WooCommerce is a free and popular tool for small and upcoming eCommerce businesses. MailChimp is the one of most popular email marketing tools available. Especially, their free and low-tier plans have been a great help for small and upcoming businesses worldwide.
So WooCommerce-MailChimp integration would be very useful for many WooCommerce users to send email newsletters and for their email marketing needs. Let’s see how to connect WooCommerce with MailChimp and what the features available for you to use for your businesses.
How to connect your WooCommerce store with MailChimp?
It is very easy to connect your WooCommerce store with MailChimp. There is an official free MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin available in the WordPress repository. 
How to install and setup MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin?
You just need some basic knowledge of WordPress administration to install and setup MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin.
- Go to the Plugins menu and click ‘Add New’
- Search for ‘MailChimp for WooCommerce’ install and activate the plugin
- After activation click ‘Connect Account’ on the plugin’s dashboard and login to your MailChimp account. If you don’t have an account, create a new one.
- Allow the necessary permissions for WooCommerce in the MailChimp account
- Then it will get back to MailChimp settings on your WooCommerce store
- Fill all the necessary details in the respective settings options
- Select the Audience list that you want to connect the WooCommerce customers
- You will see a checkbox with this label “During initial sync, auto subscribe the existing customers”. By ticking this checkbox you are agreeing to add all your existing customers to MailChimp Audience.
Note: MailChimp’s free plan only allows you to have less than 2000 customers and also charge you for every contact that you have in your audience.
So if you have many existing customers you might want to think about this before syncing.
- Also, you have to set the appropriate visibility of MailChimp opt-in checkbox
- After applying to all the settings click the ‘Start Sync’
- This will Sync all your products and customer data to MailChimp
If you want to see a detailed MailChimp for WooCommerce tutorial you can see this YouTube video for step-by-step information on setup.
How to get your customers to subscribe to your newsletter?
You don’t needs any additional WooCommerce newsletter subcription plugin because by default, MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin will add all the customer contacts to our audience.
It provides an opt-in checkbox to the checkout page. Customers subscribe to marketing using this checkbox. Those who have opted out will be added as ‘Unsubscribed’.
You can manually change their subscription status or make them subscribe using a MailChimp form later.
After adding your customers as Subscribers you can create and send marketing emails to them from MailChimp.
How to automate WooCommerce email marketing with MailChimp Integrations?
WP Ecommerce MailChimp integrations also allows you to automate your email marketing. You can automatically send emails such as Welcome email, Woocommerce Abandoned Cart email, Product Recommendation email, Post Purchase emails, etc,
What are the automations currently possible with MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin?
List of marketing automations available in the MailChimp free plan:
- Welcome series
- Woocommerce Abandoned cart
- Product re-targeting
- Best customers
- First purchase
- Order notifications
- Product follow-up
- Product recommendations
You would need paid plan if you want to send automated email based on Customer Journey, Behaviors, Triggers, Transactions, etc.,
Also see: Best WooCommerce Email Customizer Plugins
How to send an automated discount coupon on MailChimp?
Discount coupons are a great way to bring more sales to your store. So you might want to send automated emails with discount coupons. You could send discounts for various situations like Newsletter sign up, Cart Abandonment, High Purchase value, etc.,
Easiest way to do this is to generate a discount coupon in WooCommerce and add it manually to your Welcome email or Cart Abandonment email.
You should limit the discount code to be used only once for a person, since you are sending the same coupon code for everyone.
To do this,
- On your dashboard, under WooCommerce go to Marketing > Coupons
- Create your coupon
- Under “Usage Restriction” click the checkbox for “Individual use only”.
- Under “Usage Limits” put 1 under “Usage limit per person”
How to generate and send unique coupon codes for each customer?
Currently there are no options with MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin to automatically generate and send unique coupon codes to each customer.
But you can make use of some 3rd-party tools to achieve this such as the Coupon Carrier (official integration) and Personal Discount.
How to send WooCommerce transactional emails from MailChimp?
If you want to send WooCommerce transactional emails such as Order Confirmation emails, Payment Confirmation emails, Refund Confirmation emails, Shipping Confirmation emails, etc., it can also be sent using MailChimp.
You can also add order/shipment tracking links in the confirmation emails.
(Note: Transactional emails are only available on Premium plans, so you would have to upgrade to access this if you are on free plan)
Limitations of MailChimp for WooCommerce integration and how to overcome them?
1. Reliability Issues – MailChimp for WooCommerce Reviews
Though it’s an official plugin from MailChimp its reliability is questionable. Out of the 575 reviews there are 129 1-star reviews; that is more than 22% of the reviewers.
Most of the negative reviews are given by users who had problems with syncing problems and orders to MailChimp.
So if reliability is your greatest issue, you could look for other reliable alternatives.
2. No Control of Adding Customer Contacts
The #1 disadvantage with MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin would be that you have no control over adding a customer’s contact information from WooCommerce to MailChimp.
It not only adds a paying customer but adds everyone such as Cart Abandoned customer, Waiting List customer, Free Product customer(digital products) etc.,
Why do you need to control adding customer contacts to MailChimp?
As we mentioned earlier, the free plan limits you to 2000 contacts and you will reach it very fast. Also, you have to pay for the number of contacts. If you have no control over which customer contacts are added to MailChimp Audience, your marketing bill will be too much for you to bear.
For example, if you have an out of stock product or list an upcoming product to collect Waiting List, all of the contacts would be added to MailChimp Audience. If you get 500 people on this waiting list and the products take 2 or 3 months to be launched, you would be paying MailChimp for all of these contacts, you would be paying unnecessarily.
3. MailChimp is Costly
MailChimp charges you monthly and even if you are under 2000 contacts you might still have to pay around $20 – $50, if you want to send transactional emails such as Order Confirmation emails or to send custom emails based on customer journey (Customer Journey Builder), you would have to pay to access these features.
4. Synchronization Limitation
The API synchronization between WooCommerce and MailChimp is more of a 1 way sync rather than a 2-way sync other than transactional emails.
You cannot even add some basic data such as product categories data to MailChimp. If you are sending an automated email such as “Personalized product recommendations”
You need 3rd party tools for every small thing such as automatically generating and generating personalized discount codes.
5. Little Options for Customization
MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin has very little options for customization. You can make use of the Action Scheduler plugin with the WP CLI. This is useful especially for larger WooCommerce stores. You can refer to this documentation for using the Advanced Queue Setup In CLI mode.
Also See: Best WooCommerce Marketing Automation plugins – 2023
Alternatives for MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin
As we have seen the limitations of MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin, let’s see the available alternatives
Tablesome Pro
Tablesome Pro is a premium automation tool which gives you various Triggers & Actions that helps you automate all your WooCommerce marketing email processes.
It is a powerful but affordable tool with which you can greatly reduce the money you spend on email marketing.
You can also connect various email marketing services and CRMs using API such as MailChimp, SendGrid, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc,
Not just for WooCommerce it also helps you to collect data from Form Submissions using forms such as Contact Form7, WPForms, etc., and send it to 3rd-party apps such as MailChimp.
It works by automatically populating tables using various triggers such as WooCommerce events, Form submission, etc., and you can configure custom actions for each trigger.
MC4WP: MailChimp for WordPress
Another useful plugin for connecting WooCommerce and MailChimp is MC4WP plugin. With the free version of this plugin you can add a Newsletter signup checkbox to the checkout page. It also allows you to change different lists in MailChimp. You can create a form that is connected to MailChimp and embed it on any page using shortcode on your WordPress site with this MailChimp plugin.
You can easily modify the functions.php file to send WooCommerce fields to MailChimp such as NAME, FNAME, LNAME and EMAIL fields. You can also send all the fields in the WooCommerce checkout fields.
With the premium version, you can enable Order Tracking to make use of automations available with MailChimp.
AutomateWoo
AutomateWoo is a premium marketing automation plugin for WooCommerce. You can use this plugin to send a big list of marketing emails such as Discount emails, Product recommendations, Review reminders, Birthday emails, and more.
Though it allows a wide range of marketing emails the main issue with this plugin is that it uses the default WordPress email system. If you don’t have a good web host then your emails would probably go to spam.
If you want to integrate it with other email delivery services such as SendGrid, MailGun, etc., you have to use another SMTP plugin to set it up.
Final Comments
The main purpose of connecting WooCommerce with MailChimp is to automate your email marketing efforts and to generate more sales and profit.
Though there are several tools to do this. Which tools you want to go with solely depends on what automations you need and how much you can spend on it.
Saying that the current pricing of MailChimp when used with MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin may not be affordable for growing businesses.
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