One of the great things about having a globally distributed team like ours is that everyone experiences the seasons differently. Some of our team members are getting snow regularly, while others are taking surfing breaks in the afternoons. Some of us are decorating our Christmas trees and others celebrated eight nights of Hanukkah earlier this month. It’s fun to be able to share that with each other, and it helps us work better together as we make Jilt the best email marketing platform for eCommerce shops.

To that end, we’ve been hard at work since our last update deploying changes that make Jilt even better. We hope your shop is having a great holiday sales season and we wish you, your coworkers, and your family a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!

In our quest to give you ever more control over how you deliver your marketing emails to customers, we’ve added a few new segmentation rules. You can now segment your campaigns by “payment method” and the whether a cart/order requires shipping.

This is helpful if you want to change your email timing for digital orders vs. shipped orders (especially helpful for post-purchase follow ups), or to exclude PayPal orders from abandonment emails, for example.

To use the “payment method” rule, you need to know your gateway name.

For Shopify, this is very straightforward. Each order lists a “Gateway” on the “Edit order” screen, or you’ll see the gateway name under your store’s payment settings.

In WooCommerce, it’s a bit more complex to know the gateway name, as WooCommerce allows you to change this to a custom name. However, Jilt will use the slug for consistency and easier identification. Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments, and view your gateway settings, then look at the URL. The part after “&section=” is what you’ll use as the variable for the “payment method” rule. (Quick tip: you can use “payment method contains” for a partial match, like “authorize_net_cim”)

For Easy Digital Downloads users it’s a lot more difficult to know the exact name because gateways are not named consistently. For that reason, we recommend using a “contains” rule for the gateway name. Contact our support team and we’ll be happy to assist you if you’re not sure what the name of your payment gateway is.

We’ll be working on an easier way to select the payment gateway slug in the near future, and will be adding two additional segmentation rules for “shipping method name” and “has refunds,” too!

Our WooCommerce Memberships and Subscriptions integrations already have the ability to segment your member or subscription emails based on customer data. Now you can also segment other emails, like abandoned cart recovery campaigns or win-back emails, by some membership and subscription attributes.

For example, you can now send different abandonment reminders to people with active memberships vs. those with inactive ones, or send one win-back campaign to customers subscribed to product A, and a different one to people subscribed to product B.

We’re pretty excited about this change. We updated our campaign rule screen to show you the number of matching carts, orders, or customers live as you update your rules! This makes it easy to gauge what sort of reach and impact your campaigns will have as you tweak the rules.

We avoid launching any major changes during the holiday season because we know it’s the busiest time of the year for eCommerce stores.. But we do take this time to work on a lot of bug fixes and performance enhancements.

One area we greatly improved performance is our grouping algorithm. These days, it’s pretty common for people to switch devices in the middle of shopping. If a customer starts their cart on one device (like a mobile phone) and then resumes shopping on another (like a laptop computer), Jilt intelligently groups carts together to avoid duplicating emails to that customer. We updated that algorithm so groups are even more accurate.

We also made adjustments to how the Jilt for WooCommerce plugin syncs data to Jilt. This means faster performance at checkout and a better overall customer experience.

Our friends at WP Engine have included Jilt in their Solution Center! The Solution Center is a collection of WordPress resources (apps and plugins) to improve your site that have been vetted by WP Engine. We’re excited to work more closely with WP Engine to bring Jilt to their WooCommerce customers. Cheers! 🍻

We accomplished a lot in 2018, and while most of our team will be taking some well-deserved time off next week, we have a lot of exciting changes and improvements coming soon! Here’s a sneak peek at what’s on deck for early 2019.

• New onboarding: We’re working on improving our onboarding process to make it even easier to get your stores set up and start sending lifecycle email campaigns.
• New UI: You may have noticed that earlier this month we rolled out a brand new design for Jilt.com and the Jilt blog! We’ll start making changes to the platform UI to match the style of our new website and brand over the next couple of months.
• Transactional emails: Hundreds of stores are already generating a ton of revenue using the new lifecycle email campaign types we rolled out earlier this year. Next on our list: transactional emails. We’ll be adding support for things like shipping notifications and order receipts in the first quarter of 2019!
• Build your own campaigns: The segmentation engine that powers Jilt’s marketing emails is very powerful, but easy to use because every campaign is pre-built. That’s perfect for a lot of users, but sometimes you need even more control over your campaign. So, for you Jilt power users out there, we’re working on adding a way to build your own campaigns from scratch. There are some under-the-hood changes that we’ve completed already, and we’ll be finishing that feature in January.