ActiveCampaign is one of the leading Marketing Automation tools. It is a powerful and flexible tool with which you can easily manage your marketing campaigns and customer journeys. As with all software though, some features take some getting used to especially when they are new.
One of the features that ActiveCampaign have recently introduced is their Product Block for WooCommerce. While they have had a Product Block for Shopify for a while, the WooCommerce feature is fairly new – and because we have a number of clients who have WordPress websites that use WooCommerce, we thought it would be great to give you some pointers as to how to get the most out of the Product Block.
Shopi-Who and Woo-What-Now?
We realise that not all of you are necessarily familiar with web development or ecommerce websites, so before we go too much further, let me explain very briefly what Shopify and WooCommerce are.
Shopify
Shopify is a commerce platform that provides tools to set up and manage an online store, with features that let you sell on the web, on social media, to online marketplaces as well as permanent physical locations and pop-up shops. Click here to find out more about Shopify.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress websites. WooCommerce comes with a vast array of features as standard that allow you to quickly and easily create and manage an online store. Just some of its key features include stock and tax management and secure payments. Because it is open-source, there is also a huge selection of additional plug-ins available which provide additional functions and features.
As most of our clients have WooCommerce stores, we will focus on the WooCommerce settings in this article. If you are using Shopify, these tips will hopefully help you as well though.
What exactly is a Product Block?
The ActiveCampaign Product Block is an element available within the ActiveCampaign email designer to automatically pull product information from your WooCommerce account into an email campaign. Adding the Product Block to a campaign is very easy and can be achieved in just a couple of steps.
1. Connect your WooCommerce account
This is pretty obvious, but you will not be able to use the Product Block until you have connected your WooCommerce and ActiveCampaign accounts. To do so, simply go to the settings within your ActiveCampaign account, choose “integrations” from the sub-menu and click on the “Add an Integration” button. This opens a window presenting you with integrations you can create and WooCommerce is the second in the list. Click it and follow the instructions.
We are of course on hand if you need any help. Just email us.
2. Add the Product Block to an email campaign
After you have added the integration for your WooCommerce store, you can add the product block to an email campaign. The product block is available in any emails you create in ActiveCampaign, so both as stand-alone email campaigns such as newsletters or within an Automation.
To add the product block to an email, simply go to the email designer and drag the product block element into the relevant position within your email.
3. Configure the Block
Once you have added the product block to your email, you have some Options you can choose from. To access the options, click on the block I the designs, and the options menu will open on the right-hand side of the screen.
- First, select the Store you want to access products from. If you have multiple WooCommerce stores, these will be presented as a dropdown.
- Then, select the WooCommerce Category you wish the product block to feature products from. More on this below.
- Next, adjust the settings for your product block using the sliders.
- Finally, adjust the fonts for the product names, descriptions, price and buttons. You can do this by clicking on the relevant part within the product block element itself.
Things to watch out for
That’s about it in terms of basic functions for the product block. However, below are two tips for you to get the most out of this otherwise fantastic feature.
Categories
You will notice that the designer does not show you which products it is going to bring into the email. It also appears to be a random selection from the selected category in your WooCommerce store without any way to choose specific products within the selected category.
Therefore, if you want to highlight specific products, our suggestion is to creating a new category in WooCommerce that you only use for this purpose. For example, you could create a “Featured” category which you assign to products you wish to feature in the email, limiting the number of products you select to however many you choose in the email designer.
That way, every time you wish to send an email campaign you could switch the products within that category to make sure you are always showing the products you want people to see.
Should you choose to do this, just please be aware of a couple of things though:
a) If your online store uses categories to display your products, depending on how your store has been configured, you might suddenly end up with unwanted category filters on your website. Make sure you check your configuration before committing to creating and assigning any new categories and test it, to avoid any nasty surprises.
To create a category in WooCommerce, go to your WordPress Dashboard and hover over the “Products” option in the menu, then click on “Categories” in the sub-menu that comes up. Fill in the relevant fields you are then shown and click on the “Add new category” button at the bottom of the page.
If you are unsure how to check your WooCommerce settings or need help adding categories, please let us know. We are always on hand to help.
b) The second thing to bear in mind is that, if you are adding a product block to an email in an Automation, you may wish those products to always be the same.
For example, you might have an Automation that sends an email to a contact after they have placed an order for Product A. This email is designed to show them related products B, C and D that they might be interested in. If you created a category called “Featured” and added this to products B, C and D, and later switched it to products E, F and G, you might end up advertising products that are not related.
If you use the product block in an Automation, we would therefore suggest creating categories specifically for each Automation – and possibly even for every email within the Automation – so that you can easily identify which products are being used where.
Product Images
Another issue we ran into during our testing is that different email clients handle images differently, which can affect the look of your email. This is down to the way each email client handles ActiveCampaign’s CSS code.
We discovered that Microsoft Outlook in particular (and possibly other email clients) have issue displaying images correctly. According to an ActiveCampaign Help Article, this is because Outlook uses Microsoft Word to render emails, which offers limited support for both HTML and CSS.
What this means for the Product Block is that, if the main product image saved against a product on your WooCommerce account is larger than 1000 pixels, Outlook does not scale the image down, but will instead display the image in its original size. This could massively distort the way your email displays.
The only workaround at the moment appears to be to ensure that your featured product images are resized to be between 400 and 650 pixels wide.
And that’s a wrap
We are really excited about the Product Block that ActiveCampaign has added for WooCommerce, and we know that it will be really beneficial to you. By following the two pointers above, your emails will look amazing, helping you increase sales straight from your contact’s inbox!
If you need a new ecommerce solution or are looking to give your marketing automation a jump start this year, we would love to hear from you!
Call the team on 01889 280010 or email hello@zephi.co.uk.
