the asterisk and choose a token from the dropdown menu. These tokens will be replaced with real information when the recipe runs, so they’re a great way to show personalized content to different users.

Changing the default email automation settings

Your next task is getting the user’s email address from the webhook.

To do this, find the ‘To’ field and then click on its asterisk.

Adding dynamic tokens to an automated workflow

Next, click to expand the ‘Common’ section.

When it appears, click on ‘User email.’

How to share logins and user accounts between multiple websites

Uncanny Automator will now show a popup, explaining that you need to specify where the user information will come from.

In the popup, click on ‘Set user data.’

Settings user data in an automation workflow

Now, if you scroll up you’ll see a new ‘Actions will be run on…’ section.

You want to create a new user account every time the recipe runs, so select ‘New User.’

You now need to map each field to information retrieved from the webhook. Some of these fields are mandatory, such as the username and email address, but others are optional such as the display name.

To get started, simply find the first field where you want to map some data, and then click on its asterisk button.

In the dropdown, click to expand the ‘Receive data from a webhook’ section.

You can now choose the information that you want to show in this field. In our images, we’re retrieving the user’s email address from the webhook.

Simply repeat these steps for each field where you want to use the visitor’s information. Just remember to leave the ‘Password’ field empty, so that Uncanny Automator generates a new password at random.

By default, Uncanny Automator will create each new user as a subscriber. If you want to give them a different role, then open the ‘Role’ dropdown and choose an option from the list.

For more on this topic, see our beginner’s guide to WordPress user roles and permissions.

Finally, you can tell Uncanny Automator what to do if there’s already an account for this username or email address. Since you don’t want to create duplicate accounts, click on the ‘Do nothing’ radio button.

With that done, click on ‘Save.’

Create a Password Reset Email

You’re now ready to create the email that Uncanny Automator will send to your users.

To get started, scroll to the ‘Send an email’ section and find the ‘To’ field. You can now click on its asterisk button and select ‘User email’ from the dropdown menu.

Adding an email address to an automated workflow

When that is done, scroll to the ‘Subject’ field.

Here, you can type in any plain text that you want to show in the subject line. You can also personalize the email subject using tokens that Uncanny Automator will replace with genuine user data.

Creating a personalized subject line using dynamic tokens

To insert a token, select the asterisk button and then click to expand the ‘Receive data from a webhook’ section.

You can now choose the token you want to use, such as the person’s username, first name, or last name. In this way, you can create a personalized subject, which may improve your email open rates.

How to create a personalized email subject

When you’re happy with the subject line, it’s time to create the email’s body copy.

Similar to the subject, you can type plain text directly into the editor, or use tokens to create a personalized message. For example, if you’ve retrieved the user’s first name from the webhook, then you can address them by name.

How to automatically email users on a website, blog, or online store

You’ll also need to include a password reset link, so the user can create their own password and keep their account safe.

To include this link, simply click on the asterisk and start typing ‘User reset password URL.’

Adding a password reset URL to an automated email

When the right option shows up, click to add it to the message.

When you’re happy with how the email is set up, click on the ‘Save’ button.

Automatically send an email using Uncanny Automator

With that done, you’re ready to make this automated recipe live.

Simply scroll up and click on the ‘Draft’ toggle so that it shows ‘Live’ instead.

Connect Multiple WordPress Websites Using a Webhook

In the ‘Trigger’ section, find the ‘Webhook URL.’ Just be aware you may need to click to expand this section, in order to see the webhook URL.

The final step is adding this URL to the first recipe you created on your source site. To do this, copy the URL and then switch back to the recipe on your original website.

In this tab, scroll to the ‘Actions’ section and find the empty ‘Webhook URL’ field. You can then go ahead and paste the URL into this field.

Connecting multiple websites using a webhook

As soon as that’s done, the source website is ready to share user login data and information.

To make everything live, just click on the ‘Draft’ toggle so that it shows ‘Live’ instead.

At this point, you have two live Uncanny Automator recipes on two separate websites.

Now, every time someone creates an account on the source website, Uncanny Automator will share their information with the second website. The user will also get an email with a password reset link.

Do you want to share users and login information with more websites?

Then simply repeat the steps above to set up Uncanny Automator on more websites. In this way, you can easily share user data with an unlimited number of WordPress blogs, websites, and online marketplaces.

Making Sure Your WordPress Email Is Being Sent Reliably

Sometimes, users may not receive your emails as expected. This is because many WordPress hosting companies do not have the mail function configured properly.

To prevent their servers from abuse, many hosting companies even disable the mail function completely. This can be a big problem, as your users won’t receive information about how to create their passwords and access their accounts.

Luckily, you can fix this easily by using WP Mail SMTP. This plugin lets you send your WordPress emails through a reliable SMTP platform which is configured specifically to send emails like SendLayer, Gmail, and Outlook.

For more details, please see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email.

We hope this article helped you learn how to automatically share users and logins between multiple WordPress sites. You may also want to check out our guide on how to create a file upload form in WordPress, or see our expert picks for the best membership plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites first appeared on WPBeginner.

September 7, 2023

Google Meet vs Zoom: Which Is Better for Your Business?

Are you looking for the best video communication service for your business?

The right conference call software will make it easy to communicate with co-workers, partners, suppliers, clients, and more. This can help you be more productive, reach your goals, and build stronger relationships even across big geographical distances.

In this article, we will compare Google Meet vs Zoom to help you decide which video chat software is right for your website.

Why Should Your Business Use a Video Communication Service?

With the rising trend of remote working, many teams no longer work in the same building. If you are a big company, then you may even have staff in multiple countries.

This can make it difficult to collaborate and build relationships with co-workers. While you could communicate using email, phone calls, or call center software, there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction.

That’s where video chat software comes in.

These services can help people to communicate effectively and build successful business relationships, even when they are in completely different locations.

Even if you work alone, conference call services are an easy and flexible way to communicate with partners, suppliers, clients, interview candidates, and more.

When all your contacts are using the same service, it’s easier to set up meetings, send invites, manage attendees, and share and record important meetings.

However, with so many tools on the market, it can be difficult to find the best software. For example, if you are looking for unlimited video meetings, Microsoft and Salesforce integrations, and business text messaging, then Nextiva is a great choice.

Meanwhile, if you want video chat that integrates with top services such as Gsuite, Dropbox, and Microsoft, then RingCentral is one of the most feature-rich business phone and online meeting systems on the market.

There are also plenty of tools that offer free plans, including Google Meet and Zoom.

In this Google Meet vs Zoom guide, we are comparing these two popular tools to see which is right for your business. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the feature you want to compare:

Overview – Google Meet vs Zoom
Price Comparison – Google Meet vs Zoom
Ease of Use – Google Meet vs Zoom
Cross-Platform Support – Google Meet vs Zoom
Text Chat and Channels – Google Meet vs Zoom
WordPress Integrations – Google Meet vs Zoom
Professional and Community Support – Google Meet vs Zoom
Google Meet vs Zoom: Which Is Better For Your Business?
Alternatives to Google Meet and Zoom

Overview – Google Meet vs Zoom

Even if you are already using software like a virtual business phone number app, the right video communication service can help you run a successful business.

That being said, let’s start with an overview of these two popular conference call services.

Google Meet – Overview

Google Meet is video chat software that’s part of the Google Workspace platform.

The Google Meet web conferencing service

It’s essentially an enhanced version of Google Hangouts that’s designed specifically for business owners. Google Meet is a fully web-based service, so you don’t need to install any software to use it.

To try the service for yourself, simply head over to the Google Meet website and click on ‘New Meeting’. You can then select ‘Start an instant meeting’ to launch a test meeting and try the Google Meet features for yourself.

Creating a new Google Meet online video meeting

Zoom – Overview

Zoom is a popular online video conferencing and meeting tool that allows you to set up an online conference call simply by sharing a link.

Zoom may be easy to set up, but it’s also packed with advanced features that can make your meetings more productive. These include searchable transcripts, instant messaging, screen sharing, and collaborative note-taking.

Price Comparison – Google Meet vs Zoom

When choosing business tools, it’s important to find a service that fits your budget. Some video conferencing plans also put limits on the call duration and the total attendees.

When deciding whether a service is good value for money, it’s important to take these factors into consideration. With that in mind, let’s compare the price for Google Meet and Zoom.

Google Meet – Price Comparison

Anyone with a free Google Account can create a video meeting and invite up to 100 participants for a maximum of 60 minutes.

If you want to meet for longer than an hour, then you will need to upgrade to Google’s Business Starter plan ($6 per user, per month, with a one-year commitment) or higher. All of Google’s paid plans allow you to meet for 24 hours, which should be enough for most businesses.

The Business Starter plan limits you to 100 attendees, so if you want to invite more people, then you will need to buy a Business Standard plan ($12 per user/month, one-year commitment), which allows you to invite 150 participants.

Need to invite even more people? Google’s Business Plus lets you run 500-participant video meetings for $18 per user/month if you buy a one-year plan. Meanwhile, the Enterprise Plan allows you to invite 1000 participants to a video meeting.

All the paid plans come with a custom business email address, Gmail Business email, phishing and spam protection, US or international dial-in phone numbers, and a digital whiteboard.

You will also get Chat Team messaging and Drive Secure storage. However, the amount of storage you get will vary based on your plan.

If you upgrade to Business Standard or higher, then you will also get access to noise cancellation, the option to record meetings and save them to Google Drive, appointment booking pages, Cloud Search Smart search, and advanced security features.

Zoom – Price Comparison

Like Google Meet, Zoom has a free plan that allows you to invite up to 100 attendees. However, you can only meet for 40 minutes, compared to the 60 minutes allowed by Google Meet’s free plan.

The zoom video conferencing pricing page

If you need to meet for longer than 40 minutes, then all of Zoom’s paid plans allow you to run 30-hour meetings. While this is longer than the Google Meet plan, it may not be required unless you run unusually long meetings or livestream virtual events and conferences.

Unlike Google Meet, the cheapest paid plan (Pro, priced at $15.99 per month, per user) still limits you to 100 attendees. If you want to invite more than 100 people, then you will need to upgrade to Business (19.99/month/user), which allows 300 attendees.

If you want to invite over 300 people, then you must contact Zoom and discuss upgrading to their Enterprise plan.

If you upgrade to a Pro or higher plan, then you will get access to an Essential Apps package. This is a package of third-party apps that Zoom has curated to make your meetings more productive. It includes apps that allow you to take notes, create a visual agenda, get personalized meeting reports, and create automated workflows.

The Business plan introduces some powerful extra features, including single sign-on and managed domains. You can also add your own branding, which is useful if you are a freelancer, designer, or developer who regularly uses Zoom to chat with clients.

If you want to make voice calls, then both Business Plus and Enterprise come with Zoom Phone, which allows you to make secure voice calls across all supported devices.

Winner – Google Meet

For running short meetings with 100 or fewer attendees, both the free Zoom and free Google Meet plans are great options. However, if you want to run longer meetings with over 100 attendees, then you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Generally, Zoom’s plans are slightly cheaper than the Google Meet equivalent. However, all of Google’s paid plans include the Google Workspace bundle of business and personal productivity tools and a secure business email.

This gives Meet a big advantage over Zoom, especially if you are a new business that needs a full suite of productivity tools and a professional email address.

If you are already using the Google apps, then it also makes sense to choose Google Meet since it works seamlessly with the other Google tools.

With all that in mind, the paid Google Meet plans do have a slight advantage over Zoom, even if both free plans represent great value for money.

Ease of Use – Google Meet vs Zoom

Choosing easy-to-use tools can save you a ton of time. This leaves you free to focus on more important tasks, including growing your business.

Here is how the two video conferencing software options compare for user-friendliness.

Google Meet – Ease of Use

Google Meet aims to make the user experience as effortless as possible. You can visit the Google Meet website in any supported web browser and start a meeting with just a few clicks.

If you have already accepted a Meet invite, then you can click on the event in your Google Calendar. This will open a popup with a ‘Join with Google Meet’ button.

Another option is to click on the ‘Meet’ button inside your Gmail account.

As you can see, it’s very easy to create or join a meeting, especially if you are already using Google tools.

Creating a Google meeting from the Gmail email interface

Google Meet also has a pre-meeting ‘waiting room’, where you can toggle the camera and microphone on and off. You can also check the sound and video quality and change the settings before joining the meeting.

Google Meet’s settings are very simple, with just a few options. You can change the microphone, speakers, and camera that Google Meet uses and tell Google to log you out of meetings automatically if no one joins after a few minutes.

During meetings, you will find a row of buttons at the bottom of the screen where you can access some basic settings, send emojis, raise your hand to ask a question, and perform other basic tasks. You can also enable closed captions, which is great for accessibility.

To invite other people, simply share the link or dial-in number that Google Meet creates for you automatically.

If you want to schedule a team meeting, then just create a new event in Google Calendar. Then, click on the ‘Add Google Meet video conferencing’ button.

How to create a meeting using the Google Meet video chat service

This creates a meeting link automatically.

With that done, just click on ‘Add Guests’ and type in the name or email address of every contact you want to invite.

Adding guests to an online conference or webinar

As you can see, Google Meet is designed with simplicity in mind.

Most of the time, the video conference software works out of the box, and you can schedule meetings with just a few clicks. However, this ease of use does mean that Google Meet lacks some of the more advanced features you get from platforms like Zoom.

Zoom – Ease of Use

When it comes to ease of use, the Zoom experience is very different depending on whether you are using the online client or the desktop app.

The Zoom online client isn’t particularly user-friendly compared to the Google Meet experience. For example, if you want to schedule a meeting, then you will need to fill out a form.

Creating a new Zoom meeting using video chat software

However, the desktop app is much easier to use.

You can schedule a meeting or create an instant meeting with the click of a button.

You can also easily share your screen or join a meeting by typing in the meeting ID or link.

Before you join a meeting, you will get a chance to enable or disable the audio and video. However, unlike Google Meet, there’s no ‘waiting room’ where you can preview how the video feed will look before joining the main meeting.

Joining an online conference call using Zoom

No matter whether you are using the desktop app or the online client, Zoom’s settings are much more detailed and in-depth compared to Google Meet.

This does mean there’s a steeper learning curve, and non-techy users, in particular, may struggle with some of Zoom’s more advanced features.

However, Zoom’s comprehensive settings do mean the tool is far more flexible and powerful compared to Google Meet. For example, with the right Zoom settings, you can share a second webcam, which can be useful if you run webinars, demonstrations, or virtual classrooms.

Zoom can even recognize gestures and translate them into a corresponding meeting reaction. For example, you can trigger the thumbs-up emoji by putting your thumb up to the camera.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Zoom’s settings can be a bit overwhelming and confusing at first.

Winner – Google Meet

When it comes to ease of use, Google Meet definitely has the edge, particularly if you already use Google’s services. You can start a meeting instantly from the apps you are already using, including Gmail and Google Calendar.

If you already have a Google account, then getting started with Meet feels effortless. The default settings are also a good fit for most users, so Google Meet often works out of the box.

If you download the Zoom desktop app, then you will get a much better experience compared to the online client, and you will also have a ton of advanced features to explore.

However, if you are simply looking for click-and-go video chat software, then Google Meet is the clear winner.

Cross-Platform Support – Google Meet vs Zoom

A good video conferencing solution should always be within easy each, no matter what device or web browser you are using. This is particularly important if you regularly work from different places or give employees the option to work from home.

That said, let’s see how Google Meet and Zoom stack up in terms of the devices and operating systems they support.

Cross-Platform Support – Google Meet

Much like Google’s other web-based tools, Google Meet runs completely in the web browser. It supports Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari.

This means you should have no problems joining a meeting from your desktop computer, assuming you have a good internet connection and one of the major web browsers.

If your browser doesn’t support Google Meet, then you can still dial in using a phone number or PIN that Meet creates automatically.

If you regularly have video calls on your smartphone or tablet, then you can download the Google Meet app for iOS or Android. This app has a similar user interface to the desktop version, which allows you to join and create meetings with just a few taps.

The Google Meet online video chat interface

Cross-Platform Support – Zoom

Unlike Google Meet, Zoom has a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It may take longer to set up compared to Google Meet, but the desktop app provides a much better user experience compared to the Zoom online client, so it’s well worth the effort.

If you don’t want to install the app, then the web client supports Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Chromium Edge. There’s also a mobile app for Android and iOS.

Winner – Zoom

No matter what device you are using, you should have no problems accessing Google Meet or Zoom. Both video communication services also have well-designed mobile apps, which we highly recommend if you regularly make calls from your smartphone or tablet.

However, Zoom is the winner simply because it’s the only platform that has a dedicated desktop app. If you have a busy schedule, then you can just leave Zoom running in the background while you work on other tasks. You can then connect to meetings, create new events, check your schedule, and more simply by checking the desktop interface.

Text Chat and Channels – Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet and Zoom allow you to have face-to-face conversations with people no matter where they are in the world. However, they both also support text chat, so let’s see how these features compare.

Text Chat and Channels – Google Meet

Google Meet allows you to send messages that appear alongside the main video screen. However, everyone on the call can see these messages, so there’s no way to have private one-on-one conversations.

Google Meet vs Zoom: Which is right for your business?

You also can’t see any messages that people sent before you joined the meeting. Unless the meeting is being recorded, the entire conversation history will also disappear as soon as you leave the call.

You can’t add emojis or GIFs to your messages, although you can send a limited number of reactions that float across the main video window.

Text Chat and Channels – Zoom

Unlike Google Meet, you can send private messages to individual attendees in a Zoom call. This is particularly useful if you regularly host large meetings with lots of attendees. Without the option to send private messages, the chat could easily become too noisy and distracting, with multiple conversations happening at once.

Zoom also makes it easy to add emojis to your messages, although, just like Google Meet, there’s no option to add GIFs.

Similar to Google Meet, Zoom also adds a conversation log to recorded meetings, so people can follow along with the chat.

It also hides any messages that were sent before you joined the call. This is exactly the same behavior as Google Meet, but it may still be frustrating for some users.

Winner – Zoom

With the option to send private messages and built-in support for emojis, Zoom is the clear winner when it comes to text chat.

WordPress Integrations – Google Meet vs Zoom

If you have a WordPress website, then you may be wondering whether you can integrate WordPress with your video conferencing software. Let’s take a closer look at how both tools handle WordPress integration.

WordPress Integrations – Zoom

There are several ways to connect Zoom to your WordPress website. If you run webinars or online conferences, then you can use WPForms and the Uncanny Automator plugin to automatically register attendees when they fill out a form on your website.

In this way, you can onboard new clients, schedule coaching calls, and more. If you sell online courses or training, then you can even add students to an upcoming webinar or session as soon as they enroll.

To get started, simply add a registration form to your website using WPForms, which is the best contact form plugin for WordPress.

Adding a webinar registration form to a website or blog using WPForms

Then, you can use Uncanny Automator to create a recipe that registers the visitor automatically when they complete the form.

If you have a WooCommerce store, then you can use the same Uncanny Automator recipe to enroll new customers in a product webinar after they buy an item in your online store.

For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to easily integrate Zoom meetings and webinars in WordPress.

Additionally, if you want to manage your Zoom meetings from the WordPress dashboard, then you may want to look at Video Conferencing with Zoom. This plugin allows you to import all your Zoom meetings into the WordPress dashboard with a single click.

You can even restrict your Zoom content using a membership plugin. In this way, you can make money online by selling access to your Zoom recordings.

WordPress Integrations – Google Meet

You can connect Google Meet to your WordPress website using Zapier. This popular automation tool comes with a ready-made workflow that will automatically schedule a Google Meet every time you publish a new post.

This can improve your editorial workflow by giving all team members a time to meet and review the new content, provide feedback, or review the post’s traffic, conversion rates, and other important metrics using a tool like Google Analytics.

Even better, you can build your own custom Google Meet and WordPress automation workflows using the Zapier editor. This gives you the freedom and flexibility to integrate WordPress and Google Meet in the way that works best for you.

Winner – Zoom

You can integrate Google Meet and WordPress in lots of ways using Zapier. However, the combination of Uncanny Automator and WPForms gives Zoom a definite advantage.

These two must-have WordPress plugins allow you to automatically add students, customers, co-workers, and other contacts to your Zoom webinars and calls. For this reason, Zoom is a great choice for WordPress blog and website owners.

Professional and Community Support – Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet and Zoom are both easy to use, but everyone needs help from time to time. Let’s compare their support options to see the help that’s available.

Professional and Community Support – Google Meet

If you prefer to find answers yourself, then there is an entire library of tutorials and videos in the Google Meet Help portal. You can look through the different pages or type in your question and get articles recommended to you.

There’s also a Google Meet Community where you can browse questions that other people have posted.

While there is a lot of information here, thankfully, Google has created a detailed sorting and filtering system that can help you find the information you are looking for, fast.

If you can’t find a relevant thread, then you can always create your own.

Simply post your question to the Community portal, and wait for a response from the Google Meet community.

Posting a question to a community support portal

If you want to improve your Google Meet knowledge and boost your productivity, then you can check out the Google Workspace Learning Center. Here, you will find quick start guides, cheat sheets, productivity guides, and many other useful resources.

Do you prefer professional support instead?

Google’s Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus all come with standard professional support. However, if you buy an Enterprise plan, then you will get access to Enhanced Support, which promises faster response times, more advanced product knowledge, and even support for third-party technologies.

Professional and Community Support – Zoom

If you have any questions, then the Zoom Support portal should be your first stop. Here, you will find a knowledge base with thousands of articles, a learning center with on-demand video courses, and an active community question-and-answer site.

If you are interested in community support, then the Zoom Q and A threads are helpfully divided into categories and organized into Latest, Trending, Solved, and Unanswered tabs.

This system should help you get answers to common questions, fast.

If you have a Zoom problem that no one else has posted about, then you can always start a new thread and get direct help from the Zoom community.

The Zoom support portal also has a chatbot, so you can type in questions and get answers at any time of the day or night. Often, this is much faster than looking through all the Zoom documentation yourself.

Professional support options: Zoom vs Google Meet

If you buy a Business plan or higher, then you will also get live chat support, phone support, and the option to submit web tickets.

Alternatively, if you have a Pro plan, then you can submit web tickets and may be entitled to live chat and phone support, depending on the total cost of your Zoom subscription.

Additionally, if you need professional support, then Zoom offers a range of premium support plans.

Winner – Tie

While both Google Meet and Zoom offer professional support, it’s the community support and online resources that really put these two popular video services ahead of the competition.

No matter whether you choose Meet or Zoom, you will get access to detailed and extensive articles, tutorials, video guides, forums, and countless other online resources.

That said, both Google Meet and Zoom are excellent choices when it comes to support.

Google Meet vs Zoom: Which Is Better For Your Business?

If you are looking for an easy, convenient video conferencing tool with excellent support, then both Google Meet and Zoom are great options.

Both video chat platforms make it easy to communicate with teammates, employees, customers, and other contacts around the world. They are also available across all major browsers and work on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. This means you can use both Google Meet and Zoom from any location.

Ultimately, the software that’s right for you will vary depending on the features your business needs, the size of your organization, and how long your meetings typically last.

Each tool has its own strengths and drawbacks. If you want a solution that works out of the box for most users and integrates with the full suite of Google Workspace apps, then Google Meet is likely better for your business.

But if you want more advanced features and a dedicated desktop app, then Zoom is the better option. We also recommend Zoom if you run a WordPress website due to its seamless integration with WordPress via powerful plugins like Uncanny Automator and WPForms.

Alternatives to Google Meet and Zoom

In this guide, we focused on Google Meet vs Zoom, but there are lots more communication tools on the market that might be better for your business.

If you are looking for an alternative solution, then Nextiva is the best virtual business phone number service on the market.

At WPBeginner, we use Nextiva for all our business phone needs because it helps our team answer incoming customer calls from anywhere in the world without having to share their personal cell phone numbers. Plus, the Nextiva Video plan comes with video conferencing, screen-sharing, and file-sharing features.

If you regularly video chat with customers or offer customer support, then RingCentral is another popular business VoIP service provider that lets you set up a cloud call center solution for your business.

They also offer an AI-powered video meeting experience with advanced features such as live transcription, intelligent meeting summaries, and virtual backgrounds.

We hope this article helped you decide whether Google Meet or Zoom is right for your business. You may also want to see our guide on how to create an email newsletter and our expert picks of the best email marketing services for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Google Meet vs Zoom: Which Is Better for Your Business? first appeared on WPBeginner.

May 5, 2023

15 Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

Are you looking for easy and smart ways to automate tasks and increase sales in your WooCommerce store?

By automating tasks in your online store, you can save time and money while growing your business and increasing sales.

In this article, we will show you how to use WooCommerce automations to increase sales.

15 WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

Why Automate Your WooCommerce Store?

If you are running a WooCommerce store, then you probably spend a lot of your time performing repetitive tasks. These can be anything from sending marketing emails for your online store to processing customer invoices.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could automate all of those tasks and focus on growing sales and your business instead?

Luckily, you can use the best WordPress automation tools and plugins to automate WooCommerce tasks. By doing this, you will save time, offer a better user experience to your customers, and ultimately increase sales.

With that being said, here are 15 WooCommerce automations to increase sales:

Use Automation to Personalize Your Email Marketing
Set Up an Automated Marketing Campaign With Push Notifications
Let Customers Track Orders With Automated Transactional Emails
Quickly Update Your Customers With Automated SMS Messages
Automate All Invoicing and Payment Processes
Use Automated Store Activity Notifications to Boost Sales
Automatically Display Your Best Product Reviews
Use an Automated Sales Funnel to Boost Sales Conversions
Reduce Cart Abandonment With Popups and Push Notifications
Send Automated Coupons to Bring Back Customers
Automate Your Social Media Channels
Automatically Display Social Media Content in WooCommerce
Make Your Forms Smarter Using Automation
Automate Live Chat Using Artificial Intelligence
Use Uncanny Automator for Even More WooCommerce Automations
Bonus: Track Conversions to Learn How to Increase Sales

1. Use Automation to Personalize Your Email Marketing

Are you keeping in touch with your customers using an email newsletter? You may not be taking advantage of all the automation tools available in your email marketing software.

For example, the best email services like Constant Contact, Sendinblue, and Omnisend all have integrations with WooCommerce. They allow you to personalize your emails by adding the customer’s name and more.

They also let you set up a Welcome email series using a drip campaign. This is a sequence of automated emails that will go out automatically to new customers.

You can learn how to get started by scrolling down to the automated drip emails section of our guide on how to send automated emails in WordPress.

Additionally, if you are looking for a complete tool that offers WooCommerce email customization and automation, then we highly recommend using FunnelKit Automations.

Apart from letting you fully customize your WooCommerce emails, it also lets you set up smart, automated follow-up emails and workflows to boost your sales.

You can get started with FunnelKit Automations by selecting an automation from a library of handy templates.

For example, you can automatically send an email series to new customers, recover abandoned carts, send promotional emails to selected audiences, and more.

There is also an option to create your own WooCommerce automation from scratch. You will then see a visual email automation builder where you can make any customizations that you need.

For example, the screenshot above shows the workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer makes their first order. You can even see in-line analytics for each email.

You can learn more in our guide on how to customize WooCommerce emails. Make sure you scroll down to the section on FunnelKit Automations.

Tip: We recommend combining FunnelKit Automations with an SMTP service like WP Mail SMTP. This will make sure your emails are delivered to your customers and won’t get lost or end up in the spam folder.

2. Set Up an Automated Marketing Campaign With Push Notifications

You can also run an automated marketing campaign using push notifications instead of emails. These notifications go directly to the user’s web browser or mobile device. This means they have a much higher engagement rate, similar to SMS messages.

The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It is the best web push notification software for WordPress, and over 10,000 businesses use it to send targeted messages.

For each notification, you can change the title, message, URL, icon image, and more by expanding it.

There is also a preview of how your notifications will look in the browser.

PushEngage also lets you choose when to send each notification. For example, you can immediately send the first notification and select a different time for the following one.

For more details, see our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

3. Let Customers Track Orders With Automated Transactional Emails

WooCommerce will need to send different transactional emails to your customers. These help them get order confirmations, track their order status, get invoices, and find out more information about your online store.

You can customize and automate these emails using FunnelKit Automations, which is a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation.

The FunnelKit Automations dashboard makes it easy to create a new automation. You can simply click on one of the plugin’s many templates.

Funnelkit Automations WooCommerce Automation Templates

You can filter the list to quickly find the WooCommerce automation you wish to use. For example, you might want to send automatic thank-you emails to repeat customers.

You can then customize the automation using the visual automation builder, including the content of the email.

Funnelkit Automations Workflow and Email Customization

For detailed instructions, please see the section about sending automated transactional emails with FunnelKit Automations in our guide on how to send automated emails.

4. Quickly Update Your Customers With Automated SMS Messages

Many customers prefer to receive text messages to notify them about their orders. Plugins like YITH WooCommerce SMS Notifications or FunnelKit Automations will automatically send SMS messages to your customers.

SMS messages are an effective way to keep your customers up to date. They have a 98% average open rate, with 95% of messages being read in the first 3 minutes!

You can send automatic texts to your customers when their orders are dispatched or their status changes. You can automatically send SMS notifications to your customers or let them opt in at checkout.

Learn how by following our guide on how to send SMS messages to your WordPress users.

5. Automate All Invoicing and Payment Processes

As a business owner, there is a lot to manage. If you are still creating invoices manually, then you can switch to professional invoicing software that automates all invoicing and payment processes. Then, you will be free to focus on growing your business.

A plugin like WooCommerce PDF Invoices makes it easy to automatically generate invoices, collect orders, and manage your finances.

You can also save time by accepting recurring payments or adding subscriptions to WooCommerce. These WooCommerce automations will help automate the billing process and can save you time.

With automatic recurring payments, you don’t have to spend time manually sending invoices and waiting for payments from your customers.

Plus, adding subscription payments to your eCommerce business will give you a more consistent cash flow, fewer payment errors, and fewer payment delays.

6. Use Automated Store Activity Notifications to Boost Sales

Automated FOMO and social proof notifications can also increase sales in your WooCommerce store.

FOMO, short for fear of missing out, is a marketing technique used to create excitement about a product. It uses psychology to encourage customers to make buying decisions faster.

Plus, social proof shows visitors that other customers have purchased your products. This can convince users that your online store is trustworthy.

The best way to add social proof to your website is by using TrustPulse. It is one of the best social proof plugins for WordPress on the market.

TrustPulse automatically monitors activity on your site. When potential customers are close to buying something, they will see a notification showing that another customer has just made a purchase.

By simply displaying social proof, you will give your visitors a small push to complete their purchase. To learn more, see Method 1 of our guide on how to use FOMO to increase conversions.

7. Automatically Display Your Best Product Reviews

Would you like to automatically display the best reviews of your products from across the internet? You could copy and paste them manually, but that is a lot of work. Plus, there would be a delay before they appear on your website.

Luckily, Smash Balloon has a Reviews Feed Pro plugin that lets you automatically show off your best reviews from platforms like Google Reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and more.

Customer reviews, displayed on a WordPress website

It comes with pre-designed templates, so you can display your reviews in different layouts, including showcases, carousels, grids, and more.

The Reviews Feed automatically copies your website’s design so that the reviews look like a natural part of your website rather than content embedded from another platform.

You can follow our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews to set up your own automatic review feed in WooCommerce.

8. Use an Automated Sales Funnel to Boost Sales Conversions

A sales funnel is the path a user takes on your website to become a customer. It is made up of the specific pages a user may visit before making a purchase.

For example, a new visitor might land on a blog post, then view a product page, then go through your checkout flow.

Unfortunately, only 10% of shoppers, on average, will add anything to their carts. After they do, 60-80% of them abandon their carts without completing the purchase.

Luckily, you can use FunnelKit, the best WooCommerce sales funnel plugin, to change that. You can use the plugin to optimize each step, offer a better user experience, reduce distractions, and nudge users toward completing their purchases.

For example, it comes with a one-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.

FunnelKit also lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.

For instance, the FunnelKit Funnel Builder lets you add order bumps to boost profits if someone adds $X to their cart. You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout page.

To learn more, see our guide on how to make a high-converting sales funnel in WordPress.

9. Reduce Cart Abandonment With Popups and Push Notifications

As we said earlier, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy them. This means if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.

Luckily, you can use automatic push notifications to reduce cart abandonment rates. For example, you can pop up a notification when a user is about to leave your website and offer a coupon or free shipping.

Or, if the customer already has discounted items in their cart, they may just need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. Push notifications like these can help you recover 3 to 8% of abandoning cart sales.

You can learn how to use OptinMonster to add exit-intent popups by following our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

But what if the customer leaves your site before they see the popup? Push notifications can also help you connect with your visitors after they leave your website. These messages will display in your subscriber’s browser even when they are not actively browsing your store.

The easiest way to do this is with PushEngage. It is the best web push notification software on the market, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.

For more details, see our guide on how to add web push notifications to WordPress.

You can also significantly reduce cart abandonment by simply improving your online store and checkout process. We share plenty of proven tips with real examples in our guide on how to recover WooCommerce abandoned cart sales.

10. Send Automated Coupons to Bring Back Customers

It costs 5 times more to get a new customer than to keep an old one. Over time, people may lose interest in your website, forget about your products, or start shopping with a competitor.

One way to bring those customers back is to automatically send them a coupon code via email. You can use automation tools to send a coupon to customers who have become disengaged, such as when they don’t place an order for 2 months or have stopped opening emails.

You can learn how in our step-by-step guide on how to send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers.

Another good use for automated coupons is recognizing and rewarding customers when they engage with your online store. For example, you might send a coupon after a customer reviews one of your products.

This builds loyalty to your store and can get you more sales. It also encourages shoppers to review more products in the future.

You can also schedule coupons in advance so that they go out automatically on popular holidays like Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. This will leave you free to focus on promoting your offers and getting as many sales as possible.

See our guide on how to schedule coupons in WooCommerce for detailed instructions.

Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, you can also offer a coupon in a popup. Showing a coupon at the right time makes a huge difference in converting your website visitors into paying customers.

There are a few ways to do this, and we give you all the details in our step-by-step guide on how to create a coupon popup in WordPress.

11. Automate Your Social Media Channels

You can also use automation to post your online store content to your social channels. This lets you keep your social followers engaged with fresh content.

Uncanny Automator has integrations with all popular social platforms. It will let you publish new blog posts on Facebook, show off your latest product images on Instagram, advertise your sales on Twitter, and more.

Post a featured image to Instagram from WordPress

You can learn how to do this step-by-step by following our guides on how to automatically post to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Are you looking for ways to show fresh content without doing any extra work? One way to do that is to automatically display your latest social media activity in your WooCommerce store.

This can save you time and keep your website content fresh and engaging for visitors. Plus, it can boost social proof by displaying your social media followers, comments, and like counts.

Smash Balloon automates your website content by displaying your latest social media activity. It is a popular social media feed plugin for WordPress that is used by over 1.4 million websites.

For example, you can add a Facebook feed to WordPress, and new posts will automatically appear in real time. Your customers can also like, share, and comment on your WordPress posts, which is a great way to get more engagement on Facebook.

An example of an embedded Facebook feed, created using Smash Balloon

You can change the feed’s color scheme, design a custom header, add ‘like’ and ‘load more’ buttons, and much more.

If you are posting beautiful photos and engaging videos to Instagram, then it makes sense to post that content to WordPress too.

An Instagram photo feed, created using Smash Balloon

You can even show other people’s photos on your site by creating a hashtag feed or displaying the posts that other people have tagged your account in.

In the following image, you can see an example of an online store that uses a custom Instagram feed to show user-generated content.

An example of Instagram user-generated content

For details, please see our step-by-step guide on how to add your social media feeds to WordPress.

Tip: For more tips on how to use social channels to grow your online store and increase sales, you can see our complete social media cheat for WordPress.

13. Make Your Forms Smarter Using Automation

You can use form plugins like WPForms to collect all kinds of information from your customers.

For example, you can use a form plugin to display a contact form, create a questionnaire, gather testimonials, or build a survey form.

The best thing is that WPForms easily integrates with many other tools and plugins, so you can easily automate any action after someone fills out your form.

For example, when someone fills in an order form, you can use conditional logic to send an email notification to the correct department, depending on the product that was purchased.

WPForms Conditional Logic for Sending Notifications

You can also send a confirmation email to the customer who filled in the form to let them know you will be in contact soon. This a nice gesture that lets your users know that you have received their information.

In addition, by using the Google Sheets Addon, you can send any form fields you want to a spreadsheet. This will allow you to use spreadsheet features to analyze the data and collaborate with others in your team.

To automate your forms further, Uncanny Automator will let you connect WPForms and other form plugins to 100+ third-party services without having to pay fees to services like Zapier.

For example, you can create an Uncanny Automator recipe to send customer form data to Airtable. Then, your team will be able to access and use the data easily.

Using Uncanny Automator to Send WPForms Data to Airtable

To learn more, see our guide on how to create automated workflows with Uncanny Automator.

14. Automate Live Chat Using Artificial Intelligence

Automated chatbots are the future of live chat software because they allow you to engage with your customers 24/7. They can free up time by automatically answering common customer questions, generating leads, improving user experience, and making more sales.

Chatbot.com is the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. It lets you easily automate live chat on your website by setting up your own chatbot using a drag-and-drop builder. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills.

It even comes with pre-built templates that you can use as a starting point to quickly get your AI chatbot up and running. These templates include different scenarios like selling products, customer service, recruitment, bookings, and more.

For example, you can use the eCommerce bot template to walk your customers through the entire buying process. There are even templates for specific industries, including a coffee shopbot, recruitment bot, and restaurant bot.

If visitors want to communicate with a real person, then you can easily forward them to your customer support agent, phone support, or any of ChatBot’s live chat software integrations, such as LiveChat.

15. Use Uncanny Automator for Even More WooCommerce Automations

This article contains many specialist tools that do specific automation jobs very well. By contrast, Uncanny Automator is a Swiss army knife that allows you to create all types of automation workflows without having to write any code.

It acts as a bridge so that you can get different WordPress plugins talking to each other, as well as loads of third-party services.

You create automation by building Uncanny Automator recipes, consisting of triggers and actions. The action will be automatically run when a user or WooCommerce triggers an event.

Uncanny Automator Triggers and Actions for WooCommerce

Here are some of the WooCommerce triggers you can use to run a recipe:

A customer viewing a product
A customer adding a product to their cart
A customer paying for a product
A payment failing
A customer reviewing a product
And much more

Then the recipe can automatically run any of these WooCommerce actions:

Creating an order with a product
Changing the price of a product
Generating and emailing a coupon code
Giving an order a specific status

There are dozens of recipes that you can create, allowing you to save hundreds of hours while running your online store more efficiently.

For instance, you can use Uncanny Automator to automatically create a new customer account when someone submits a contact form on your website, or send notifications to Slack.

Bonus: Track Conversions to Learn How to Increase Sales

To use any marketing automation platform effectively, you will need easy-to-understand reports that tell you exactly what is working for your business and what isn’t.

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It lets you get a clear picture of what is happening on your site and what you can do to bring in more sales.

It comes with WooCommerce conversion tracking, form submissions, outbound link tracking, and user tracking.

Its Reports page has an ‘eCommerce’ tab that shows your most important conversion metrics, including the conversion rate, transactions, revenue, and average order value. Below that, you will see a list of your top products with quantity, sale percentage, and total revenue.

You will also see your top conversion sources. You can use this report to attract more customers and offer exclusive discounts for customers from specific sources.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to set up WooCommerce conversion tracking.

You can also connect Google Sheets with WooCommerce to easily record and manage your orders and customer data. Once the information is in a Google Sheet, you can easily filter it based on factors like the order total, the customer’s location, coupons used, and more.

You can then share this information with your team, even if they don’t have access to the WordPress dashboard. For example, you can easily send this data to your suppliers, marketing departments, or other team members.

You are even able to turn this data into charts and graphs. All of this makes it easier to analyze the information and then use these insights to fine-tune your business and get more sales.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to increase sales using WooCommerce automations. You may also want to see our guide on how to add wholesale pricing in WooCommerce or our expert picks for the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 15 Best WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales first appeared on WPBeginner.

April 7, 2023

14 Best Ways to Use OpenAI on Your WordPress Website

Are you wondering how to use OpenAI and ChatGPT on your WordPress website?

OpenAI can help with everything from generating meta descriptions for your posts to writing email sales copy. You can use OpenAI on your WordPress site to save time, cut costs, improve your SEO and workflows, and grow your business!

In this article, we will show you 14 of the best ways to use OpenAI on your WordPress website.

A (Brief) Introduction to OpenAI

You have probably heard the terms “OpenAI” and “ChatGPT” used interchangeably, but they’re not exactly the same.

OpenAI is the research laboratory (read: a group of very smart people) behind the chatbot ChatGPT and the deep-learning, image-generating model DALL-E 2, among other AI-powered products.

The team over at OpenAI created ChatGPT which is an AI assistant to help streamline your workflows and save you time.

It can write email newsletters for you, suggest blog post ideas, do keyword research, automate your workflows, and so much more.

To improve your WordPress website workflows with artificial intelligence, you will first need to create an account with OpenAI. Getting signed up is FREE. All you will need is an email and a password.

We also recommend reading our guide on the best ChatGPT prompts for bloggers, marketers, and social media, so that you can interact with the program more easily.

With that in mind, let’s look at 14 ways to use OpenAI on your WordPress website.

Generate Titles and Meta Descriptions with AIOSEO
Generate Ad Copy and Product Descriptions
Generate Blog Post Ideas
Perform Sentiment Analysis
Automate Customer Support with Intelligent Sentiment Analysis
Create Event Summaries, Recap Podcast Episodes, and Take Meeting Minutes
Draft Blog Posts (and Seamlessly Integrate Them Into Your Workflows)
Draft Emails in Minutes
Create Blog Post Summaries for Social Media
Generate AI Images for Your Posts or Landing Pages
Create Course Outlines in Your LMS
Create Lessons in Your LMS
Create a Chatbot
Have Fun! Write Short Stories, Poems or Cook Up Recipes

1. Generate Titles and Meta Descriptions with AIOSEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress, and it just got an AI-powered boost. After adding your keywords to your blog posts, let AIOSEO and OpenAI further optimize your content for search engines.

The first step is installing AIOSEO. Please see our guide on how to install WordPress plugins.

Then, from within the WordPress post editor, you can tell OpenAI to generate titles and meta descriptions that best fit your content with the click of a button.

Simply go to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ at the bottom of your page and find the ‘Post Title’ box.

The AIOSEO OpenAI post title generator — Next, you need to click on the robot icon. If you hover your mouse over it, you will be able to see a ‘Use AI Generator’ message.

Now, you can see 5 post title suggestions. Simply click on the ‘+’ icon next to one to use it for your post.

If you don’t like any of the suggestions, you can also click ‘Generate New Titles’ to see new ones.

Then, simply repeat the same steps by clicking on the robot icon in the ‘Meta Description’ box. AIOSEO will then suggest a few meta descriptions for your post.

Plus, connecting your OpenAI account to your AIOSEO account is as easy as copying and pasting an API key. You can check out AIOSEO’s documentation for more details.

2. Generate Ad Copy and Product Descriptions

Due to GPT-3’s talent for SEO, it is probably no surprise that it can handle more of your content creation needs. You can use OpenAI to create short, effective ad copy that matches your brand or long-form product descriptions for your WooCommerce store.

For example, we prompted ChatGPT to describe the need for running shoes using the “problem-agitate-solve” framework.

Creating a product description with ChatGPT

Simply edit the text to match your preferred sentence structure, include your keywords, throw in some on-brand and product-specific language, and then watch your sales increase!

3. Generate Blog Post Ideas

If you are anything like us, then coming up with content ideas for your WordPress blog can be time consuming. Fortunately, OpenAI runs on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

So, you can ask it to come up with ideas for new content on your blog.

In our previous examples, we used OpenAI to help with tasks by inputting prompts directly into ChatGPT.

In our next few examples, we will look at how to integrate OpenAI directly into your WordPress workflow, truly leveraging the power of automation and AI to save time and resources.

Uncanny Automator is one of the best automation plugins for WordPress, and it enables you to connect OpenAI to your WordPress site in many useful and interesting ways.

For this example, we will use OpenAI with Uncanny Automator to generate ideas for new content based on a user’s form submission. Then, we will automatically send OpenAI’s response to your content management spreadsheet or database, like Google Sheets or Airtable, for the whole team to access.

If you don’t already have Uncanny Automator, you can download the Automator plugin for FREE to try on your WordPress site.

Once you have downloaded Automator, you will need to connect Automator to OpenAI. Then we will build the automation recipe below.

First, you need to create a new form using a contact form plugin like WPForms. From your WordPress admin sidebar, navigate to WPForms » Add New.

Then, create a new contact form and make sure to add two number fields labeled ‘Temperature’ and ‘Maximum length’, and one single line text field labeled ‘Open AI Prompt’.

Now, you must head to Automator » Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, simply select ‘Logged-in users’, followed by ‘Confirm’.

Next, give your new recipe a title that makes it easy to recognize. For example, we have named our recipe ‘OpenAI Content Ideation’.

In the ‘Triggers’ panel, you need to select ‘WPForms’. From the drop-down list that appears, select ‘A user submits a form’ and choose the WPForms form that you just made. When you are finished, just click ‘Save’.

After that, in the ‘Actions’ panel, you have to select ‘OpenAI’.

From the drop-down list that appears, choose ‘Use a prompt to generate text with the Davinci model’.

In the Actions section, map the fields from the WPForms form to the Temperature, Length, and Prompt fields in the OpenAI action.

To do this, click the ‘*’ icon to the right of each field to choose the correct token associated with the trigger.

How to use WPForms tokens with OpenAI prompts using Automator

When you are finished, simply click Save.

To send the blog post ideas to an external spreadsheet, you will need to add a second Action. To do this, click ‘Add action’ in the ‘Actions’ panel.

From the menu of available integrations, simply choose Google Sheets.

Then, from the drop-down list, select ‘Create a row in a Google Sheet’.

Create a row in a Google Sheet with OpenAI

In the editor, you must select your content management spreadsheet. Then, click ‘Get columns’ and add the OpenAI Response token to the appropriate column(s).

Make sure to click ‘Save’ when you are done.

Finally, in the top right corner, toggle your recipe from ‘Draft’ to ‘Live.’

Now, whenever you enter information into your blog post idea generator form, Automator will tell OpenAI to suggest new content ideas and send them to your Google Sheets spreadsheet.

In our example, we entered “Give me 5 fun blog posts on pediatric dentistry” into the WPForms form.

Then, OpenAI generated a response, and Automator added it to the worksheet in the recipe.

4. Perform Sentiment Analysis

There is no way of knowing if AI has any feelings of its own. If we had to guess, we would say that it probably doesn’t. At least, not yet. But that doesn’t mean that it cannot understand human emotions.

You can use OpenAI to perform sentiment analysis by asking it to interpret the mood of your customers’ feedback.

But how can you use this with your WordPress website?

Maybe your contact forms are connected to a help desk plugin, and you want to assign priority based on the message urgency.

Alternatively, maybe you want to automatically approve positive blog comments. You could even quickly identify negative feedback in surveys powered by your favorite WordPress form plugin.

In both cases, you will be able to address negative feedback quicker, keep your customers happier, and improve your online reputation.

5. Automate Customer Support with Intelligent Sentiment Analysis

Now that you know how to use OpenAI to perform sentiment analysis, you can easily add it to your workflows. By combining OpenAI’s emotional intelligence with Uncanny Automator’s efficiency, you will be able to create a seamless customer support system.

For this example, you will need the pro version of Uncanny Automator so that you can add conditional actions to the automation.

Let’s put together an Automator recipe that creates tickets in our customer support plugin whenever a customer reviews a product.

First, we have OpenAI perform sentiment analysis on the reviews as they come in.

Then, using Automator’s Filters feature, we create tasks with different priority levels based on OpenAI’s assessment of the customer’s sentiment.

In this recipe, if OpenAI decides that a new WooCommerce product review is negative, then it creates a new help desk ticket in FluentCRM and adds an Urgent tag.

How to tag a negative support ticket with OpenAI and Automator

If you are ready to take things to the next level, you could even use the submission to create a draft reply for the ticket.

Just add an extra OpenAI action to generate a draft reply, then include that response as the ticket draft.

This works best with the GPT-3.5-Turbo model because you can use Automator to also send context. For example, you can tell it to answer the prompt as a helpful support agent from your website.

6. Create Event Summaries, Recap Podcast Episodes, and Take Meeting Minutes

Running special events on your WordPress website is easy with WordPress calendar plugins. Unfortunately, not every customer of yours can save the date.

After all, we cannot do everything and be everywhere all at once, but OpenAI can.

If your customers missed the big day, OpenAI can create event summaries for you. You can even choose the length and format of the summary you want OpenAI to make.

For example, we asked ChatGPT to create a 100-word summary of an October 2008 IMF town hall. In less than one minute, ChatGPT turned the 1,500-word opening remarks into a 100-word summary.

Alternatively, maybe you are trying to grow your podcast audience. To help your listeners who don’t have two hours a day to consume media, you can use OpenAI to recap your podcast episodes, hitting all of the highlights.

Using transcripts, we asked ChatGPT to summarize the first 15 minutes of a popular podcast.

Finally, some conference call tools, like Zoom and Google Meet, allow users to record their meetings with audio transcripts. You can then feed those transcripts into OpenAI and create meeting summaries in just a few seconds.

7. Draft Blog Posts (and Seamlessly Integrate Them Into Your Workflows)

For content writers (including us), few things are more stressful than a blank page. Thankfully, artificial intelligence is the sledgehammer that can break through any writer’s block.

Using one of our blog post ideas from our previous recipe, we told OpenAI to draft a blog post for us.

In this Automator recipe, a form submission (the trigger) tells OpenAI to draft a new blog post. Then, it messages the writer in Slack to let them know the draft is ready for them.

From your WordPress admin sidebar, simply go to WPForms » Add New.

Then, create a new form with at least two number fields labeled ‘Temperature’ and ‘Maximum length.’ You will also need two single-line text fields labeled ‘Title’ and ‘Open AI Prompt’.

Next, you must go to Automator » Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select ‘Logged-in users’. Then, simply give your new recipe a title like ‘OpenAI Blog Post Draft’.

In the ‘Triggers’ panel, you need to select ‘WPForms’ From the drop-down list that appears, you must choose ‘A user submits a form’ and pick the form you just created.

When you are finished, make sure to click ‘Save’.

Moving on, in the ‘Actions’ panel, you must select ‘OpenAI’. From the drop-down list that appears, choose ‘Use a prompt to generate text with the Davinci model’.

In the editor, fill in the fields using the tokens from your form’s fields that match the fields in the editor. When you are finished, just click ‘Save.’

Now, it is time to set up an automatic blog post that will be created with the OpenAI content.

In the ‘Actions’ panel, simply click ‘Add action’. Then, from the menu of available integrations, select ‘WordPress’.

Next, from the drop-down list, hit ‘Create a post’. In the editor, you must fill in the ‘Title’ field with the Title token from your form and enter the OpenAI Response token into the ‘Content’ field.

Then, make sure to click ‘Save’.

Create a post using Automator and OpenAI

Optional: You can also add a ClickUp action to your recipe to create a task with the post URL in the description.

Additionally, you can include a Slack action to notify your content writer that a new task and draft post is waiting for their review.

Finally, in the top right corner, toggle your recipe from ‘Draft’ to ‘Live’.

In our WPForms form, we then asked OpenAI to ‘Write a casual blog post on three ways to make dental visits fun for kids.’

And here is the draft that Automator created with OpenAI’s response.

We call that the anti- writer’s block recipe! You can also use AI to generate your SEO title, write a meta description, and even set up a featured image.

8. Draft Emails in Minutes

Writing carefully-worded emails takes time. Unless, of course, OpenAI is writing them for you.

Whether you are sending out an internal notice, responding to a customer’s questions, or reaching out to prospective clients, OpenAI can draft your email in seconds. After that, it is just a matter of proofreading and including specific information.

We prompted ChatGPT to “write a 300-word marketing email promoting a Black Friday sale on limited edition clothing.” Less than 30 seconds later, we had an email that we could easily customize to suit our branding and needs.

If you pair OpenAI with customer relationship management (CRM) apps, you will be drafting emails faster than your SMTP server can send them!

Promoting your blog posts on social media is important. However, sometimes, writing the appropriate character-length tweets and captions can be even more challenging than creating a whole article.

With OpenAI and Automator, you won’t have to stress about the perfect hashtags.

Here is an example of an action that takes a new blog post and sends it to OpenAI to generate a summary that can be shared on Twitter:

Automator will send that summary, complete with hashtags, to our WhatsApp account. There, we can review, edit, copy, and then paste the content into our social media accounts when we are ready to publish it.

For a post on connecting ChatGPT to LearnDash, OpenAI wrote this summary:

Embrace the robot revolution and use OpenAI and LearnDash to create the e-learning platform of your dreams. #AI revolution is here! Harness the power of AI for your #elearning platform w/ OpenAI & ChatGPT models. Automate content creation, create course outlines & answer students’ questions. Save time & money w/ Uncanny Automator! #LearnDash #NolejAI #RobotRevolution.

You could even extend your recipe to make Automator post the summary straight to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

10. Generate AI Images for Your Posts or Landing Pages

Are you tired of scrolling through stock photography databases trying to find the perfect image for your blog post? Or finding a picture and then realizing that every other article with your keywords is using the same image?

Fortunately, OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E 2 can create original images from descriptive plain text.

OpenAI’s Content Policy and Terms give you all of the rights to the images that you create with DALL-E 2, “including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise.”

Using our original WPForms form with an added field for an image prompt, we used Automator to create a draft blog post complete with a featured image.

Here is that same blog post about dental visits with a featured image created by DALL-E.

As you can see, it has a fun graphic with a tooth, toothpaste, and different toothbrushes.

To make the process even easier, whenever you tell DALL-E to create an image using Uncanny Automator, Automator will add the image to your WordPress media library, with no hotlinking necessary.

11. Create Course Outlines in Your LMS

OpenAI is smart. After all, “intelligence” is in the name.

With Uncanny Automator and a learning management system (LMS) like LearnDash, you can be just as smart as AI. Or, at least, you can create outlines for courses that will make you as smart as AI (if you do your assigned reading).

We asked OpenAI to create an advanced 8-week course outline on supercomputers, which, funnily enough, is kind of like an OpenAI autobiography.

Once you have your course outline, don’t forget to use AIOSEO’s OpenAI integration to write your meta description.

12. Create Lessons in Your LMS

Using a similar Uncanny Automator recipe to the previous one, you can easily fill in the course outline that you created with OpenAI-generated content.

We used OpenAI’s response from our previous recipe to help us create this lesson.

Here is the first part of it.

With the right prompts, you can also create a recipe that generates unique images for your lessons and uploads them automatically to your WordPress media library.

Using Automator tokens, you can also set your new DALL-E 2 generated image as the featured image for your lesson or include it somewhere in the lesson itself.

OpenAI supercomputer lesson with DALL-E image

13. Create a Chatbot

As a natural language processor, OpenAI loves to talk. You can use this feature to communicate with customers in your online store or business website.

This can help you target users who are having problems on your site or want to learn more about your products and services.

With the right recipe, you can actually turn OpenAI into a chatbot on your WordPress website. You can read this guide on how to create an AI-powered chatbot with OpenAI and Automator.

14. Have Fun! Write Short Stories, Poems or Cook Up Recipes

Once you have fully integrated OpenAI and Uncanny Automator into your workflows, you will have enough time to do the things that really matter like growing your business or spending more quality time with family.

Playing around with OpenAI and trying out new things is a great way to learn how to create better prompts that get the results you are looking for, so you can continue to save time and optimize your workflows.

OpenAI and WordPress plugin development are in the super early stages right now, and there is so much more in the works. We will be sharing more details and updates in this guide in the coming months.

We hope this article helped you find some ways to use OpenAI on your WordPress website. You may also want to see our guide on the best AI chatbots software for your website, or how to create an email newsletter to connect with visitors after they leave your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 14 Best Ways to Use OpenAI on Your WordPress Website first appeared on WPBeginner.

January 26, 2023

How to Import & Export WooCommerce Products with Images

Do you want to import and export WooCommerce products with images?

Importing or exporting WooCommerce products with images allows you to easily move your store or add new products in multiple stores.

In this article, we will show you how to easily import and export WooCommerce products with images.

How to Import & Export WooCommerce Products with Images

Why Import & Export WooCommerce Products?

Many users need to import and export WooCommerce products for a number of reasons.

You may want to move products from one WooCommerce store to another
You may want to start an online store with a new WordPress website but with the same WooCommerce products
You may want to move your website to a new server but need a better way to move products
You may want a faster way to add your products to multiple stores that you manage
and more

Now normally if you are moving your website to a new server, then you can just duplicate your entire website and set it up on your new host.

We have a complete step-by-step guide for that, see how to easily move WordPress to a new host or server.

On the other hand, if you only want to move products, then this tutorial will help you learn how to properly export and import WooCommerce products with images and other product data.

We’ll show you two methods, you can choose one that works best for you.

Method 1. Import & Export WooCommerce Products without a Plugin

WooCommerce comes with built-in functionality to easily import and export products with images, but without using any additional plugins.

First, you need to visit the Products » All Products page in your WordPress admin area. There, you will see two buttons at the top to ‘Import’ or ‘Export’ products.

Let’s first check out how the export feature works.

Exporting WooCommerce Products without Using a Plugin

Simply click on the ‘Export’ button at the top to continue.

On the next screen, you’ll see a bunch of options to choose what data you want to export.

Default WooCommerce product export options

For instance, you can choose to only export certain columns from product data. You can also choose to export specific product types or products in specific categories.

To export all products with images and all other data, you can leave these options unchecked.

Optionally, you can check the ‘Export custom meta.’ If you are unsure, then it’s better to check it so that you have the data.

Go ahead and click on the ‘Generate CSV’ button to continue.

WooCommerce will now prepare a CSV file and download it to your computer.

What is a CSV File?

CSV is short for Comma Separated Values, and it is file type of plain text that separates different columns or fields of data with a comma.

You can open it with any spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Here is how it would look:

Importing WooCommerce Products without Using a Plugin

Simply go to the Products » All Products page and click on the Import button at the top.

If your WooCommerce store is empty, then instead of the buttons at the top, you will see buttons at the center of the page.

Click on the ‘Start Import’ button to begin the import.

This will bring up the import wizard.

First, you need to click on the ‘Choose File’ button to select the WooCommerce export CSV file you downloaded earlier.

Click on the continue button to upload the CSV file.

WooCommerce will now check to see if your CSV file is in a compatible format. After that, it will ask you to map that data to existing WooCommerce product data.

The default settings here will work for most WooCommerce stores.

However, you still need to review and if a column is missing, and then click on the drop-down menu next to it and select a matching field if available.

Particularly, if you are using variations attribute for products, then make sure to scroll down to the attributes columns and match fields.

This will allow you to ensure that the fields in your CSV file match the corresponding WooCommerce fields.

Click on the ‘Run’ the Importer button to begin.

WooCommerce will now start importing data from CSV file. It will also download any images attached to your products.

Once finished, you can visit the Products » All Products page to see the imported products.

Make sure to visit your shop and product pages to check that everything is working as expected.

Method 2. Import & Export WooCommerce Products with a Plugin

For this method, we’ll be using a plugin to import and export WooCommerce products.

The advantage of this method is that it offers more flexible options and also allows you to export / import product reviews.

Plus, it allows you to import / export WooCommerce products in batches which comes in handy if you have a large store with many products and images.

Exporting WooCommerce Products with a Plugin

First, you need to install and activate the Product Import Export for WooCommerce plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The plugin comes as three separate addons. You’ll need to download and install all of them.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Webtoffee Import Export (Pro) » Export page and select the ‘Product’ as the post type you want to export.

Exporting WooCommerce products using a plugin

On the next screen, you need to select an export method.

The default Quick Export method automatically selects all your products for export.

Optionally, you can also choose ‘Advanced Export’ which allows you to filter products by category, tag, and status.

You can also exclude individual products manually.

Click on the Export button to continue and the plugin will start preparing your product data.

Once finished, you’ll be prompted to download the export file to your computer.

Importing WooCommerce Products with a Plugin

Now that you have your export file ready, you can use it to import products on another WooCommerce store.

Simply install and activate the Product Import Export for WooCommerce plugin on the store where you need to import the products.

After that, go to the Webtoffee Import Export (Pro) » Import page and select ‘Product’ as the post type you want to import.

Click on the ‘Step 2: Select import method’ button to continue.

Next, you need to select an import method and upload the exported file you downloaded earlier to your computer.

Click on the ‘Step 3: Map and Import Columns’ button to continue.

On the next screen, you’ll see a list of fields and the matching fields from your import file. If you see an empty field, you can choose a matching field for it in the next column.

If you are using product variations like sizes and colors, then make sure to click on the Attributes tab to match attribute fields.

However, if you are not using any products with variations or custom attributes then you can use the default settings.

Click on the ‘Step 4: Advanced Options / Batch Import’ button to continue.

On the final screen, you’ll see advanced options. For instance, you can choose to match products by ID or SKU, choose what to do if a product already exists, and more.

If you are importing products into an empty WooCommere store, then you can use the default settings.

Finally, click on the ‘Import’ button to run the product import process.

You’ll see the progress of the import on screen. Once finished, you can click on ‘View Products’ to check if everything has been imported correctly.

The plugin also allows you to import and export Product Reviews.

If you want to import or export the product reviews too, then simply choose ‘Product Reviews’ post type on the import or export page.

Improve Your WooCommerce Store with Automations

If you find yourself doing a lot of manual work around your WooCommerce store and want to save time, then we recommend using Uncanny Automator for workflow automation.

Uncanny Automator helps you connect over 100+ plugins and apps with a simple no-code visual builder. You can use it to create automated workflows for things that you normally do without writing any code.

There’s a free version that you can try out, and it’s already used by over 20,000 websites.

Aside from workflow automation, if you’re looking for a marketing automation tool for WooCommerce, then we recommend using FunnelKit Automation. It will help you grow your sales and improve conversions without the high costs.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily import and export WooCommerce products with images in WordPress. You may also want to see our pick of the essential WooCommerce plugins or see these practical tips on recovering abandoned cart sales in WooCommerce.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Import & Export WooCommerce Products with Images first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 29, 2022

How to Send Automated Coupons in WordPress to Bring Back Customers

Do you want to send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers?

By sending the right coupon to the right person at the right time, you can re-engage customers who are losing interest. This can get you more sales, create brand loyalty, and help you keep your best customers.

In this guide, we’ll show you a few different ways to send automated coupons in WordPress, and bring back customers.

How to send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers

Why Send Automated Coupons to Bring Back Customers?

You may have heard the saying that it costs five times more to get a new customer than keep an old one.

While lead generation will help grow your business, you also need to keep your existing customers happy. Over time, people may lose interest in your website, forget about your products, or start shopping with a competitor.

That’s where automated coupons come in.

The best WordPress automation tools and plugins can watch your customers for signs they’re becoming disengaged. For example, a customer may not place an order for 2 months or stop opening your emails.

One way to bring those customers back is to automatically send them a coupon code via email. By creating this automated workflow in WordPress, you can retain customers without having to do all the hard work yourself.

Pro Tip: If you send coupons via email, then you’ll need to make sure those messages land in the customer’s inbox and not in the spam folder. Here, a good SMTP service provider is essential for improving your email deliverability. We also recommend using WP Mail SMTP as it allows you to easily send WordPress emails using any SMTP service provider.

With that being said, let’s see how you can send automated coupons in WordPress and bring back customers. Simply use the quick links below to jump to the method you want to use.

Method 1. Using FunnelKit (Best for WooCommerce Users)
Method 2. Using Uncanny Automator (Over 100 Integrations)

Method 1. Using FunnelKit (Best for WooCommerce Users)

One way to send automated coupons in WordPress, is by using FunnelKit Automations.

FunnelKit is a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin that allows you to create powerful customer winback campaigns. It also lets you create unique, personalized coupons, which can really catch the shopper’s attention.

FunnelKit integrates with WooCommerce and has lots of features that are designed to grow your online store. With that in mind, FunnelKit is a great choice if you already use WooCommerce to sell products and services online.

How to Set up the FunnelKit WordPress Plugin

First, you’ll need to install and activate the free version of FunnelKit Automations, as it provides the base for the premium plugin’s features. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After that, you’ll need to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations Pro plugin.

After activating both plugins, go to FunnelKit Automation » Settings. You can now go ahead and add the license key to the ‘License’ field.

Adding a license to the FunnelKit Automations WordPress plugin

You’ll find this information in your account on the FunnelKit website. After adding this information, click on the ‘Activate’ button.

How to Create an Automated Coupon Workflow for WordPress

Now, we’re going to create a workflow that will generate a personalized coupon and send it to the customer via email. This workflow will run once 30 days have passed since the customer’s last order.

To create the workflow, go to FunnelKit Automations » Automations (Next Gen) in the WordPress dashboard. Then, click on the ‘Add New Automation’ button.

Creating a new WordPress automation with FunnelKit

You’ll now see all the different automation templates that you can use.

Since we want to create our own workflow, select ‘Start from Scratch.’

Creating a custom automated workflow in WordPress

In the popup that appears, type in a name for the automation. This is just for your reference, so you can use anything you want.

With that done, click on ‘Create.’

Add a name to your FunnelKit automation workflow

Now, we need to choose the action that will kickstart the workflow, so click on ‘Select Trigger.’

In the left-hand menu, choose ‘WooCommerce’ and then click to select ‘Customer Win Back.’

Adding a 'customer winback' trigger to an automation workflow

With that done, click on ‘Done’ to add the trigger to your automation workflow.

Back in the main editor, click on the ‘Customer Win Back’ trigger.

Adding a trigger to the FunnelKit automation editor

In the ‘Customer Last Ordered Period’ section, you can type in how long FunnelKit will wait before running the workflow.

For example, in the following image the workflow will run when 30 days have passed since the customer’s last order.

FunnelKit will repeat this automation once every 24 hours, so it’s important to only run it for a short period of time. For this reason, we’ve set the workflow to stop when 35 days have passed since the customer’s last order.

Adding an order period to the automation recipe

In this way, you won’t annoy customers by sending them dozens of emails.

Next, you can set the time when the automation will run, using the ‘Schedule this….’ fields. FunnelKit will use your store’s timezone, so you may want to change your online store settings if you want to use a different timezone instead.

With that done, click on ‘Save.’

Back in the main workflow editor, click on ‘+’ and then select ‘Action.’

Adding actions to an automated workflow in WordPress

In the popup that appears, select ‘WooCommerce’ and then click on ‘Create Coupon.’

Simply click on ‘Done’ to add this action to the workflow.

How to create an automated coupon using FunnelKit

Back in the main FunnelKit editor, click on the action you just added. This opens a popup where you can customize the ‘Create Coupon’ action.

To start, type a name for the coupon into the ‘Coupon Title’ field. This is just for your reference so you can use anything you want.

Creating a winback customer automation workflow in WordPress

After that, choose the type of coupon that you want to create, using the ‘Discount Type’ dropdown menu.

FunnelKit supports percentage discount, fixed cart discount, and fixed product discount. Most of the time, you’ll want to select ‘Percentage Discount’ to make sure all customers get a similar benefit, no matter how much they spend or what products they buy.

After that, type an amount into the ‘Amount’ field. For example, you might offer customers 20% off, or a $5 discount on all purchases.

How to create an automated percentage discount coupon

FunnelKit automatically creates a unique coupon code for each contact. However, you can add a prefix to the start of the coupon, which can either be plain text or dynamic tags. FunnelKit will replace these tags with real text every time it creates a code, so this is a great way to create personalized coupons.

Since we want to bring shoppers back in, you may decide to include the customer’s name in the coupon. This can catch their attention, and also makes your code easier to remember.

To add plain text as a prefix, simply type into the ‘Coupon Code Prefix’ field.

Adding a prefix to the automated coupon code

To add one or more tags, click on the ‘Merge tags’ icon.

This is the button that has curly braces.

Adding dynamic text to the automated coupon code

Now, you’ll see all the tags that you can use in the automated coupon.

We’re going to use the {{contact_first_name}} tag, but you can use any tags you want.

How to create a personalized coupon code with merge tags

Simply copy each tag and then paste it into the ‘Coupon Code Prefix’ field.

As you can see in the following image, you can use a mix of plain text and tags.

How to create a personalized and dynamic coupon code

By default, the coupon will never expire. A sense of urgency and FOMO can push customers to use a coupon, so you may want to select the radio button next to ‘Expire after Specific Days’ or ‘Expire on Specific Date.’

You can then use the controls to specify when the coupon will expire.

Adding a coupon expiration date to your WordPress coupon

Finally, you can choose whether the coupon gives customers a free shipping discount.

Shoppers love free shipping, so you may want to consider adding this to your coupon by selecting the ‘Yes’ radio button under ‘Allow Free Shipping.’

How to create a free shipping discount for your online store

When you’re happy with how the coupon is set up, make sure you copy the small pieces of code under the ‘Coupon Title.’

You’ll need this coupon code for the email we’ll be creating in the next step, so store it somewhere safe.

Creating an automated coupon to win back customers

With that done, click on ‘Save’ to store your changes.

Now we have a coupon, it’s time to create the email that FunnelKit will send to your customers. To add an email action, click on the ‘+’ button and then select ‘Action.’

Add an email action to win back customers

If it isn’t already selected, then click on ‘Messaging’ in the left-hand menu.

Then, select ‘Send Email’ and click on ‘Done.’

Choosing an action in the FunnelKit automation plugin

You can now create an email by typing in a subject and preview, and adding body text.

Similar to creating a coupon, it’s best to use a mix of plain text and tags. To add dynamic tags, click on the ‘Merge Tags’ icons that appear next to the To, Subject, and Preview Text fields.

How to create a personalized email to win back customers

If you want to add tags to the email body, then you can click on the ‘Merge Tags’ button.

To add your coupon code, simply paste or type in the {{wc_dynamic_coupon id= code we copied in the previous step.

Create a personalized email to bring back customers

When you’re happy with how the email looks, click on ‘Save & Close.’

That’s it. When you’re ready to make the automation live, click on the ‘Inactive’ slider so it turns to ‘Active.’

Now, FunnelKit will automatically send the coupon to any customer who hasn’t purchased from you in the past 30 days.

Method 2. Using Uncanny Automator (Over 100 Integrations)

Another way to send automated coupons in WordPress, is by using Uncanny Automator. It is one of the best WordPress automation plugins on the market and lets you create powerful workflows to save time and help you respond to customers more quickly.

Uncanny Automator works seamlessly with WooCommerce, plus all of the must have WordPress plugins and third-party tools. If you’re already using lots of different software on your online store, then Uncanny Automator may be a good choice for you.

There is a free Uncanny Automator plugin that lets you automate many common tasks. However, we’ll be using Uncanny Automator pro because it works with WooCommerce.

To start, you’ll need to install Uncanny Automator pro, plus the free plugin as it provides the base for the premium version. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Automator » Settings and enter your license key into the ‘Uncanny Automator Pro license key’ field.

Adding an Uncanny Automator license to your WordPress website

You’ll find this information under your account on the Uncanny Automator website.

Uncanny Automator is a powerful and flexible plugin, so there’s lots of different ways that you can bring customers back to your site. Let’s take a look at a few options.

Automatically Send Coupons to Logged-Out Customers

It’s smart to let customers create an account with your online store, as it encourages brand loyalty and makes it easier for shoppers to buy from you in the future.

User registration can also help with lead generation. If you get the shopper’s email address, then you can target them with email marketing, personalized ads, an email newsletter, and much more.

If you’re using WooCommerce, then this plugin automatically creates all the pages customers need to create and manage an account. WooCommerce also adds a new Customer role, which it automatically assigns to any shoppers who register with your store.

Are you using a different eCommerce solution that doesn’t support customer registration? Then see our guide on how to allow user registration on your WordPress site.

After that, you can simply create a new role for your customers. For detailed instructions, please see our beginner’s guide to WordPress user roles and permissions.

If you allow user registration, then you can track when a shopper logs out of their account, as this suggests they’re losing interest in your store. You can then send a coupon to encourage them to log back in.

To create this recipe, simply go to Automator » Add new in the WordPress dashboard.

Uncanny Automator will now ask whether you want to create a recipe for logged-in users, or everyone. Go ahead and select ‘Logged-in users,’ then click on the ‘Confirm’ button.

Creating a logged-in automation recipe with Uncanny Automator

Next, you can give the recipe a name by typing into the ‘Title’ field. This is just for your reference so you can use anything you want.

Once you’ve done that, click on ‘WordPress’ in the ‘Select an integration’ area.

You can now choose a trigger, which is anything that kickstarts the recipe.

In the dropdown menu, start typing the following ‘A user logs out of a site’ and then select the right option when it appears.

Choosing a trigger for the automated coupon recipe

We only want to run the workflow when someone with the ‘Customer’ user role logs out of their account.

With that in mind, click on the ‘Add filter’ button.

How to create an automation workflow for your WooCommerce customers

In the popup that appears, click on ‘WordPress.’

Next, find ‘The user has a specific role’ in the dropdown menu.

Filtering your users based on WordPress role

Open the ‘Role’ dropdown and select the role you’re using for your customers.

After that, go ahead and click on ‘Save filter.’

Sending an automated coupon to your WooCommerce customers

Now it’s time to specify the action that Uncanny Automator will perform every time this workflow runs.

We’re going to send the customer an email containing a coupon, so go ahead and click on ‘Add action.’

Since we want to send an email, select ‘Emails’ as the integration.

In the dropdown that appears, click on ‘Send an email.’

Send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers

This adds all the fields that you can use to create the email.

To start, we need to make sure the message goes to the right user, by clicking on the asterisk next to the ‘To’ field. Then, select ‘Common’ and ‘User email.’

You can now create the email by adding a subject line and body text.

Here, you can use a mix of plain text and tokens, which are placeholders that Uncanny Automator replaces with real values automatically. For example, if you want to use the customer’s name, then you can click on the asterix and select ‘Common.’

Simply select the ‘User first name’ token to create the personalized greeting.

Adding a dynamic user name token to the coupon workflow

You’ll also need to create a coupon and add it to the email.

The easiest way is by using the Advanced Coupons plugin, which is the best WordPress coupon code plugin on the market. It lets you create lots of different advanced coupons to get more sales and grow your business.

For a step-by-step guide, please see our post on how to create smart coupons.

After creating a coupon, you can simply add it to the email.

Sending an automated coupon email in WordPress to bring back customers

When you’re happy with how the email looks, click on ‘Save.’

After that, it’s time to set a delay. This is how long Uncanny Automator will wait after the customer logs out, before sending them the coupon.

To add a delay, hover your mouse over the ‘Email’ action. When it appears, click on ‘Delay.’

How to add a delay to an automation workflow

You can then add your delay in the popup that appears.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and select ‘Set delay.’

Adding a time delay to the automated coupon recipe

When you’re happy with how the recipe is set up, it’s time to make it active.

In the ‘Recipe’ box, click the ‘Draft’ switch so that it shows ‘Live’ instead.

That’s it. Now, when a customer logs out of their account, Uncanny Automator will wait for the specified amount of time before sending them a coupon code.

Automatically Send Coupons for a Specific Product

Sometimes a shopper may look at a product multiple times. This suggests they’re interested in the item, but something is stopping them from making a purchase.

In this case, you may want to send them a coupon, which will encourage them to splash out on the product.

To get started, create a new recipe for logged-in users following the same process described above. After that, click on ‘WooCommerce’ in the ‘Select an integration’ area.

Adding WooCommerce as an integration in Uncanny Automator

Next, choose a trigger by typing the following ‘A user views a product.’

When the right trigger appears, give it a click.

Get more sales with an automated coupon recipe

By default, this trigger is set to ‘Any product.’

If you want to link the recipe to a specific product, then open the ‘Product’ dropdown and choose that product from the list.

Choose a WooCommerce product from the dropdown menu

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Number of times’ button.

By default, the recipe will run every time a customer looks at a product. You should change this, so the customer has to look at the product multiple times before triggering the recipe. To do this, type a different number into the ‘Number of times’ field.

Triggering a workflow when the customer views a product multiple times

When that’s done, click on ‘Save’ to store your settings.

This recipe should only run when a customer views a product, so click on ‘Add Filter.’ In the popup that appears, click on ‘WordPress’ and then choose ‘The user has a specific role.’

Adding WooCommerce features to an automation recipe

After that, open the ‘Role’ dropdown and select the role you’re using for your customers.

When you’re ready, click on ‘Save filter.’

Now it’s time to add the action. There are a few different ways to send automated coupons from your WordPress website.

To email a code to your customers using Uncanny Automator and Advanced Coupons, simply follow the same process described above.

Another option is to generate the code using WooCommerce. To do this, click on ‘Add Action’ and then select ‘WooCommerce’ as the integration.

Selecting the WooCommerce eCommerce plugin as an integration

In the search bar, start typing ‘Generate and email a coupon code to the user.’

When the right option appears, give it a click.

This will add some new settings where you can create the coupon code.

To generate a code automatically, simply leave the ‘Coupon code’ field blank.

How to create a coupon for your WooCommerce online store

In the ‘Discount type’ field, choose the kind of coupon that you want to create, such as a fixed cart discount or percentage discount.

For this guide, we’ll select ‘Percentage discount’.

How to create a percentage discount code

After that, type the percentage discount into the ‘Coupon amount’ field.

In the following image, we’re offering customers a 30% discount on their purchase.

In the next field, you can set an expiry date for the coupon, either by using the YYY-MM-DD format or typing in the number of days until the coupon expires.

For example, in the following image the coupon will expire after 7 days.

Adding an expiration date to an automated coupon code

You can also set a minimum and maximum spend for the coupon. We’ll leave these fields blank so the customer can use the code with any purchase.

You may also want to check the ‘For individual use only’ box so customers can’t use this code in combination with other coupons.

Next, scroll to the ‘Usage limit per coupon’ section. The shopper should only be able to use the coupon once, so type in ‘1.’

There are lots of other settings you can change for the coupon. It’s a good idea to look through these settings to see whether you want to make any more changes.

When you’re happy with how the coupon is set up, scroll to the ‘Email’ section. To start, find the ‘To’ field and then click on the asterisk next to it. Then, click on ‘Common’ and select ‘User email.’

Creating an automated coupon email to bring back shoppers

With that done, you can add a subject line and change the text in the email body.

To create a more personalized email, it’s a good idea to use a mix of plain text and tokens, by following the same process described above.

Adding a coupon to your WooCommerce email

When you’re happy with the email, click on the ‘Save’ button to store the recipe.

After that, you can make the recipe live by clicking the ‘Draft’ switch so that it shows ‘Live.’

Making an Uncanny Automator recipe live on your WordPress website

Now, every time someone views a product multiple times, it’ll trigger the recipe workflow.

We hope this article helped you learn how to send automated coupons in WordPress to bring back customers. You may also want to check out our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales and the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Send Automated Coupons in WordPress to Bring Back Customers first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 19, 2022

How to Send Automated Emails in WordPress

Are you looking to automate emails in WordPress?

Your small business or online store relies on email. However, keeping up with marketing emails, transactional emails, email notifications, and engaging with users can become overwhelming. Automating these emails can save you time and effort while delivering you better results.

In this article, we’ll show you how to send automated emails in WordPress to streamline your workflow and grow your business.

Why Send Automated Emails in WordPress?

Whether you have an online store, a membership site, or a small business website, you rely on email to keep it growing and running smoothly.

For example, you can use email to welcome new users and let them know when new content or products are available. Email is also useful for marketing campaigns and updating your customers on the progress of their orders.

You can even use email to notify yourself when there is a new post waiting for you to review, or that a WordPress update needs to be installed.

Since email is used for so many tasks on your WordPress website, it only makes sense to save time and effort by automating as many emails as possible.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to send automated emails in WordPress. Here are the topics we’ll cover in this tutorial:

Making Sure Your WordPress Email Is Being Sent Reliably
Sending Automated Drip Emails Using Constant Contact
Sending Automated Transactional Emails With FunnelKit Automations
Automating Marketing Emails Using Uncanny Automator
Bonus: Sending Automated Notification Emails

Making Sure Your WordPress Email Is Being Sent Reliably

Before you start automating your emails, it’s important to make sure that emails from your website are being delivered reliably.

By default, most WordPress hosting companies do not have the mail function configured properly. To prevent their servers from abuse, many hosting companies even turn it off completely. In these cases, your WordPress emails will fail to reach users.

Luckily, you can fix this easily by using WP Mail SMTP. This plugin lets you send your WordPress email through a reliable SMTP platform which is configured specifically to send emails like SendLayer, Gmail, Outlook, etc.

The free version of WP Mail SMTP should be more than sufficient for most websites. For more details, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email.

Sending Automated Drip Emails Using Constant Contact

A good place to start thinking about email automation is the way you market your store or business. And one of the best ways to automate marketing is with a drip campaign.

What Is an Automated Drip Campaign?

Automated drip campaigns are email messages that automatically guide your users along a specific journey. They’re great for boosting user engagement on your WordPress site.

For example, these messages can welcome new users, promote important content, upsell products, target specific geographic regions, and encourage users to register for events.

To send automated drip notifications by email, we recommend using Constant Contact because it’s the best email marketing service on the market. However, you can use any other major email marketing platform, including Sendinblue, HubSpot, and others.

To start, you can visit the Constant Contact website and create an account. The software gives you a 60-day free trial, so you can try it out before committing to a premium plan.

Pro Tip: If you use our Constant Contact coupon code, then you can also get 20% off by purchasing upfront.

Creating a List of Contacts

Once you sign up, you can visit the Constant Contact dashboard to create a contact list.

Constant Contact has already created a default list for you. However, you can create your own list by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab in the top menu, and then clicking the ‘Create List’ button.

A popup window will appear where you can enter a name for your list.

After that, simply click the ‘Save’ button.

You can add contacts to the list by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab and then clicking the ‘Add Contacts’ button.

A popup window will open with multiple options for adding new contacts.

Now you can add your contacts manually, upload them in a spreadsheet or CSV file, or import them from other apps.

Creating an Automated Drip Campaign

Once you’ve added your contacts, you need to create the drip campaign.

To do that, head over to the ‘Campaigns’ tab and then click the ‘Create’ button.

Next, Constant Contact will show you multiple options for creating a campaign.

Go ahead and select the ‘Email Automation’ campaign.

From here, you can select single-step automations or multi-step automation.

Single-step automations send just a single email, such as a welcome email. Multi-step automations let you create a series of emails that are automatically sent to your subscribers so you can let them know about your products and services, send special offers, and more.

In this tutorial, you’ll create a multi-step automation for when new subscribers join your email list. Go ahead and select the ‘A contact joins a list’ option.

Next, you will have to enter a name for your campaign.

Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button.

Constant Contact will then ask you to choose what activity will trigger the email. For example, the drip series is automatically triggered when a user joins your email list, opens an email, clicks a link, or buys a product.

You can use the default ‘Contact joins a list’ option as the trigger type. Then you can choose the email list you created earlier. Go ahead and click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done.

Creating the Emails for Your Drip Campaign

Now you need to create the emails to send in your automated drip campaign. The first one you create will be sent automatically when the user signs up.

To begin, simply click the ‘Create New Email’ option.

Constant Contact will now show different email templates to choose from.

For this tutorial, we’ll use the ‘Agent Welcome’ template.

You can customize the email template using the drag-and-drop email builder.

You can choose multiple elements from the menu on your left and place them on the template.

You also need to add the email’s content by removing the placeholder text and adding your own. Once you’ve done this, simply click the ‘Continue’ button at the top right of the editor and the email will be added to the drip series.

Next, you can add a second email by clicking the ‘+ Add to series’ button and then the ‘Create New Email’ button.

You’ll need to select a template and customize the new email as you did earlier. You can set the delay before the drip campaign sends its next email.

By default, this value is set to 4 days. You can change this by clicking the ‘Edit’ button in front of the section titled ‘Wait 4 days.’

This will open the ‘Time Delay Editor’ where you can choose when the next email in the drip campaign will be delivered. You can click the ‘Confirm’ button when you’re done.

Now, you should see all your emails in the campaign summary area.

Go ahead and click the ‘Activate’ button in the upper-right corner to launch your campaign.

Constant Contact will then show a prompt to verify whether you wish to activate your campaign.

Simply click the ‘Continue’ button, and the tool will check if everything is working properly and activate your campaign.

You’ve now successfully launched your automated drip email campaign.

For more detailed instructions, and to learn how to create a drip campaign using push notifications, see our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

Sending Automated Transactional Emails With FunnelKit Automations

If you are running a WooCommerce store, then your customers will receive different transactional emails. These help them get order confirmations, track their order status, get invoices, and find more information about your online store.

You can customize and automate these emails using FunnelKit Automations, a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation. It is a sister product to FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels), a powerful sales funnel builder for WooCommerce.

First, you need to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Creating Email Automation Workflows With FunnelKit Automations

Upon activation, you need to go to Campaigns » Automations (Next-Gen) to add a new automation from your FunnelKit Automations dashboard. Here you will see a library of email types that make it simple to create new automations.

You can import an email automation workflow with a single click, then use the visual email automation builder to make any customizations that you need.

For example, here’s the workflow for Abandoned Cart Reminder.

Autonami - Abandoned Cart Email Workflow for WooCommerce

Customizing WooCommerce Emails With FunnelKit Automations

FunnelKit Automations lets you customize any WooCommerce email and create new emails using a drag-and-drop email builder inside WordPress.

You can go to FunnelKit Automations » Templates from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Add New Email Template’ button.

Add new email template in FunnelKit Automations

Next, you can enter a name for your email template.

After that, make sure you click the ‘Add’ button to continue.

Now the plugin will let you enter a subject line and preview text for your email.

You can customize the content of your WooCommerce emails using rich text, HTML, or the visual builder.

The visual builder lets you select different elements from the menu on your left and place them on the template using drag and drop.

For instance, the ‘Content’ tab lets you can add columns, buttons, headings, menus, text, and more to the email template.

The ‘Body’ tab lets you further customize each element, such as the text color, alignment, font, size, and more.

Once you’re done, you can click the ‘Save’ button at the top.

For more detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WooCommerce emails. Once there, make sure you scroll down to the second section titled ‘Customizing WooCommerce Emails using FunnelKit Automations.’

Automating Marketing Emails Using Uncanny Automator

Of course, you’ll also still need to send marketing emails outside of your drip campaign. These are most effective when they are personalized and timely.

For example, you can use automated emails to showcase products similar to what your customer has already bought. Or you can automatically send users an email as soon as you publish a new article on your website.

You can do this easily by using Uncanny Automator. It’s the best WordPress automation plugin that allows you to create automated workflows for your WordPress site.

The free version easily connects with popular email marketing services such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, and others, making it easy to automate your email.

For this tutorial, we’ll use the free version of Mailchimp because it’s popular and they offer a free forever plan where you can send up to 10,000 emails per month to 2000 subscribers.

Getting Started With Uncanny Automator

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the free Uncanny Automator plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to the Automator » Add New page to create your first recipe. In this tutorial, we’ll send an automated email to subscribers whenever we publish a new post.

You’ll be asked to select which type of recipe you want to create. You should choose ‘Logged-in users’ and then click the ‘Confirm’ button.

Selecting an Uncanny Automator Recipe Type

Setting Up the Automation Trigger

Next, you need to choose whether the automation will be triggered by Uncanny Automator or WordPress.

Since you will be sending an automated email when a new WordPress post is published, you should click on the ‘WordPress’ option.

Selecting an Uncanny Automator Trigger Integration

Now you can choose from a long list of available WordPress triggers.

You need to select the trigger labeled ‘A user publishes a type of post with a taxonomy term in a taxonomy.’

You can use the search feature to find this trigger more quickly.

Selecting an Uncanny Automator WordPress Trigger

If you like, you can get specific about the types of posts that will trigger the email. You can choose a post type and a specific category or tag from the drop-down menus.

For this tutorial, we’ll go with the default settings.

Selecting the Types of Posts That Will Trigger the Automation

Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button when you have finished setting up the trigger.

Setting Up the Automation Trigger

Next comes the action part, where you choose what action will be triggered. To get started, simply click the ‘Add action’ button.

Clicking the Uncanny Automator 'Add action' Button

Now you will be shown a long list of integrations that are available for the action.

You should click the Mailchimp icon to connect it to your website.

Selecting an Uncanny Automator Action Integration

This will bring up a popup where you need to follow the on-screen instructions to finish the connection by logging into your Mailchimp account or creating a new one. Once connected, you will be able to choose what action you want to perform on your Mailchimp account.

You should then choose the option ‘Create a send a campaign’.

Choosing the Uncanny Automator 'Create and send a campaign' Action

Now you need to type a name for the campaign. You might like to use tokens so that the Mailchimp campaign name for each new post is different.

For example, you can click the ‘*’ button to the right of the field and select the ‘Post title’ token.

After that, you can use the drop-down menus to choose your audience and segment and fill in the subject and other details of your email.

You can compose your email in the ‘Email contents’ field. Make sure you use tokens so that the content is updated for each email campaign.

For instance, you can include tokens for the post title, post author display name, post excerpt, post URL, and featured image URL.

Once you are finished, you can switch the recipe from ‘Draft’ to ‘Live.’

Switching the Uncanny Automator Recipe From Draft to Live

From now on, when you publish a new article on your website, Mailchimp will automatically send an email to your subscribers.

You can learn more about building an effective mailing list in our guides on using Mailchimp and WordPress and how to create an email newsletter the right way.

You might also like to see our guide on how to automatically send a coupon to users who leave reviews in WooCommerce. It’s another good example of how you create automated emails using Uncanny Automator to build customer loyalty.

Bonus: Sending Automated Notification Emails

Now that you have set up automated emails for your users, you can do the same for yourself and your team.

For example, you can create automated email notifications to keep track of issues that require your immediate attention, such as when an author submits a post for you to review.

Creating a Notification for Posts Pending Review

You can also stop the WordPress notifications you don’t need from filling up your inbox, such as comment notifications.

To learn how to customize notification emails, see our step-by-step guide on how to add better custom notifications in WordPress.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to send automated emails in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to get a free email domain, or check out our list of the best WordPress membership plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Send Automated Emails in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

July 19, 2022

How to Connect Multiple WordPress Sites Together (3 Ways)

Do you want to connect two or more WordPress websites together?

Having multiple websites is an advantage for your business as you easily segment products and services for different customers and keep your main website secure. However, connecting each site and making them work together can be tricky.

In this article, we’ll show you how to connect multiple WordPress sites together.

Why Connect Multiple WordPress Websites Together?

Let’s say you have multiple websites like a WordPress blog and an online course website. If someone purchases a course from your blog, then you’d have to manually enroll them on to your site that has the learning management system (LMS).

This could take a lot of time, or cost you a lot if you need to hire help to get the job done.

On the other hand, you can automate different tasks and save time by connecting these websites together. When a customer purchases the course, they’re automatically registered and enrolled on a separate membership site. This is good practice to keep your main WordPress site secure.

Many people think of creating a WordPress multisite network when connecting numerous sites together. However, you don’t need to run a multisite network to connect each website together. In fact, that’s usually not the best solution.

We’ll show you 3 simple ways of making different websites work together. You can click the link below to jump ahead to any section you’re interested in:

Connect Multiple WordPress Sites Together Using a Plugin
Create a Subdomain to Connect WordPress Websites
Use Interlinking to Connect WordPress Websites

Method 1: Connect Multiple WordPress Sites Using a Plugin

The best way to connect two websites and make them talk to each other is by using the Uncanny Automator plugin. It’s the best WordPress automation plugin and helps you create automated workflows on your website.

You can think of the plugin as Zapier for WordPress websites. With Uncanny Automator, you can easily create a connection between multiple websites.

For this tutorial, let’s consider a situation where you have a WooCommerce store and a membership website.

We’ll show you how to connect both websites using Uncanny Automator. Our goal is to automatically register customers on your membership website when they buy a course from your store.

Note: Before you start, make sure that you’ve added a product to your WooCommerce store and created different membership levels on your membership site.

Next, you’ll need to install the Uncanny Automator plugin on both of your websites. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll be asked to install the Uncanny Automator free plugin. The lite version offers limited features and is used as a base for the pro version.

After that, you’ll need to go to the Automator » Settings page from your WordPress dashboard and enter your license key. You can find the key in the Uncanny Automator account area.

After entering the key, don’t forget to click the ‘Activate License’ button.

You’ll need to repeat the activation steps for both WordPress websites.

Creating a Recipe for Purchasing a Product on Your WooCommerce Store

Next, you’ll need to create a recipe on your WooCommerce store when customers purchase your product. ‘Recipes’ are automations.

To start, you can head over to Automator » Add New from your WordPress admin panel.

After that, you’ll be asked to select a recipe type. Logged-in recipes are triggered by logged-in users only, while ‘Everyone’ recipes can be triggered by all users.

Go ahead and select the ‘Logged-in users’ as the recipe type, since your customers will be creating an account and logging in to make a purchase. Then click the ‘Confirm’ button.

Next, you can enter a name for your recipe and select ‘WooCommerce’ as the integration. The name is for your reference only, and your users won’t see it.

Enter a name and select WooCommerce as integration

Then, you’ll need to select a trigger for your recipe.

Simply select the ‘A user completes, pays for, lands on a thank you page for an order with a product’ as the trigger.

Next, you’ll be asked to select the trigger condition.

You can select ‘pays for’ as the condition and click the ‘Save’ button.

After that, Uncanny Automator will ask you to select a product for your recipe.

Go ahead and select the digital product that’s on your WooCommerce store. For example, we’ll choose the WordPress Course: Ultimate Growth Hacking as the product for this tutorial.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button after selecting a product.

Now you’ll need to choose an ‘Action’ for your recipe.

To create the action, you’ll need to select an integration.

You can easily send the customer’s registration data to your membership website using a webhook. A webhook is a bit of code that allows different tools and apps to provide information to other apps in real-time.

Don’t worry, you won’t need to know how to code in order to use it. We’ll walk you through all the steps.

Go ahead and select ‘Webhooks’ as the integration.

In the next step, you can select an action for your chosen integration.

Simply select the ‘Send data to a webhook’ option.

Next, you’ll need to enter your webhook details.

Keep this tab open for now.

To complete the recipe on your WooCommerce store and fill in the webhook details, you need to create a webhook on your membership website.

Creating a Webhook on Your Membership Website

First, you’ll want to open your membership site in a new tab. Then head over to Automator » Add New from your WordPress admin panel on your membership site.

Go ahead and select ‘Everyone’ as the recipe type and click the ‘Confirm’ button.

After that, you will have to enter a name for your recipe and select a trigger integration for your recipe.

Simply click the ‘Webhooks’ as the integration.

In the next step, you’ll need to select a trigger for your integration.

Go ahead and select the ‘Receive data from a webhook’ as the trigger.

Next, the plugin will show the webbook URL. You can note down the URL in a text file, as we’ll need it later on to finish the recipe on your WooCommerce store.

After that, scroll down to the Fields section. Now enter ‘Email’ under the Key field and select ‘Email’ for the Value type.

Enter field details and cope the webhook link

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button.

Next, you can add an action to your recipe by clicking the ‘Add action’ button.

There will be different integrations you can choose for your action. Simply select the membership plugin you used to create the membership site.

In our case, we’ll select MemberPress since we used it to set up the membership site.

After that, you can choose an action for your selected integration.

Since we want our customers to subscribe to a membership automatically, we’ll select the ‘Add the user to a membership’ option.

A popup will now appear showing that the action will require WordPress user data.

Go ahead and click the ‘Set user data’ button.

Next, you’ll need to choose between an Existing User or a New User.

Simply click the ‘New User’ option.

A form will now appear where you can set the user data. You can leave the first name and last name fields blank.

Next, go ahead and click the asterisk icon (*) for the Email field. From the dropdown options, select ‘Field #1 Email’ under Receive data from a webhook.

Click the asterisk sign and select email field

You can repeat this step for the Username field as well. As for other fields, you can leave them blank.

Now, under the ‘What to do if the user already exists’ option, simply choose ‘Do nothing’ and click the Save button.

Next, you can select the membership plan you want the WooCommerce customer to subscribe to by clicking the Membership dropdown menu.

Besides that, you’ll see more fields for subtotal, tax amount, tax rate, status, gateway, and more. You can leave them to the default setting.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done.

If you want, there are more actions you can add to the recipe, like allowing WordPress to send a confirmation email or registering the user to a Zoom webinar.

Next, you can now go ahead and publish your recipe. Simply click the ‘Draft’ toggle on the right side of the page and change it to ‘Live.’

Finishing Your Purchase Recipe in WooCommerce

Now that your recipe is active on the membership website, it’s time to finish up the recipe on your WooCommerce store.

First, go back to your WooCommerce website and open the recipe we created earlier. Next, enter the webhook link we copied in a text file (when creating a recipe on the membership site) under the ‘URL’ field.

Next, you can scroll down and keep the Request Method and Data format to the default setting.

Under the Body section, you can click the asterisk (*) sign for the ‘Key’ field and select ‘Billing email’ as the option. Similarly, you can also select ‘Billing email’ for the Value field.

Add additional data for WooCommerce recipe

There’s also an option to send test data to see if your connection is set up correctly.

When you’re done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button.

Next, go ahead and publish your recipe by clicking the Draft toggle and changing it to Live.

That’s it!

Whenever a customer purchases your selected WooCommerce product, they’ll be automatically subscribed to a membership plan on your membership website.

You can use this same method to set up similar automations to connect multiple WordPress sites together.

Method 2: Create a Subdomain to Connect WordPress Websites

Another way you can connect multiple WordPress websites is by creating a subdomain.

However please keep in mind that these websites will not be in sync automatically, and you will have to manually update both of them.

Subdomains are additional parts of your primary domain name and help you organize different sections of your WordPress website. You can use them to separate other functions from your main website.

For example, let’s you want to create an eCommerce store but keep it away from your main domain. In this case, you can create a subdomain for your online store, and your website will look like this:

https://store.yourexamplewebsite.com

Similarly, you can create a subdomain for different locations like uk.yourexamplesite.com or fr.yourexamplesite.com.

At WPBeginner, we also use a subdomain for our video content. You can visit https://videos.wpbeginner.com/ and get access to numerous video tutorials on WordPress.

You can easily create a subdomain using your WordPress hosting account. For more details, you can see our explanation about subdomains and how to create one.

Then, you can see our guide on how to install WordPress to create another WordPress site on the subdomain.

You can also connect multiple WordPress sites together by linking them together. The links will help to boost your WordPress SEO by passing authority (link juice) to each domain.

One common way to do this is by adding a custom link to your main navigation menu.

You can also add a link to your website’s footer.

For example, on WPBeginner, you’ll see that we’ve linked to websites that are part of the WPBeginner family of products along with some site links.

To edit your WordPress footer and add links to another website, please see our guide on how to edit the footer in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to connect multiple WordPress sites together. You can also see our guide on how to start a WordPress podcast and the best WordPress plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Connect Multiple WordPress Sites Together (3 Ways) first appeared on WPBeginner.

June 27, 2022

How to Automatically Publish from WordPress to Instagram

Do you want to automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram?

Instagram is one of the largest social media sites in the world with about a billion active users. By sharing your blog posts to Instagram, you can reach more people and get them to visit your website.

In this article, we will show you how you can automatically post to Instagram whenever you publish a new WordPress post.

How to automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram

Why Automatically Publish From WordPress to Instagram?

As one of the largest social media websites in the world, many WordPress website owners use Instagram to connect with potential new readers, website visitors, and customers.

Once you have some followers on Instagram, you can use this social networking site to promote your WordPress blog. Every time you publish a blog post, it’s a good idea to let your Instagram followers know about your new content.

To make your blog post stand out on Instagram, you’ll need to add an eye-catching image and an interesting caption. While Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links in captions, you can link to your blog from your Instagram bio, so your followers can easily find your latest posts.

You can also add a link in bio page which lets you showcase more than link to your Instagram bio.

Since running an engaging Instagram account takes time and effort, you can save some of that time by automating the process of publishing to Instagram automatically.

That being said, let’s see how you can automatically post to Instagram whenever you publish a new WordPress blog post.

Automatically Publish from WordPress to Instagram

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin that helps you create automated workflows without having to write code.

It connects with more than 80 plugins and third-party apps, so you can build smart automation workflows that saves you time. For example, you can integrate Slack with WordPress, create a workflow that automatically posts to Facebook from WordPress, and much more.

The free version of Uncanny Automator comes with over 100 automation triggers and actions.

In this guide, we’ll be using the free version, so you can automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram even if you’re on a tight budget and just getting started. If you want to build more powerful and advanced workflows, then Uncanny Automator Pro includes over 400 triggers and actions.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Uncanny Automator plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Automator » Settings. Then, simply click on ‘Connect your site.’

Uncanny Automator will now ask whether you want to upgrade to get more credits, triggers, and actions. If you do want to upgrade, then click on the ‘Upgrade to Pro now…’ button and follow the instructions to buy Uncanny Automator Pro.

If you want to automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram using the free version of Uncanny Automator, then simply click on ‘Connect your free account.’ You can always upgrade to Uncanny Automator Pro at a later date.

Uncanny Automator will now show a popup where you can create an account by typing in your name, email address, and the password that you want to use. After typing in this information, click on ‘Sign Up.’

After a few moments, Uncanny Automator will show a message confirming that you’ve set up the plugin.

Next, you need to click on ‘Return to dashboard.’

Before you can start automatically publishing from WordPress to Instagram, you’ll need to connect your Instagram account to Uncanny Automator.

Note: To post automatically, you’ll need an Instagram Business account that’s connected to a Facebook page for your business. Don’t already have an Instagram Business account? The good news is that it’s free. Here’s Instagram’s guide on how to convert a standard account into an Instagram Business account.

To connect Uncanny Automator to your Instagram account, go to Automator » Settings. Then, click on the ‘Premium integrations’ tab.

In the left-hand menu, go ahead and click on ‘Instagram.’

Since Instagram is owned by Facebook’s parent company, you’ll need to connect to the Facebook page that’s linked to your Instagram Business account.

To get started, click on the ‘Connect Facebook Pages’ button.

Connecting Uncanny Automator and Facebook

Uncanny Automator will now guide you through the process of connecting to your Facebook page. Once you’ve done that, Uncanny Automator will ask you to select the Instagram account that you want to use.

After choosing an account, you’ll need to select the actions that Uncanny Automator can take, and the information it can access on Instagram. Since we want to automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram, you’ll need to enable the first two options:

Access profile and posts from the Instagram account connected to your Page.
Upload media and create posts for the Instagram account connected to your Page.

After that, go ahead and click on the ‘Done’ button.

Once you’ve done that, Uncanny Automator will take you back to the WordPress dashboard.

You should now see that Uncanny Automator is connected to your Instagram account.

Connecting Uncanny Automator and Instagram

The next step is creating the workflow that will automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram. Uncanny Automator calls these workflows ‘recipes,’ and they’re made up of actions and triggers.

To build a recipe, go to Automator » Add New.

On this screen, you’ll be asked to select whether you want to create a ‘Logged-in’ recipe or an ‘Everyone’ recipe.

Blog posts can only be published by a user who has a WordPress account. With that in mind, click on ‘Logged-in users.’ Then, just click on the ‘Confirm’ button.

You can now start to build your Uncanny Automator recipe.

First, you’ll need to add a title by typing into the field that shows ‘Add Title’ by default.

We’ll call the recipe ‘Automatically Publish from WordPress to Instagram’, but you can use anything you want.

Creating a recipe to automatically post to Instagram

Next, you need to define the condition that will trigger the action. For our recipe, the trigger is someone publishing a new blog post.

To add a trigger, simply click on the WordPress button in the Triggers section.

The WordPress automated workflow triggers

You’ll now see a list of all the Uncanny Automator triggers.

In the ‘Search for triggers’ field, start typing the following: ‘A user publishes a type of post with a taxonomy term in a taxonomy‘.

When the right trigger appears, click on it to add it to your Uncanny Automator recipe.

Automatically posting from WordPress to Instagram

Next, you’ll need to decide the type of content that will trigger the recipe. Simply click on the Post Type dropdown and then choose between post, page, media, or any post type.

Since we want to post to Instagram every time someone publishes a new blog, you’ll typically want to click on ‘Post.’

Creating an automated workflow for Instagram

At this point, you can tell Uncanny Automator to only run this recipe for posts that have a certain category or tag. For example, you may only want to automatically post when a blog has the ‘announcement’ tag.

This gives you more granular control over the content that gets published to your Instagram account, while still getting the time-saving benefits of an automated workflow.

To limit this recipe to a specific tag or category, open the ‘Taxonomy’ dropdown. Here, you can click on either ‘Category’ or ‘Tag’

Adding categories and tags to an automated workflow

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Taxonomy term’ dropdown.

You can now click on any of the categories and tags to add them to your recipe.

When you’re happy with the information you’ve entered, click on ‘Save’ to save your changes. Uncanny Automator will now show a summary of the action that will trigger your recipe.

The next step is choosing the action that will happen every time you publish a new WordPress post. Start by clicking on the ‘Add action’ button.

Automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram with Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator will now show all the plugins and apps that you can use for the recipe.

You simply need to find ‘Instagram,’ and give it a click.

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Search for actions’ field. In this field, start typing in ‘Publish a photo to an Instagram Business account.’

When the right action appears, click to add it to your recipe.

Automatically publish a photo to Instagram

You’ll now see a new set of controls.

To start, we need to specify the image that Uncanny Automator will post to Instagram every time you publish a new WordPress post.

Sometimes you may want to use the same image for every post. For example, you might have used image editing software to create a special image advertising your website.

To use the same image every time, either type or copy/paste the image’s URL into the ‘Image URL or Media library ID’ field.

Adding an image URL to your automated workflow

To get an image’s URL, simply find the image in your WordPress media library.

You can then copy the value in the ‘File URL’ field, as you can see in the following image.

Another option is to use a different image for every WordPress post, so you’re not posting the same image to Instagram over and over again.

Every time you publish a blog, Uncanny Automator can post the blog’s featured image to Instagram. If you need help adding featured images to your posts, you can see our guide on how to add featured images or post thumbnails in WordPress.

To post the blog’s featured image to Instagram, click on the asterisk button next to the ‘Image URL or Media library ID’ field.

Then, simply click on the ‘Search token’ field and start typing ‘post featured image URL.’

When the right token shows up, give it a click to add it to your recipe. Now, Uncanny Automator will get the post’s featured image and post it to Instagram automatically.

The next step is typing in the caption that Uncanny Automator will add to the Instagram post.

One method is to simply type text into the ‘Caption’ box, such as ‘We just published a new post. Read all about it on our blog!’ Uncanny Automator will then use this caption for every single Instagram post.

Posting a caption to Instagram automatically

Another option is to add tokens to the caption. Similar to dynamic text, Uncanny Automator will replace the token with a unique value that it gets from the blog post, such as the post’s title or URL.

This allows you to create more engaging and interesting captions, instead of posting the same caption over and over again.

To see all the different tokens that you can use, go ahead and click on the asterisk button.

In the dropdown menu, find ‘A user publishes…’ and then click on the arrow next to it.

Now, find the token that you want to add to your caption, and click on it.

To create more interesting and helpful captions, you may want to use a mix of plain text and tokens, as you can see in the following image.

When you’re happy with your recipe, click on the ‘Save’ button.

The final step is activating the recipe so that it will start automatically publishing from WordPress to Instagram.

To publish your automated workflow, find the ‘Recipe’ section towards the right side of the screen. Then, simply click on the slider to turn it from ‘Draft’ to ‘Live.’

Publishing an automated workflow in WordPress

Now every time someone publishes a new blog on your WordPress website, Uncanny Automator will make a new Instagram post automatically.

How to Get More Out of Your Instagram Feed

Automatically publishing your blog posts to Instagram is a great way to keep your Instagram content fresh and updated.

To get more attention to their Instagram accounts, often professional bloggers and online store owners will embed their Instagram feed on their websites.

This helps you add social proof, keep visitors longer on your site, increase engagement, and even boost sales.

The easiest way to embed Instagram feeds on WordPress is by using Smash Balloon Instagram Feed. It is the best Instagram plugin for WordPress and allows you to add Instagram content to your website automatically.

There’s a free version of the Instagram plugin that’s used by over 1 million websites.

Embedding an Instagram feed in WordPress

You can use Smash Balloon to customize exactly how your Instagram feed will look on your website, and the content it shows.

You can even sort feeds based on Instagram hashtags, show likes and comments, create a custom Instagram photo feed in WordPress, and more using its simple editor.

After creating your feed, you can add it to any page, post, or widget ready area simply by using the Instagram Feed block.

For more details, see our guide on how to easily embed Instagram in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to automatically publish from WordPress to Instagram. Next, you can see our guide on how to embed a Facebook video in WordPress, or see our expert pick of the best social media plugins for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Automatically Publish from WordPress to Instagram first appeared on WPBeginner.

March 11, 2022

18+ Best ClickFunnels Alternatives in 2022 (Better Features + Free)

Are you looking for the best ClickFunnels alternatives?

ClickFunnels is a powerful sales funnel builder you can use to convert website visitors into leads and customers. However, it might not be the best choice for your WordPress site.

In this article, we’ll show you the best ClickFunnels alternatives you can use with WordPress.

18 Best ClickFunnels Alternatives (Better Features + Free)

Is ClickFunnels Right for Your WordPress Business?

ClickFunnels is website builder software that makes it easy to generate leads, sell products, host webinars, and grow your email list.

While ClickFunnels might simplify the process of building a sales funnel, it can be very expensive and doesn’t offer the same level of flexibility that WordPress provides.

For example, WordPress makes it easy to build a complete online store, create sales funnels, grow your WordPress blog, and more.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best ClickFunnels alternatives that you can use to create your own sales funnels using WordPress.

We’ve created a table of contents to make it easier to find the best ClickFunnels alternatives for specific features you need.

Alternatives for building landing pages and sales funnels
Alternatives for managing leads
Alternatives for generating leads
Alternatives for selling products
Alternatives for creating premium content and courses
Alternatives for website and store analytics
Alternatives for managing affiliates

Alternatives for Building Landing Pages and Funnels

One of the main features of ClickFunnels is the ability to create high converting sales funnels. Sales funnels lead a user on a path from a visitor to a customer.

The entire process starts with building your own landing page. Some of the most popular landing page solutions include SeedProd, WooFunnels, and Leadpages.

1. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best alternative to Clickfunnel’s drag and drop landing page builder. It’s the best WordPress landing page plugin in the market used by over 1 million websites.

It lets you easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and more. Plus, you can even create a custom WordPress theme without writing any code.

SeedProd comes with dozens of professional templates that are optimized for higher conversions. Every template can be completely customized with the intuitive drag and drop builder.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a landing page with WordPress.

To increase your conversions even further, see our proven tips on how to increase your landing page conversions by 300%.

2. WooFunnels

WooFunnels is a powerful page builder that lets you create full sales funnels from start to finish. It comes with ready-to-use templates for checkout pages, order forms, opt-in pages, and more.

Besides the page builder, it also includes tools for abandoned cart tracking, automations, customer segmentation, lead capture forms, and even email marketing.

Plus, there are built-in A/B testing and analytics features, so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your landing pages.

3. Leadpages

Leadpages is another easy to use page builder that helps you create lead generation pages and landing pages.

It includes a large template library that you can use to quickly create a landing page. Every page template can be fully customized with the drag and drop builder.

Leadpages also has built-in optimization tools and unique lead generation features like popups, alert bars, and more.

Once you collect your leads, you can use the included payment tools to sell your services and products.

To learn more, see our comparison of Instapage vs Leadpages vs Unbounce vs SeedProd.

Alternatives for Managing Leads

Once you start to generate leads through your landing page, you need a way to manage those leads and start to make sales.

Here are some of the best alternatives to Clickfunnel’s email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation features.

4. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the best email marketing service for small businesses. It’s one of the largest and fastest-growing email marketing services in the world. It lets you easily manage your email list, contacts, and more.

Every account gives you access to unlimited emails, tracking and reporting, a free image library, list segmentation, integration with Facebook ads, and more.

It’s very easy to set up and create your own email newsletters using the drag and drop email creator.

Plus, if you opt for one of the higher Email Plus plans, you’ll get access to even more powerful features like email automation, surveys & polls, and more

Some other great choices for getting started with email marketing include Sendinblue, which offers a basic free plan, and Drip, which is great for more advanced email automations for eCommerce sites.

5. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is one of the best CRMs for small businesses who are looking for a cost-effective solution to manage leads.

There are multiple free plans you can choose from in the CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service hubs. So, if you’re a growing business, then it can be a great cost effective solution.

Plus, the free plan offers support for unlimited users and unlimited contacts.

It offers you a view of your entire sales pipeline, so you can monitor your sales, contact activity, team performance, and more.

For more details, see our guide on how to add a CRM on your WordPress site and get more leads.

6. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin in the market. It lets you create powerful workflows to save time without writing any code.

It seamlessly integrates with the most popular WordPress plugins and third-party tools to create custom automations in a couple of clicks.

Think of it like Zapier, but for WordPress websites.

For example, you can integrate Slack with WordPress, send WordPress forms data to Google Sheets, and much more.

If you need to share marketing data with your team or want to automate any other task related to your WordPress site, then Uncanny Automater is a great choice.

Plus, there’s a free version of the plugin you can use to get started, which supports all kinds of WordPress plugins and actions.

To learn more, see our guide on how to create automated workflows in WordPress with Uncanny Automator.

Alternatives for Generating Leads

One of the main reasons to use ClickFunnels is to generate leads to sell your products and services.

Here are some of the best alternatives you can use to generate leads using WordPress.

7. WPForms

WPForms is the best lead generation WordPress plugin in the market used by over 5 million websites.

It includes a library of over 300 pre-built form templates you can use as a starting point for your lead generation form. Then, you can easily customize the form to match your needs by using the drag and drop builder interface.

WPForms also integrates with many other popular plugins like OptinMonster and SeedProd, to help simplify the lead generation process.

You can even use the free version of the plugin, which lets you create a simple form and connect it with your Constant Contact account.

For more details, see our step by step guide on how to create an email newsletter the right way.

8. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is an incredibly powerful lead generation tool and WordPress popup plugin that you can use on your WordPress site.

It lets you simply create high converting popups and email sign up forms that you can use to turn abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers.

There’s a library of over 400+ templates you can fully customize with the drag and drop editor.

It’s the best tool for creating high converting alert bars, slide-in scroll boxes, spin to win optins, and more.

Plus, you can combine this with the page targeting features to show customized popup messages for different pages on your site, which has been proven to increase conversions.

You can even use OptinMonster to generate leads in other ways. For example, you can use the content locking feature to offer visitors a preview of your content before signing up.

For more details, see our guide on how to grow your email list in WordPress with OptinMonster.

9. Formidable Forms Calculator

Formidable Forms is an advanced drag and drop form builder with a wide variety of calculator templates that you can use to generate leads.

Calculators are a popular type of lead magnet used by some of the best blogs in the world.

Most calculators will help fill a need, solve a problem, or answer a question for your readers. To get their results, your readers will enter their email addresses.

There are all kinds of unique calculators you can build with this plugin, including a mortgage calculator, a BMI calculator, paycheck calculator, fitness tracker, and more.

To learn more, see our guide on how to generate more leads with free online calculators.

10. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway and contest plugin in the market. It lets you easily create viral giveaways to increase your traffic and help grow your email list.

RafflePress comes with a drag and drop builder you can use to create your campaigns quickly. Plus, it includes a template library to make the giveaway creation process even faster.

There are all kinds of advanced features like social media sharing, success tracking, fraud protection, email verification, giveaway landing pages, and more.

All of this ensures you can run a successful contest or giveaway to help you generate more traffic, leads, and customers.

To learn more, see our guide on how to create a giveaway to grow your email list by 150%.

Alternatives for Selling Products

ClickFunnels has built-in features that let you sell a variety of different products.

Here are some of the top WordPress plugins that add eCommerce and shopping cart functionality to your site.

11. WP Simple Pay

WP Simple Pay makes it easy to accept one-time and recurring payments in WordPress without setting up a shopping cart.

It also includes an easy to use drag and drop payment form builder and all the tools you need to accept payments on your site securely.

It also easily integrates with pricing table plugins, so you can create beautiful pricing pages for your website.

For more details, see our guide on how to accept payments with Stripe in WordPress.

There’s also a free version of the plugin available that offers a free Stripe integration for WordPress.

12. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads lets you easily sell digital downloads using WordPress.

It’s beginner friendly and comes with all the features you need to create a beautiful and functional digital goods store. It allows you to sell eBooks, PDF files, plugins, and much more.

It also has features to easily manage your records, offer discount codes, view your product and sales data, and more.

We use Easy Digital Downloads to sell our software MonsterInsights and WPForms.

13. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins in the market. It’s completely free and open-source and has all the features you need to build a fully functional online store.

There’s also a large library of addons and WooCommerce themes you can use to add new features to your WooCommerce store.

It can be used to sell both digital and physical goods, has built in inventory management, support for multiple payment gateways, and more.

You can also fully customize your product pages, checkout page, thank you pages, and more, to improve your conversions.

Alternatives for Creating Premium Content & Courses

ClickFunnels offers online course management features, so you can sell, create, and manage your paid content.

Here are the best ClickFunnels alternatives for course creation and premium content features.

14. MemberPress

MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin in the market that’s helped online creators earn over $1 billion dollars.

It’s very beginner friendly and be used to create membership sites, content paywalls, online courses, sell eBooks and digital downloads, and much more.

Basically, MemberPress makes it simple to restrict access to any kind of premium content on your WordPress website.

It uses a course builder built on top of the WordPress block editor, so it’s easy to add lessons, manage access controls, and more.

To learn more, see our ultimate guide on creating a WordPress membership site.

15. LearnDash

LearnDash is a very flexible and easy to use WordPress LMS plugin.

It’s built with teachers in mind and lets you easily create online courses with the drag and drop course builder. You can create multi-layer courses with lessons, quizzes, topics, and categories.

Plus, it integrates with popular payment services, forum plugins like bbPress, and even MemberPress, to more easily manage subscriptions.

Alternatives for Website & Store Analytics

ClickFunnels provides users with analytics data to better understand their traffic, conversions, and sales.

With the right WordPress plugin, you can do all of this and more.

16. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress analytics plugin used by over 3 million websites.

It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows reports with the most useful data right in your WordPress dashboard.

You can see your most important metrics like, your top posts and pages, audience demographics, main sources of traffic, income reports, and more.

MonsterInsights ecommerce report example

All of this data helps you better understand your users, reduce abandoned carts, and make more sales.

For more details, see our guide on how to track user engagement in WordPress with Google Analytics.

Alternatives for Managing Affiliates

ClickFunnels includes affiliate management features that let you create and manage your very own affiliate program. Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase awareness about your business and make money online.

Let’s take a look at the WordPress plugins that offer alternatives to ClickFunnels affiliate management software.

17. AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is the best affiliate tracking and management software for WordPress.

It lets you easily create your own affiliate program and build your network of affiliates to help you sell your products and services.

There’s real-time reporting, integration with popular eCommerce plugins, and more. It includes everything you need to manage your affiliate program within your WordPress dashboard.

18. Easy Affiliate

Easy Affiliate is another popular all-in-one affiliate program plugin for WordPress. It’s very easy to use and includes many helpful features to track and manage your affiliates.

This solution makes it easy to create your own self-hosted affiliate program, along with real-time reports to track the performance of your affiliates.

It also includes built-in fraud detection and integrates with other popular plugins on this list like MemberPress, WooCommerce, and more.

Bonus: Additional Tools to Improve Sales Funnel Conversions

Beyond the ClickFunnels alternatives highlighted above, there are some additional ways you can improve your sales and conversions.

The following tools will help you make more money from your website and build trust with your visitors.

19. TrustPulse

TrustPulse is the best social proof plugin for WordPress in the market. It lets you simply display real-time notifications of user actions on your site.

You can use it to display recent purchases, free trial sign-ups, email newsletter sign-ups, and more. These notification popups are highly effective and won’t detract from the user experience on your site.

TrustPulse can be set up on your website in a few minutes and is proven to increase your conversions by as much as 15%.

It also includes powerful features like smart targeting, which will show your social proof messages to the right people at the right time.

For more details, see our guide on how to use FOMO on your WordPress site to increase conversions.

20. PushEngage

PushEngage is the best web push notification software in the market.

It lets you send targeted messages to your visitors after they leave your site to help bring users back to complete their purchase.

You can use these for product announcements, coupons, abandoned cart reminders, and more.

Push notifications go directly to your user’s web browser or mobile device, which means they have a very high engagement rate.

PushEngage is easy to set up and comes with powerful features to help you optimize your campaigns, including A/B testing, custom triggered campaigns, smart opt-in reminders, and much more.

For more details, see our guide on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you find some of the best ClickFunnels alternatives for your WordPress site. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best web design software and our expert picks of the best free website hosting.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 18+ Best ClickFunnels Alternatives in 2022 (Better Features + Free) first appeared on WPBeginner.

February 4, 2022June 17, 2024

6+ Best Product Review Plugins for WordPress (2024)

Our readers often ask us if there are any WordPress product review plugins that we recommend.

During our 16+ years of blogging, we’ve reviewed and written about a lot of different products that we recommend to our readers. We have also collected and displayed different customer reviews for the plugins that we develop through our partner companies.

While we did these things completely manually in the past, plugins can speed up the process a lot. Plus, product review plugins can help you get more traffic from search engines, boost affiliate link clicks, add user-submitted reviews to your website to increase social proof, and more.

That’s why we have tested the most popular WordPress product review plugins on the market, while paying attention to features, user-friendliness, and different use cases.

In this article, we have hand-picked the best product review plugins for WordPress.

Why Use Product Review Plugins in WordPress?

What do you do when you want to buy something online? If you are like most people, then you probably check out product reviews to compare different options.

If you have an online store, then allowing your customers to submit reviews is a smart way to add social proof to your website and boost sales.

Even a niche review site where you are writing all the reviews yourself can use a product review plugin. The right plugin will help you optimize your reviews in search results so you can get more clicks and traffic.

WordPress makes it easy to add new blog posts and create important website pages, but writing review content or adding reviews to your website requires additional features offered by WordPress plugins.

Product review plugins can help you make more sales, let users add reviews to your website, display reviews from third-party platforms, and more.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best product review plugins you can use on your WordPress site.

Why Trust WPBeginner?

At WPBeginner, our team has 16+ years of experience in blogging, affiliate marketing, and running WordPress websites. We also thoroughly test each of the plugins that we recommend on real websites.

For more details, see our editorial process.

1. WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro is the best WordPress product review plugin on the market. It gives you full control over your WordPress product reviews, makes it easy to create product comparisons, and much more.

It includes a library of pre-designed templates you can customize to match the design of your website. There are different types of rating systems you can use, like percentage, star rating, points, and more.

Creating a custom review box lets you present all the important product information for your visitors, including a link to buy the product.

Review schema markup is automatically included, allowing you to show star ratings in the search results. When we tested the plugin, we realized that you can also let your users add their reviews to your products, rate features, and vote on other users’ comments.

Pros

The plugin lets you display reviews from third-party sources like Facebook, Google Places, and Yelp, so you can easily add social proof to your WordPress website.
WP Review allows you to create a pros and cons section for each product.
It lets you control who can review your website with its review user roles feature.
The plugin offers complete spam protection, import/exports reviews, and has a WooCommerce integration.

Cons

WP Review has a free plan, but most of the features can only be unlocked in the pro version.

Why we recommend WP Review Pro: Overall, WP Review Pro is the best product review plugin. It comes with lots of premade templates, makes it super easy to add reviews from other sources, and also offers complete spam protection.

2. All In One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress on the market used by over 3 million websites. It lets you easily add product review schema to your review blog posts and optimize your content to get more traffic from search engines.

Schema markup doesn’t appear on your website for visitors to see, but it helps search engines better understand your content and display your product reviews properly.

Rich snippets will catch potential visitors’ attention and are more likely to get clicks from the search results.

When you are writing your product reviews, AIOSEO will automatically detect the right type of schema based on what you are writing.

You also have full control over the product review schema and can enter relevant product information for search engine bots to read.

Pros

With AIOSEO, you can add existing customer reviews to improve the search appearance. You will find this option below the review schema box in your post editor.
You can optimize your product images for SEO with the plugin.
It offers on-page SEO analysis, local SEO, social media integrations, and a broken link assistant.
When testing the plugin, we realized that AIOSEO can also act as a writing assistant and help you write better product descriptions.

Cons

The plugin does not offer any premade templates for product reviews and does not let you add product reviews from other sources.

There is a free version of the plugin available, but you’ll need the pro version to access the product review schema feature.

Why we recommend AIOSEO: If you want to optimize your product reviews for SEO, then All in One SEO is the best option. Its product review schema allows you to easily add product reviews and boost search engine rankings on your website.

For more details, you can see our complete All in One SEO review.

3. Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro

Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro is the best Google Reviews plugin. It also allows you to display reviews on your website from different sources like Yelp, Facebook, WordPress.org, Trustpilot, and TripAdvisor.

The plugin comes with an easy-to-use editor that lets you customize your product reviews feed according to your liking. You can change the feed’s layout, add different buttons, and create your own color scheme.

The Smash Balloon Review Feed Pro plugin

You can then add the product reviews feed to any page, post, or widget area on your website using Smash Balloon’s block or shortcode.

Pros

Reviews Feed Pro lets you create multiple product review feeds for different platforms.
It lets you filter reviews based on star ratings, keywords, or specific platforms.
You can configure the reviews feed to match your WordPress theme.
The plugin offers optimized images, local storage, and background caching for fast-loading review feeds. When we tested the plugin, it loaded the product review feed in no time.
Smash Balloon also offers other plugins that you can use to embed Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds. You can also create a social wall with it.

Cons

The plugin’s free plan only lets you add Yelp or Google reviews. To add a feed for product reviews from other sources, you will need to upgrade to the pro plan.
It does not offer a feature for users to add product reviews directly on your WordPress site.

Why we recommend Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro: If you want to display a product reviews feed from another source like Yelp, Facebook, or Google, then Reviews Feed Pro is the ideal plugin for you.

For more information, you can see our complete Smash Balloon review.

4. WP Customer Reviews

WP Customer Reviews allows you to collect customer reviews and testimonials as well as create your own product reviews.

For example, you can create a specific page on your website to showcase your testimonials and improve your social proof and conversions.

You have full control over your review forms and the information you want to collect from your users. To display reviews, you can use shortcodes or the included block.

Plus, WP Customer Reviews allows you to configure which user roles can leave product reviews on your website.

Pros

You can check the reviews in your WordPress dashboard, so you have complete control over the ones that are displayed.

It has the option to turn any existing WordPress blog post into a product review.
WP Customer Reviews lets you add product review schema to improve search engine rankings.
The plugin allows you to add a pros and cons section for each product, add star ratings, and import/export reviews.

Cons

It offers limited features to filter and approve reviews based on different criteria.
The plugin offers basic layouts for reviews with limited customization.

Why we recommend WP Customer Reviews: The plugin is completely free and can also integrate with WooCommerce seamlessly. If you have an online store and are on a shoestring budget, then we recommend WP Customer Reviews to add product reviews to your website.

5. Site Reviews

Site Reviews is an easy-to-use review plugin that lets you collect customer reviews for your products, services, or a local business, similar to a site like TripAdvisor or Yelp.

You can even let users review certain parts of your website, like posts, products, pages, and more.

It comes with a simple settings page that allows you to control how you want to gather reviews and how you want to display them on your website. You can customize the review form and display it anywhere on your site.

Pros

With Site Reviews, you can pin your best reviews to the top so your customers will see them first.

It integrates with WooCommerce, so you can improve how customers leave reviews on your WooCommerce product pages.

You can display your reviews using the included Gutenberg block or shortcode to show specific reviews.

Cons

Site Reviews offers limited mobile responsiveness.
The plugin can potentially conflict with other plugins activated on your website.

Why we recommend Site Reviews: If you are looking for a free plugin to add a simple product reviews section, then you can use Site Reviews.

6. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce lets you easily add more detailed reviews to your store.

Your customers can attach pictures and vote on reviews, plus you can add a question and answer section so your product listings look the same as Amazon.

Overall, this plugin helps improve your social proof so that when visitors go to your product pages, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Pros

It lets you send automated emails after a customer makes a purchase to help you generate more reviews. You can also send a coupon after a review is left on your product.
The plugin can integrate with Google Shopping, boost SEO, and support over 30 languages.
It allows you to approve, edit, or delete reviews, import/export reviews, and send review reminders on WhatsApp.

Cons

The plugin does not come with spam protection, so you may have to deal with spam, negative, or inappropriate reviews.
Users have had security concerns with the plugin in the past.

Why we recommend Customer Reviews for WooCommerce: This free plugin is a great option if you have a WooCommerce store due to its seamless integration and beginner-friendly interface.

Bonus Entries

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool for WordPress and is used by over 1.2 million websites. You can easily create high-converting popup campaigns to grow your email list and get more sales for the products you review on your website.

It comes with a library of over 400 templates you can use to quickly create spin to win optins, alert bars, yes/no optins, and many other types of popup campaigns for your website.

You can use these popups in creative ways. For example, you might create a popup that displays a coupon for the affiliate product you are reviewing in an article.

This is a common way to increase affiliate income and earn more revenue. That’s why many of the most successful WordPress blogs use this technique in their product review articles.

Pros

You can target different users for various product reviews based on behavior, interests, or location.
The tool comes with a drag-and-drop builder.
You can optimize your opt-in forms with A/B testing.
The plugin can help you capture leads and generate revenue.

Cons

OptinMonster does not have a free plan, but its connecting plugin is free.
It does not have a dedicated product or customer reviews feature.

Why we recommend OptinMonster: If you are looking for a tool that can encourage users to buy products from your product reviews, then OptinMonster is a great option. You can use it to create popups that will offer discounts or coupons to users on product review pages.

For more information, see our OptinMonster review.

8. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin. It lets you automate the process of collecting reviews from customers after they purchase a product.

You can also use the plugin to automatically post product reviews on Facebook or other social media platforms every time a user leaves feedback on your website. This can help boost your social media following and engagement.

Plus, Uncanny Automator helps you create other automated workflows on your site without any code, making it easier to manage your website and business.

Pros

The plugin acts like Zapier for WordPress and can connect with 150+ WordPress plugins and tools like Twilio, Instagram, Google Sheets, and Zoom.
It has a free plan, is super easy to use, and provides unlimited recipes and actions.
It can connect your product reviews with email marketing tools or CRM software.

Cons

Some of its features can only be unlocked in the pro version.
The plugin does not offer dedicated product review features.

Why we recommend Uncanny Automator: If you want to add your product reviews on platforms other than your WordPress site, then you can use Uncanny Automator to create an automated workflow.

For more details, you may like to see our Uncanny Automator review.

9. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market that allows you to get more customer reviews in exchange for entries into your giveaway/competition.

You can use it like a product review plugin by asking users to leave feedback on your website for your products if they want to enter your free giveaway.

RafflePress can also integrate with Trustpilot, Capterra, and G2 if you want users to leave product reviews on those platforms instead. All you will have to do is simply add these platforms as actions in the giveaway.

Once you do that, click on the block to open its settings in the block panel, where you can make the action mandatory. Now, if users want to enter a giveaway, then they must leave a product review first.

We have also used RafflePress on our own website to get more email subscribers. For details, you can see our insider look at how WPBeginner ran a successful viral giveaway with RafflePress.

Pros

The plugin comes with a drag-and-drop builder, premade giveaway templates, and complete fraud protection.
You can also ask users to share your products on their social media handles to enter the giveaway.
It can help capture leads and choose real-time winners.

Cons

It has a free plan, but you will need the pro version to unlock the product review actions.
RafflePress is not a dedicated product review plugin.

Why we recommend RafflePress: If you want to host giveaways or contests to boost engagement and get product reviews at the same time, then this is the plugin for you.

For more information, see our RafflePress review.

Which Is the Best WordPress Product Reviews Plugin?

In our expert opinion, WP Review Pro is the best WordPress product review plugin on the market. It comes with plenty of premade review templates, complete spam protection, and lets you add different rating systems for reviews.

However, if you want to boost search rankings with your product reviews, then we recommend All in One SEO for WordPress due to its amazing product reviews schema.

Similarly, if you want to add product reviews from another platform like Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, or Facebook, then Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro is a good choice.

Alternatively, if you want to use a free plugin, then WP Customer Reviews is also a great option.

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Product Review Plugins

Here are some questions that are frequently asked by our readers about product review plugins for WordPress.

Do product review plugins help with SEO?

Product review plugins can help boost SEO if they have a schema markup feature. The plugins also add new content to your site, which can further improve search engine rankings.

Additionally, reviews left by customers usually contain relevant keywords that can help with your site’s SEO. If you want to use product reviews to improve your website’s ranking, then AIOSEO is the ideal choice.

Can I use product review plugins to encourage customers to leave reviews?

Most product review plugins do not contain any specific feature that can encourage users to leave reviews.

However, you can use a plugin like OptinMonster to generate attractive popups that will offer discount offers to customers if they visit the product review pages on your website.

If you want, you can also offer free giveaways to customers if they leave product reviews on your website or external review platforms.

How can I use product reviews to gather customer feedback and insights?

Popular plugins like WP Customer Reviews allow you to create product review forms where you can add different fields to gather feedback and insights from customers.

However, we recommend using a dedicated user feedback plugin to gather customer insights instead.

For example, you can use UserFeedback to add a customer survey prompt on your website.

You can even use WPForms to create polls and surveys to collect feedback. For details, see our tutorial on how to create post purchase surveys in WooCommerce.

Best WordPress Guides for Product Reviews

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 6+ Best Product Review Plugins for WordPress (2024) first appeared on WPBeginner.

January 7, 2022

17 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers

Are you a photographer using WordPress and wondering what are some of the best WordPress plugins for photographers?

WordPress plugins help you improve your workflow, automate different tasks, optimize your website for search engines, and provide a better user experience to your visitors.

In this article, we will show you the best WordPress plugins for photographers.

Why Use a WordPress Photography Plugin?

Thousands of photographers use WordPress to share their work with the world. That’s because WordPress is the easiest way to build a photography website.

With the right photography theme, you can create a completely unique look for your website. However, the real power of WordPress comes from plugins that allow you to add new features and automate multiple tasks to improve your workflows.

For instance, you can use an SEO plugin to optimize your images and website for search engines and improve your keyword rankings. Similarly, there are plugins for displaying your photographs in galleries and image sliders, making them elegant and prominent on your site.

Aside from that, you’d also want to promote your work and get traffic more traffic to your website. This is where you can use social media WordPress plugins to grow your followers.

That said, let’s look at some of the best WordPress plugins for photographers.

1. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is the best social media WordPress plugin. It’s an extremely useful plugin for photographers because it helps you display photos, videos, and other content from social media platforms on your WordPress website.

You can create a custom Twitter feed, Facebook feed, YouTube feed, and Instagram feed using Smash Balloon. It also helps create a social wall, where you can combine content from multiple social channels and show them in a single feed.

This can save you a lot of time, since any photos you post on your social media accounts will automatically be added to your professional website, too.

The plugin is very easy to use and offers lots of design options, so you can customize your social feeds to match your brand. Smash Balloon is SEO-friendly and helps leverage social proof to boost engagement, increase followers, and grow your business.

2. Envira Gallery

Envira is the best responsive WordPress gallery plugin on the market. It allows you to effortlessly create mobile-friendly and fully responsive image galleries in WordPress that look equally awesome on all devices and screen sizes.

Image galleries created with Envira Gallery load much faster, which makes it super fun and easy for your users to browse the galleries. You can also enable watermarks to prevent image theft.

Envira Gallery is also the most search engine-friendly gallery plugin. It allows you to add metadata for your images and galleries easily. It works great with other SEO plugins as well.

3. Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider plugin. It allows you to quickly and easily create fully responsive slideshows within minutes. You can add those sliders to any page, post, or even your homepage.

It’s a great plugin to showcase your photographs on your WordPress website. Users can easily browse through different pictures using the slider.

Soliloquy is highly optimized for speed, which means your pages will load faster. Visual effects, customizations, and SEO-friendly slides are just some of the features of this easy-to-use tool.

4. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the best automation plugin for WordPress. You can use it on your website to create automated workflows without editing code.

As a photographer, you can save time by automating repetitive tasks like processing data from contact forms, offering support, sharing your pictures on social media, and more.

With Uncanny Automator, you can use existing plugins and software to talk to each other. It supports over 70 of the most popular WordPress plugins and offers over 700 triggers and actions.

For example, Uncanny Automator lets you automatically Tweet new posts, connect any WordPress form with Google Sheets to save data, send SMS notifications for WooCommerce purchases, and much more.

5. WPForms

WPForms is the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It helps your clients to stay in touch with you by using a contact form. You can also accept quotations and proposals for new projects using WPForms.

Its drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.

WPForms comes with pre-built templates, spam protection, and each form is responsive for any device. It also lets you collect files and documents through form submissions and accept online payments.

The plugin is compatible with other popular WordPress plugins, email marketing services, and payment providers.

6. All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and is a complete website optimization solution. It helps you to get more traffic from search engines.

Using AIOSEO, you can optimize your site for featured snippets, create sitemaps, perform a competitor analysis to beat your competition, and more.

For photographers, WordPress SEO allows you to optimize your pages and use open graph metadata. Open Graph is used by Facebook and many other social websites to display your pages properly when shared.

It also includes image SEO options so you can optimize your photographs to appear more often in search results and get more traffic to your website.

We have a complete tutorial on how to install and set up the AIOSEO plugin for more details.

7. BirchPress

BirchPress is a complete online appointment and booking system for WordPress sites.

It allows users to place their booking on your website and even pay for it using PayPal. For professional photographers, this enables you to get more paid work.

The plugin easily syncs with your calendar and you can set email notifications and reminders when an appointment is booked, rescheduled, or canceled. Other than that, you can also create your own booking form using BirchPress.

Basically, any good appointment and booking plugin would work. You may also want to take a look at our list of the 5 best WordPress appointment and booking plugins.

8. WP Portfolio

WP Portfolio is the best portfolio plugin for WordPress that helps you showcase your work to your visitors. You can use it to easily create a gallery to display your photographs.

The plugin offers ready-to-use website templates for your photography portfolio. Simply add the pictures to the portfolio and display them anywhere on your website using a shortcode.

WP Portfolio also offers different options to customize your image portfolio without the need to write code or add custom CSS. You can also use the plugin to showcase a website portfolio and a video portfolio in WordPress.

9. Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails is a free WordPress plugin for photographers and is super easy to use. It helps you regenerate all thumbnails sizes for any image you’ve uploaded in the Media Library.

When you upload an image in WordPress, it automatically saves your images into multiple sizes. Your WordPress theme can also add additional image sizes. However, when new sizes are added to WordPress, the old photos are not available in those new sizes.

Regenerate Thumbnails solves this issue, and it is a must-have tool for all WordPress photography sites. You can quickly turn any image into a thumbnail and in any size using the plugin.

10. Image Widget

Image Widget is a handy plugin that lets you display images in the widgets area like the sidebar on your website.

WordPress comes with an image widget that you can add to your sidebar, but the options are limited. The Image Widget plugin solves this problem by adding a more customizable image widget to your WordPress site. It’s also responsive so it will look good on any size screen.

Simply drag and drop the widget to any sidebar or add a widget block. Next, select an image or upload one from your computer. You can also add multiple image widgets in a sidebar.

11. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer is another popular WordPress plugin that you can use on your photography website to optimize your images. It helps improve your website speed by compressing oversized images.

As a photographer, you will have many images in high resolution which will be large in size. These images can slow down your website and increase your site’s bounce rate.

With EWWW Image Optimizer, you can automatically compress these images to reduce their size and scale them to fit different device sizes. This way your users won’t have to wait for your photographs to load.

There is also an option to lazy load images and improve page load time. Lazy load allows your website to only load images when a user scrolls down to the specific picture.

12. Easy Watermark

Easy Watermark plugin allows you to add watermarks to image uploads in WordPress automatically. As a photographer, you may want to add watermarks to your photographs to protect them from theft or misuse.

You can choose an image, set transparency, and watermark position. The plugin offers different formats for your image watermark, including JPG, PNG, or GIF formats.

The plugin can also add a watermark to all previously uploaded images. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to automatically add watermark to images in WordPress.

13. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a must-have plugin for any website, especially for photographers. It helps speed up your site which is important for your WordPress SEO.

Speed is an important factor for all websites. For photography websites, it is even more critical because images are usually the most time-consuming elements on the page.

Using WP Rocket, you can improve your page load speed significantly. For the proper configurations, see our guide on how to install and setup WP Rocket.

Note: If you’re using SiteGround as your WordPress hosting, then you don’t need WP Rocket because their performance plugin is very powerful.

14. Imsanity

Imsanity is one of the best WordPress photography plugins that help to resize and save storage space.

When you transfer images from your camera and mobile devices, they are usually high-resolution images with image sizes reaching 3MB to 24MB+ per image.

Imsanity allows you to define more reasonable image sizes for the images you upload to WordPress. This not only saves you bandwidth but also makes your website faster with a better user experience.

The plugin will automatically scale down the images to the configured size and offer a bulk image resize option.

15. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization toolkit for WordPress. It helps you capture leads, optimize your site for conversions, and get people to subscribe to your newsletter.

With OptinMonster, you can build an email list for your photography website. That’s because most people who find your website through search engines and other sources will probably never find your website again.

This is where getting people to subscribe to your newsletter can be beneficial. As a photographer, you can stay in touch with your audience, share your latest work via email, and get people to visit your website again.

Besides that, an email list can also help you get more clients. You can build your brand, increase awareness with your subscribers, and convert subscribers into paying customers.

OptinMonster is the perfect solution for converting visitors into subscribers and customers. Please take a look at our case study where we increased our email subscribers by more than 600% using OptinMonster.

16. MemberPress

MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin and it helps you make money from your photography website. You can offer digital downloads of your pictures to members.

For instance, you can create different membership levels and offer exclusive content about photography like downloadable pictures, blog posts, podcasts, eBooks, and more to only logged-in users with a paid subscription.

Besides that, MemberPress is great for selling online courses. You can create a professional photography course for your audience and use the plugin to monetize your website.

Other features offered by the plugin include creating a registration form, restricting permission, and managing your transactions.

17. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is one of the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress that lets you sell eBooks, PDFs, music files, images, and more.

Using the plugin, you can sell your photographs to your visitors and make more money. It is very easy to use and offers seamless integration with payment services like PayPal and Stripe.

You get a full shopping cart with Easy Digital Downloads along with different customer management features. For instance, you can view, edit, or delete customer records, track customer activity, and more.

Besides that, the plugin lets you track your earnings and shows a report inside the WordPress dashboard. You can also create discount codes using the plugin to boost sales.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress plugins for photographers. You may also want to check out our guide on how to choose the best blogging platform and the list of 40 useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress blog.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 17 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers first appeared on WPBeginner.

Why Send WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails to Customers?

Set Up WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails

Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment SMS

Create WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Popups

Send WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Notifications

Bonus: Use WooCommerce Automations to Increase Sales

What Is Zapier and Why Use a Zapier Alternative on Your Website?

1. Uncanny Automator

2. Thrive Automator

3. HubSpot Automation

4. FunnelKit Automations

5. Constant Contact

6. IFTTT

7. Make

8. Pabbly Connect

Which Is the Best Zapier Alternative for Your Website?

Frequently Asked Questions About Zapier Alternatives

Best WordPress Guides for Automating Your Website

Why Use a ChatGPT Plugin in WordPress?

1. All in One SEO

2. Uncanny Automator

3. WPForms

4. Formidable Forms

5. Thrive Ovation

6. AI Engine

7. AI Chatbot

8. AI Power

9. AI Post Generator

10. AI ChatBot with ChatGPT

11. AI Mojo

Which Is the Best ChatGPT WordPress Plugin?

Frequently Asked Questions About ChatGPT WordPress Plugins

Best Guides for Using AI in WordPress

What is Email Marketing Automation in WordPress?

Why Automate WordPress Email Marketing?

How to Set up Email Marketing Automation in WordPress

Make Sure Your WordPress Emails Can be Delivered

1. Sending Automated Emails via Constant Contact

2. Automate WooCommerce Emails Using FunnelKit Automations

3. Automate WordPress / WooCommerce Emails Using Uncanny Automator

Ideas for Email Marketing Automation with Examples

How Can AI Be Used on WordPress Websites?

1. Come Up With a Catchy and Memorable Business Name

2. Generate Content Marketing Ideas

3. Prepare and Research Your Articles

4. Write Draft Blog Posts

5. Come Up With Titles and Meta Descriptions

6. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

7. Improve the Grammar and Readability of Your Content

8. Write Compelling Email Copy

9. Create Blog Post Summaries for Social Media

10. Write Ad Copy and Product Descriptions for Your Store

11. Write Better Landing Page Copy

12. Create Images for Your Blog, Social Media, and More

13. Optimize the Copy in Your Popups

Bonus: Provide Excellent Customer Service and Support

Expert Guides on Using Artificial Intelligence

What Is a WooCommerce Customer Journey?

How to Optimize the Customer Journey for Your WooCommerce Store (12 Tips)

Build Customer Awareness

Help Customers Consider Your Products

Help Customers Complete Their Purchases

Provide Great Customer Service

Build Customer Loyalty

Why Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites?

How to Share Users and Logins Between Multiple WordPress Sites

Why Should Your Business Use a Video Communication Service?

Overview – Google Meet vs Zoom

Price Comparison – Google Meet vs Zoom

Ease of Use – Google Meet vs Zoom

Cross-Platform Support – Google Meet vs Zoom

Text Chat and Channels – Google Meet vs Zoom

WordPress Integrations – Google Meet vs Zoom

Professional and Community Support – Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet vs Zoom: Which Is Better For Your Business?

Alternatives to Google Meet and Zoom

Why Automate Your WooCommerce Store?

1. Use Automation to Personalize Your Email Marketing

2. Set Up an Automated Marketing Campaign With Push Notifications

3. Let Customers Track Orders With Automated Transactional Emails