The Jilt team took some time to rest and recharge over the holidays, and now we’re back and pushing full steam ahead to make Jilt even more useful for you in 2018. First out of the gate, we have a bunch of big additions to the app this week, including post purchase follow ups, test mode, and an enhanced abandoned orders view.

We’ve been teasing the idea that Jilt would begin doing more than recover abandoned carts for awhile now, and this week’s launch of post-purchase emails is our first step toward helping Jilt become the complete solution for all your eCommerce email marketing.

Read on for full details.

Post purchase follow ups

We all know how effective cart recovery emails are at turning abandoned shopping carts into sales and boosting revenue, but they’re only one type of email you can send to improve your revenue. Communicating with your customers at key points during their journey with your store (the “lifecycle”) is a proven way to build loyalty, increase cart size, spur repeat buying, and motivate positive behaviors like sharing, reviewing, or buying.

That’s why we’re excited to expand Jilt’s lifecycle email functionality with the release of post purchase follow up emails. You can use these emails to thank customers, provide important information (like your return policy), gather feedback, offer coupons, or share your company story. Post purchase follow ups are triggered when all items in an order are paid and fulfilled, and for our EDD users, these emails are compatible with the Simple Shipping plugin.

Here’s how it works: When creating new campaigns, you’re now able to choose a trigger for when emails are sent: either “cart abandonment” or “purchase completed.”

Campaign setup for post purchase follow ups is similar to cart abandonment campaigns. You can set how long after purchase completion to send the email, and you can schedule one or more emails in each campaign.

Use Jilt’s new drag and drop email editor to create the emails in your campaign, and then go live when you’re ready to start sending.

Test mode

The live preview of your emails in Jilt’s email editor does a pretty good job of showing you what your messages will look like to customers, but to truly get a sense of how your emails will come across you want to see them in the wild. Maybe you even want to share them with colleagues, coworkers, or friends. But you don’t want to pay for these test emails or influence your abandonment and recovery data. We get it; that’s why we’re happy to say that test mode is here. Test mode allows you to send real, live emails without paying for additional MCEs and it allows you to attach a staging store to Jilt for testing purposes (limited to our free tier).

For your live shop, if a customer or order matches your Jilt user account email or the email domain matches your shop domain, Jilt will add a “Test” badge to these orders and customers, and exclude them from MCE usage and all Dashboard statistics. So, for example, if mystore.com is connected to Jilt, any @mystore.com email will be marked as a test customer and order.

What if you want to connect a test or staging store to Jilt so you can test things out before you go live? Jilt automatically detects test stores based on the domain name (such as staging.mysite.com or dev.mysite.com¹), or alternatively, you can mark your store as being in “test mode.” Staging sites will allow you to send test emails to people outside of your domain (like advisors or friends) without incurring MCE costs.

A test shop will let you test emails and orders for up to 25 different test customers, so you can make sure your shop browsing and email experience is configured exactly the way you want it.

¹ Jilt automatically marks a shop in test mode if the subdomain uses one of these words: dev, staging, test, sandbox. Certain Shopify store types (such as affiliate, development, or staff stores) are automatically marked as test stores as well.

Improved abandoned orders view

To ensure that a customer has truly abandoned the cart, Jilt waits 15 minutes until considering an order “abandoned.” As a result, orders typically appear in your Jilt orders list 15 minutes after the customer has left the site. In order to give you a better understanding of the activity on your site, Jilt now shows all abandoned orders as they come into your shop. Orders are marked “live” until the 15 minute grace period has passed.

Coming soon

Brand settings: We’re making it easier to add your logo, colors, and social networks, which can be automatically included in your emails. You’ll be able to get up and running with new campaigns even faster as a result.

Email Previews: View the contents of scheduled and recently sent emails to see exactly what your customers are seeing with real-time data from orders.