3 plug-ins you need to do Wix email marketing right

For merchants who are in the process of setting up an ecommerce store, the options for website builders can be overwhelming.

That fact has a major influence on the product roadmap at Wix, says Bogar Alonso, former head of ecommerce outbound marketing and thought leadership.

“We’re the best of all worlds,” Alonso says. “Wix’s robust, built-in feature set, which is buttressed by carefully vetted third-party apps and integrations, sits on enterprise-grade infrastructure.”

Wix offers ecomm store owners access to:

• Intuitive website design, even for beginners
• Professionally designed templates for websites and landing pages
• Built-in functionality for payment processing, analytics, inventory management, and more
• Proven reliability and security
• 24/7 customer support
• Tiered pricing options for paid plans
• More than 400 third-party apps and integrations with popular technology platforms

But which of those third-party and proprietary apps and integrations best support an ambitious email marketing plan built on a Wix-centered martech stack? Here are 3 must-haves, according to Alonso:

1. Marketing automation plug-ins for Wix
2. Accounting plug-ins for Wix
3. Loyalty plug-ins for Wix

1. Marketing automation plug-ins for Wix

In a post-cookies, privacy-first world, where channels like paid social media are getting more expensive and less effective, email marketing is having a “renaissance moment,” Alonso says.

As a declining economy pushes more businesses to get scrappier with their marketing dollars, selecting the right email marketing service provider can be the difference between surviving and shutting down.

According to Alonso, “Wix merchants that are looking to grow in this new reality can lean on the customer data capabilities Klaviyo provides to reach their customers at the time, frequency, and cadence they want.”

Klaviyo is a unified customer platform that gives your brand direct ownership of your consumer data and interactions, empowering you to turn transactions with customers into productive long-term relationships—at scale.

By combining sophisticated email and SMS marketing capabilities with a powerful built-in customer data platform (CDP), Klaviyo “lets you claw back that customer relationship information to get closer to your customers, making it more of a consensual relationship—and, hopefully, one that will withstand the test of time,” Alonso explains.

Klaviyo’s email marketing features enable Wix ecommerce merchants to:

• Use the drag-and-drop editor to create email marketing campaigns, text messages, and on-site sign-up forms that reflect their authentic brand identity.
• Build messages from scratch or choose from 200+ pre-built templates.
• Send real-time email automations like abandoned cart emails, welcome emails, and transactional emails.
• Segment their email list and personalize communications based on factors like:
  • Purchase history
  • Browse history
  • Location
  • Customer engagement
  • Predicted lifetime value
• Use advanced A/B testing functionality to test email subject lines, CTAs, content, images, and more.
• Easily track key performance metrics like open rates, click rates, and conversions.

The email marketing platform is “tailor-made” for ecommerce merchants that are “ready to scale,” Alonso says—“any merchant that understands they need to maximize revenue and their operations through the use of automation. Klaviyo offers a great set of email marketing tools for scaling to the next level.”

That toolset, as well as the platform’s user-friendly interface, “really sets merchants up to double down on email marketing as a channel, while also focusing on retention,” Alonso says—which, in the years ahead, “is going to be huge.”

In a competitive industry at a competitive time, “you have to differentiate yourself as a brand,” Alonso points out. “To build a brand that will survive the headwinds, marketing automation is a great opportunity for optimizing the customer journey and keeping your brand and your brand’s story front and center.”

Put more simply: “Klaviyo really helps merchants win back a lot of the power that legacy advertisers like Facebook and Google have over customer data,” Alonso says. “Any business owner in the ecommerce space could benefit from using Klaviyo.”

2. Accounting plug-ins for Wix

Taxes and accounting are another “huge pain point” for Wix merchants, Alonso says—and the QuickBooks Connector by Intuit is one tool he sees solving it for many Wix merchants.

“QuickBooks is a great tool for small business owners,” Alonso says. “It helps them automate their inventory and invoices, and it delivers a synchronization of data and tasks that small business owners really need.”

With QuickBooks, Wix merchants can:

• Retrieve orders from their Wix Store, Wix Bookings, Wix Events, or Wix Hotel.
• Create new items in their QuickBooks online account when they create products in their Wix store.
• Automatically create sales in their QuickBooks online account for orders customers place on their Wix website.
• Map tax codes from their store orders to tax codes in their QuickBooks online account.
• Eliminate human error from manual data entry between their QuickBooks online account and their Wix site.

“Time is such a scarce resource for a lot of these merchants,” Alonso points out. “To not have to work out some of these things manually is time well spent.”

3. Loyalty plug-ins for Wix

For Wix merchants interested in offering a loyalty program to returning customers, Alonso is a big fan of the Wix Loyalty app. It enables store owners to grant points for signing up, making purchases, placing orders, and more, then reward customers with gifts, perks, and discounts.

With Wix Loyalty, merchants can:

• Customize their program’s name, points, and icon to match their brand.
• Determine how customers earn points and get rewards.
• Run members-only promotions and discounts.
• Schedule and send personalized email notifications.
• Manage each member’s point balance manually and offline.
• Access insights to understand their customers better.
• Get 24/7 VIP support.
• Track program success from the Wix Loyalty dashboard.

“People are getting a lot of nice business impact using that one,” Alonso says. “It’s integrated, so it allows them to not have to go to a third-party app. They can really own the loyalty experience with their top customers.”