The crazy heat dome currently parked over most of North America means the majority of the Jilt team is stuck indoors–and that’s good news for you! It means more time working on Jilt and making it even more powerful and easy to use. We have some big updates coming in a few weeks, but here are some of the things we’ve rolled out recently.

Use brand settings in your emails

Many of you may already be using the improved brand settings within Jilt to add your brand colors to your email templates automatically. Now we’ve made it even easier to make sure your emails match your brand, by including your logo and social links in your emails.

As of last month, the shop logo you set in your brand settings will be added automatically above email content. You can choose whether to hide the logo, or adjust its size, by clicking on it in the email editor.

Emails can also incorporate social media icons in a new email editor block. If you’ve added social profiles under Settings > Brand, the “Social” email block will automatically display icons for these social networks using your profile links. You can adjust the icon style and size, and your primary brand color is automatically used.

Jilt for WooCommerce version 1.5

Jilt for WooCommerce version 1.5.0 doesn’t have a ton new on the surface, but this release paves the way for lots of features we’re working on now. Let’s start with the changes you’ll see as a user, then what this release means for the future.

First, we’ve improved the add-to-cart popover for early email capture. This feature has already helped hundreds of merchants increase their number of recoverable carts, and we’ve made some refinements for usability in this release. The add-to-cart popover will now be triggered on custom add-to-cart links, such as those you add manually or with a WooCommerce shortcode.

We’ve also improved the feedback from this popover for your customers with the addition of progress and success animations while typing:

Second, this version adds a tool to clear expired and unused coupons created by Jilt. You can find this tool under Status > Tools, and it will clear up to 200 coupons at a time. We plan to automate this process within Jilt to clear coupons automatically, but this will provide a quick way to clean up some of those expired and unused coupons created by Jilt (this will not delete any coupons created manually or by other apps–Jilt always “flagged” coupons it generates, and only those will be removed).

Now for the items that will lead to future improvements. We’ve moved the plugin settings to a top-level, dedicated page. We plan to add more details from Jilt in your WP admin, and this new settings page will allow us to do that.

We also migrated the plugin to use the WooCommerce core REST API for handling data between Jilt and your site. Previously, the Jilt for WooCommerce plugin used a custom format to pass order information to Jilt app. However, we’ve been working on expanding the data the Jilt app can use for your emails (to include product and customer information)–since Jilt app can now use more data from your site, it makes more sense to use the full REST API to get that data.

Upon upgrading to version 1.5.0, the plugin will automatically create API keys and pass them to the Jilt app from the plugin, so this transition is entirely seamless for you! This makes product recommendation email blocks immediately available to your store. Also, you can now use product and category segmentation rules to segment your campaign emails (letting you use specific campaigns for certain products or types of items).

Once we launch a few additional changes for Jilt that we already have in progress, this will also let you use more product and customer information (such as lifetime spend) for other types of campaigns. Stay tuned. 😀

Other updates

We’ve published a couple of stand-alone update posts over the past month that are worth pressing repeat on.

GDPR-compatibility

GDPR compliance was top-of-mind for many merchants throughout May. At the end of the month, we published an overview of what we do for compliance, along with a more detailed page on how the GDPR affects email marketing, and how Jilt gives you the most advanced set of tools to comply as an eCommerce shop owner.

Campaign segmentation

Our campaign segmentation announcement detailed one of our longest-running projects: the ability to choose which audience receives which campaign. Hundreds of merchants are already using segmentation rules to send campaigns based on order total, whether or not shipping is needed, and more.

We’re also constantly working on expanding these rules. For example, shortly after release, we updated rules to include product categories or collections (in addition to specific products):

We have several more segmentation rules updates in progress now that you’ll hear about soon.