Improving email delivery in WooCommerce based businesses
Improving email delivery in WooCommerce based businesses
WooCommerce is a great platform for your eCommerce store and can be integrated easily with your web host’s email delivery service.
However, the problem with Hosting Server email is that it can be less reliable at delivering those vital transactional emails necessary to keep your business functional. Transactional emails are those emails sent automatically to customers and include shipping notices, order confirmations, receipts, password resets and digital product download pages. So it is essential that you use a dependable email system so that your emails are received by your customers every time.
For a number of reasons too many communications sent using server-based WordPress PHP mail do not get delivered. This means that customers and prospects do not receive your communications and both staff time and resources have to be diverted to resolve the problems this creates.
Why email delivery problems occur:
Many eCommerce companies use the WordPress email service provided by their web host. While this may seem like a convenient solution there can be a number of problems associated with this option.
Perhaps the most obvious limitation is that the email service that comes with your hosting package has an hourly and daily limit. Limits in the region of 250 emails daily are not uncommon and for many businesses, this is insufficient for their needs. Another common problem is that emails become flagged as ‘spam’ and are prevented from reaching their destination due to Spam Filters, basically, your website is liable for any bans that occur because of other users on that shared IP.
Almost as frustrating as non-delivery of emails is slow delivery. There are a variety of technical reasons why your hosting company’s email service might take longer than expected to deliver your customers emails.
Resolving the problem
The simplest, and most effective solution, to the problem of the unreliability of WordPress email, is to use one of the hosted email services available. The advantage of using these services for email delivery is that they will route your emails through their trusted servers, rather than your web host’s servers. This results in more emails reaching their destination and happier customers and clients. Hosted email services also provide business owners with information on delivery and open rates, as well as the ability to resend emails.
With WooCommerce websites the delivery of your emails can be improved simply by signing up with a managed email company. This means that changing email provider is simply a matter of installing a plugin through the WordPress dashboard and signing up for the relevant service. These plugins replace your eCommerce site’s WordPress PHP mail with the service provided by the dedicated email hosting service.
There are a number of reasonably priced hosted email services which also have a WordPress plugin, including All the below have free monthly allowances (apart from Mandrill) and proven reliability, pick the one that best suits your business needs. (as always, no affiliate links below)
- Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES)
- Mailgun – allows you to send up to 10,000 emails each month free;
- Mandrill – works with MailChimp. $20 per month for up to 25,000 emails;
- Sendgrid – send up to 40,000 emails for free (with their 30-day trial);
- SparkPost – lets you send up to 100,000 emails per month free;
All the providers above have decent dashboards that allow full tracking of your email.
Using hosted email services to address your WooCommerce email problems not only means that your transactional emails could be more likely to reach their destination on time. It also means that if you change your website hosting company your email service is not impacted.
