In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a WooCommerce user asked for a solution to send emails to customers who bought a specific product, scheduled for a particular date and time.
While this sounds simple, it proved challenging because many popular tools—like AutomateWoo and Noptin—use queues that include all qualifying customers at setup, even those with canceled or refunded orders. Additionally, tools like AutomateWoo ignore orders created before automation setup, which can complicate follow-up communication for large stores with thousands of orders.
Here’s a breakdown of the community’s recommendations and alternative approaches.
1. Offsite Marketing Tools: Klaviyo and Metorik Engage
Many users recommended Klaviyo and Metorik Engage as reliable offsite tools for handling email automation, particularly with WooCommerce.
- Klaviyo: Klaviyo offers powerful eCommerce email automation. With Klaviyo’s flows, you can set up a sequence that triggers emails based on specific product purchases. However, it’s worth noting that Klaviyo, like most email marketing tools, focuses on marketing and requires the customer’s email to be subscribed to send follow-ups.
- Klaviyo Community Guide
- Metorik Engage: Metorik Engage was also suggested for this purpose. It’s an analytics and automation tool built specifically for WooCommerce and supports transactional messaging and automated emails. However, at present, it doesn’t have a specific feature to schedule emails for exact future dates, although this is reportedly on their roadmap. Metorik can also work around the subscription limitation by associating email follow-ups with specific customer actions, such as free or hidden orders.
2. Onsite Plugins: MailPoet and Custom Coding Solutions
For those preferring an onsite solution, MailPoet was recommended as an alternative, though it may increase database usage due to the numerous columns it adds. If additional database load isn’t a concern, MailPoet can handle WooCommerce-triggered email automations effectively.
However, if a lighter approach is desired, a custom-coded solution may be more efficient:
- Custom Scheduled Emails via PHP: Using WooCommerce’s hooks, you can create custom functions that trigger an email at a specified date and time based on past product purchases. This involves using PHP code to query orders for a specific product, storing customer email addresses in a custom database table, and scheduling emails with WordPress’s
wp_schedule_eventfunction. Example workflow:
- Query WooCommerce orders with the specific product ID.
- Extract and store customer emails in a database table, excluding canceled or refunded orders.
- Use
wp_schedule_eventto set up future email tasks based on the target date.
While this method requires coding knowledge, it allows for complete customization and minimal reliance on third-party plugins.
3. Understanding Plugin Limitations and Trade-Offs
As the community noted, handling scheduled emails directly on WooCommerce can lead to performance issues, especially for larger stores. Onsite tools tend to add database weight and can lead to inefficiencies if not well-optimized. For smaller shops or temporary needs, onsite plugins like AutomateWoo or MailPoet can work with some limitations, but for long-term scalability, offsite tools or custom coding may be more practical.
Conclusion
For WooCommerce stores needing scheduled email follow-ups, Metorik Engage and Klaviyo offer powerful offsite solutions, while MailPoet and custom coding can work well for onsite implementations. Each option has trade-offs in terms of database impact, flexibility, and scheduling precision, so choose based on your store’s size and specific needs.
