Ever been curious about what you can do with email marketing and notification emails in Recharge?
If you have, you’re in the right place.
Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the options Recharge users have around email automations. Let’s take a look at how you can get the most out of this resource leveraging built-in tools and handy integrations like Klaviyo, MailChimp, and Omnisend.
The Recharge email notification suite
To start, let’s talk about the built-in notification suite within Recharge.
It’s important to first understand what it means when you hear that Recharge sends emails—which we do. The misconception, however, is that Recharge has built-in email tools around advanced automated email campaigns, like those used in winback efforts or upselling, for example.
The reality, however, is that Recharge’s email capability is purely notification-based. Here’s what we mean by that.
An example of an automated notification-based email you could send within Recharge would be a “Subscription Activation” email. This type of email is automatically triggered to send when a new customer signs up for a subscription, and includes basic subscription information that keeps the customer updated.
Below, you’ll find some images from a merchant’s Recharge dashboard where they can choose what email notifications they want to be sent to customers based on an action. Any of these can be turned on and off using the toggle buttons.
You also have the ability to send emails to yourself as the store owner. These notifications include things like notifications around when a customer cancels a subscription or a daily update of your customers’ actions. Again, these can be toggled on and off based on preference.
Different types notification emails you can send within Recharge include:
- Notification around a product that’s out of stock
- Subscription cancellation confirmation
- Upcoming charge notification
- Card declined notification
- Card expiring notification
- Refund issued notification
Now that we know what emails can be sent within Recharge, let’s talk about what you can create with the help of our integration partners (which we’ll get to!)
Currently, Recharge is limited in its capacity around:
- Cart abandonment/winback email campaigns
- Upselling emails
- Customization (beyond being able to add a custom color and logo)
- Analytics (insights into click/open rates)
The good news is: Email marketing tools like Klaviyo, MailChimp (with the help of Zapier integrations), and Omnisend allow you to do all this and more.
Before we dive a bit deeper on automating emails, you may find it useful to read our earlier article: 5 Zapier Integrations to Simplify Your Subscription Business (+ Use Cases). This article goes in depth about how to use Zapier and what its strengths are. You can also reference our Zapier/Recharge setup guide here.
Recharge & Klaviyo
The Recharge and Klaviyo integration helps merchants drive sales by using data from Shopify and other apps to send automated emails, create personalized product recommendations, deliver post-purchase engagement campaigns, run better Facebook ads, and more.
Here are a few types of automated email campaigns you could send thanks to this integration:
- Started Subscription: A welcome email for brand new subscription customers
- Cancelled Subscription: A winback campaign to bring back churned customers
- Started Checkout: Cart abandonment campaign to drive conversions that almost happened
With the help of the Zapier integration, the triggers are the same as above but include additional types of trigger-based emails, like new order or reactivated subscription. The actions for Klaviyo are:
- Add subscriber
- Create event
- Update subscriber
You can reference the Klaviyo/Recharge setup guide here.
Recharge & MailChimp
By integrating Recharge and MailChimp for email marketing, you can instantly expand your ability to send advanced automated email campaigns around your subscription-based products. There are three different levels of options for this.
Option 1: Base integration (Shopify but not Recharge)
The base integration (enabling in Shopify but not Recharge) allows you to sync Recharge customer account information and order information with MailChimp—and if the customer opts into your email marketing when they check out with Recharge, the integration also syncs that information in MailChimp so you can send additional marketing emails as well.
Keep in mind that with the base integration for MailChimp, you still can’t:
- Sync customer subscription cancellation events (only registers if an order is cancelled in Shopify)
- Read customer reactivation events on a subscription (only reads the new orders submitted to Shopify)
- Read new subscription information (just reads the orders that are submitted to Shopify)
Option 2: Enabled integration (Shopify + Recharge)
With the enabled integration for Shopify AND Recharge, you get the benefit of one extra feature: Customers will be added to a cancelled list if any of their subscription item statuses are changed to cancelled.
This could be from a subscription expiring, too many card declines, or a manual cancellation by the storeowner or the customer via the Recharge customer/admin portal.
With that cancelled list, you can run any sort of winback campaigns in order to get those customers coming back to you.
Option 3: Zapier for Recharge + MailChimp
Recharge + MailChimp via the Zapier integration gets you a few more options. With this avenue, you can send automated emails around important actions such as:
- New customer
- New active subscription
- New cancelled subscription
- New order
- New subscription
The actions for MailChimp are:
- Create campaign
- Send campaign
- Unsubscribe email
- Add/update subscriber
- Add subscriber to segment
Some merchants want the ability to automate notification emails from the Recharge suite as well, and this enables that (for a few of them.)
For example: Setting up a zap for “Subscription Activation” is: New customer in Recharge > add/update list in MailChimp
From there, the merchant gets full customization and analytics. Just remember to turn the respective Recharge notifications off, so you’re not double-sending notifications to your customers. You can reference the Mailchimp/Recharge setup guide here.
Recharge & Omnisend
With integration between Recharge and Omnisend, marketing automation for subscription notifications will be easier than ever before.
Going further than email marketing automation, with Omnisend integration you’ll be able to send messages and updates to your customers via several different channels, like email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, web push notifications, WhatsApp, Viber, and more.
- Subscription Welcome: Send an automated welcome series when a customer begins a new subscription and introduce them to your brand
- Subscription Updates: When your customer updates their subscription, send them an automated message to confirm that update.
- Subscription Reactivation: Create an automation workflow to win back customers who have recently canceled a subscription
- Custom Automation: Update your customers on new subscription options, promos, sales, and anything else that will catch their attention.
Integration between Recharge and Omnisend is simple. From your Omnisend account:
- Go to My Account > Connected Apps and click on Connect New App.
- Find Recharge in the list, and click connect
- You’ll be prompted with an “Authorize Access” page. Authorize access between Recharge and Omnisend.
- Click Install to finalize integration between the two apps.
Once you’ve installed Recharge in your Omnisend app, you’ll be able to automate messages for your subscriptions.
Recharge will now create custom events in Omnisend in real time (note: you will have to import historical data).
Available custom events include:
- New subscription created
- Updated subscription
- Canceled subscription
- Activated subscription
The integration between Recharge and Omnisend will also make it possible to create custom event fields that you can use to personalize your messages. You’ll be able to use product names, prices, quantities, frequency, and more to make sure your messages are relevant to your customers.
Advanced email marketing opportunities
The integrations with Klaviyo, MailChimp, and Omnisend can help you do a lot when it comes to email marketing automation, but there are still some advanced opportunities out there that you can capitalize upon. Let’s look at a few different use cases so we can study what these look like in action.
Use Case 1: Update a Subscribed List
Many Recharge merchants want to be able to update a subscribed list in Klaviyo, MailChimp, or Omnisend. The use case here is to just send an email saying “thank you for ordering” or “upcoming shipment” or “leave a review here”, which essentially replaces the Recharge notification emails.
Without the use of the API, the ability to send an “upcoming charge” email still does not exist outside of the Recharge notifications.
This just involves the base integration between Recharge and Klaviyo, MailChimp, or Omnisend. When a new person purchases something, add simply that person to a subscribed list.
Use Case 2: Revenue-Driving Campaigns
A growing number of merchants are also taking their marketing efforts to the next level with more advanced features. These include:
- Winback campaigns. Using Zapier (and either Klaviyo or MailChimp), customers who unsubscribed from a Recharge subscription are added to an “unsubscribe” list in your email marketing platform of choice. In Omnisend, the customer is automatically added to an “unsubscribe” list. From there, you can run an email campaign to get them to opt back into your subscription. When they do return, you can use Zapier or Omnisend’s native integration, to update their status on a list to show they’re a current Recharge subscriber instead of unsubscribed.
- Upselling campaigns. When a customer becomes a subscriber in Recharge, putting him/her on an email list where you consistently offer upsells can result in higher average order value (AOV). Upselling emails can be sent in either Klaviyo, MailChimp, or Omnisend.
- Abandoned carts. Klaviyo and Omnisend allow you to send emails to customers who don’t finish the checkout process. This is based on a predetermined timer set in both platforms that triggers when they start the checkout process in Recharge but do not finish.
Example in Klaviyo
Example in Omnisend
Make more sales with automated email marketing and Recharge
When it comes to automated emails for your subscription customers, there are many different options that can help you improve communication, keep customers updated, and even drive sales. The question is: When will you get started?
