How to create a Customer Mailing List with WooCommerce

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a mailing list based on existing customers from your shop.

We will focus on customers who have placed orders which have been fulfilled. The requirement is that any customer that is going to be included, must have at least one completed order. As your list will only include customers who already know some of your products, it can provide a great basis to communicate with them, to let them know about promotions, new products and so on.

Use Case – Create a mailing list based on your existing customers. Use it to communicate efficiently with your known customers and for targeted email marketing campaigns.

WooCommerce does not directly support to create a mailing list based on a customer’s orders and their status. Here we show how it is done with the right tools. For this tutorial, we will be using Groups Import Export. This extension provides the additional features that we need to cover this use case. The following assumes that the extension is installed and activated.

👉 Go to Groups > Export Users. Here we can create our mailing list. We choose suitable profile options that determine the format and exported data. In the section for WooCommerce, we use the fields that allow us to set constraints based on orders, to pinpoint which users will be included in the export.

👉 In the Profile section …

• Check the option to “Include extended user profile data”
• Check the option to “Use separate columns”
• Check the option to “Include a column header”
• Clear the prepopulated selection of meta data fields and add only “billing_email”

👉 Under WooCommerce …

• Choose “Completed” in the “Users with order status” field

👉 Click Export

You will obtain a “.tsv” file, which uses a format that uses tabs to separate values. The file will include the following column headers and data for each user:

• user_email : The user’s email address
• user_login : The user’s login username
• first_name : The user account’s first name
• last_name : The account’s last name
• user_url : Website URL related to the user account
• user_pass : this is empty when exporting and provided as a convenience placeholder for imports
• roles : The user’s role or roles
• groups : The groups that the user is a member of
• meta:billing_email : The billing email address

You now have a mailing list that can be used to communicate with these customers. You can use it to launch newsletter campaigns using tools like Groups Newsletters which allows to run your own and self-hosted marketing campaigns, or you can use it to run them using any third-party provider of your choice.

Conclusion

We have seen a great way to create mailing lists based on your existing customers.

You can fine-tune these lists based on additional criteria, like users who belong to certain groups or those who have purchased during a particular time frame.

Use the lists to run targeted email campaigns, communicate efficiently with these customers to let them know about promotions, new products and other useful information. Run these campaigns using self-hosted tools or third-party services.

References

• The documentation of the Groups Import Export extension.
• The documentation of the Groups Newsletters extension.
• The two extensions are included in the Groups Bundle which contains several extensions at a considerable discount compared to the individual purchase prices.