To this day, I can’t believe the % of people who ask this question!
These are people who are involved in selling online in some way. Course creators, consultants looking for clients online, tech startup CEOs (damn!… double damn!), web designers, “ux experts” (intentional quotes) and many, many more.
In my opinion any business owner with a website who doesn’t pay attention or learn some copywriting is wasting so much potential revenue, sales, partnerships and possibilities of growth.
And the funny thing is I was no Indiana Jones either. I discovered copywriting completely by accident! My stars must have aligned when I met the first online marketer in real life. I don’t even remember the first conversation about it.
You know, I don’t blame anyone though, except the name itself. “COPY”… “WRITING”. It is a seriously stupid name for a wonderful life-changing craft. It’s so bad that even if you eavesdrop on a conversation, it won’t spark any interest.
“Hey Stella, this copy is weak, we need to change it”. “Okay, I’ll get a new version… but you should know this is based on another copy that doubled conversions for a similar product line”. “That’s fine, not all of it.. just the middle bits”. “Okay let’s tweak it and test the subject lines though”
If I heard this, there is no part of me that even would want to ask questions about it. “COPY” sounds like something involving a computer data backup. Perhaps they are using Xerox machines I’d think and walk away.
For all the amazing things copywriting can do with words to a business and this world, it failed to name itself.
All I wanted was to sell simple digital products using WooCommerce – my page templates. It should be easy for the buyer so they purchase in just 3 steps
Click on ‘Buy Now’
Fill in contact & payment details
Finish purchase and download item
Not too much to ask in 2023, I thought. I was wrong.
I spent some time to get it to work the way I wanted. I’m sharing every step needed to simplify your WooCommerce setup in this article so you can do the same.
Why is this recommended?
This flow is streamlined for higher conversions / sales. People love simple. WooCommerce out of the box is built for bigger, complicated full fledged e-commerce shops
What we’ll setup?
We’ll setup something similar to the screenshots below.
I won’t focus on getting the exact look and feel.
The focus will be on the flow / user experience. Zero fancy stuff.
Step 1: Simple product page, with a buy button.
Step 2: Checkout screen
What You Need
A website that runs on WordPress and WooCommerce
10 mins time
Optionally, you can use Elementor Pro which I use to customize the look and feel of the product page and the checkout page.
How To Add A Digital Product In WooCommerce
Simply add a new product in WooCommerce (Products > Add New) and configure the following settings as shown in the screenshots below.
Detailed Steps To Streamline The Buying Experience
Here’s what we will do to simplify your WooCommerce setup
Skip the cart page
Disable product reviews
Disable stock management / inventory management
Disable the cart functionality (and limit only one product at a time)
Skip the cart page
Under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > General, make sure the redirect to the cart page after successful addition is checked.
Under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Page Setup, make sure both cart page and checkout page are pointing to your Checkout page.
Disable product reviews
This one is simple and optional. I enable this to just keep it clean.
Even if we skip the cart page, there is still a possibility of adding multiple items to the cart in the background. Then we end up having products on the checkout page that we cannot remove.
Step 1: So to avoid that, first enable the following setting in all your products (screenshot below)
Step 2: This step requires you to have a child theme installed. If you don’t know what it is, I suggest you read this post. But most paid themes should provide one for download. You’ll have to simply install it alongside your actual theme. You can use a free plugin like Child Theme Configurator to generate one quickly.
Next you’ll need to copy-paste a few lines of code. First copy the code below.
It does two things:
Disables the annoying zoom functionality that comes with WooCommerce
Empties the cart, before adding a new item to it. This ensures the cart cannot have more than one item ever.
// before addto cart, only allow 1 item in a cart
add_filter( 'woocommerce_add_to_cart_validation', 'woo_custom_add_to_cart_before' );
function woo_custom_add_to_cart_before( $cart_item_data ) {
global $woocommerce;
$woocommerce->cart->empty_cart();
// Do nothing with the data and return
return true;
}
add_filter( 'woocommerce_single_product_zoom_enabled', '__return_false' );
Next go to Appearance > Theme File Editor > functions.php and paste the code as shown in the screenshot below.
Conclusion
If you followed the steps above, you should now have a streamlined, simple buying experience on your WooCommerce store that helps increase conversions / sales. Feel free to contact me with your questions.
Ah transactional emails… The only type of email that people actually read these days
I’m joking. People don’t read emails anymore
Joking again. People don’t read anymore
For the rest of you non-people reading this, here’s the story of why + how I migrated 3 transactional email services (ElasticEmail to SendGrid to Postmark) within a few hours and what you can learn from it.
Premise
Imagine a website with 100,000 visitors a month
That’s roughly
3,300 people a day
140 people per hour
2-3 people per minute
That was my client’s website. And that’s just visitor count. We also had 300-400 new signups per day.
And, as it was an interactive course platform, there were hundreds or sometimes up to a thousand logged-in users.
I was helping him move from Teachable to Self-hosted WordPress.
So we were moving the number of students in stages to not disrupt their experience. And in the process, I found out that after a certain limit, the web host’s servers cannot handle the volume (or) the high frequency of emails.
If you have to receive a contact form notification email 5-10 times a day. That’s okay. But if you have to send a few emails every minute, you need a dedicated email server for such emails.
That’s where Transactional email services come in.
Moving away from Teachable
Teachable is an easy platform for people who want to sell their online courses. It takes care of everything. It is great for people who want to escape the technical stuff.
But there are limitations as they do with most pre-built hosted platforms. Once a business crosses certain limits, it can be hard to grow on Teachable. It is not very flexible for online marketing or growth hacking.
Also, there’s no gamification or anything other custom ideas you might want to experiment with.
So for those reasons I was helping him migrate from Teachable to a WordPress-based stack. I’ll write more about my learnings from that experience later.
Discovering Transactional emails
Transactional emails are sent to facilitate (or notify) events important to the user.
Examples are
password reset email
purchase confirmation, invoices
password change notification
signup confirmation
subscription state changes (start, canceled, renewed, etc.)
The other type is marketing emails.
Imagine not receiving the email that helps you change your password?
Or an email that has an OTP that helps you log in!
When you’re a paid subscriber, imagine not receiving the email that helps you reset your password.
I don’t know about you… I’d be frustrated when basic things don’t work as expected.
Elastic Email – My first setup
So I quickly lookup the top transactional email services and read a few reviews to quickly grasp this space.
I had to choose between Twilio SendGrid and Elastic Email.
And I decided to go with ElasticEmail.
Why?
Their website seemed cleaner and simpler than SendGrid.
Their marketing was on point. I’m someone from a software development background who switched to marketing. Just see that headline!
And when I tried their service for free, the user experience was slick, elegant, and simple.
Trigger – Angry Customers
I woke up one morning to an email from a student who was locked out of the site because they forgot their password, and when they tried to reset it, they didn’t receive the password reset email.
These were paid monthly or yearly subscribers who were pretty angry as they were not able to use something they are paying for, naturally! I would be too.
So I go inside Elastic Email, and… after a little bit of time I find that there is a section where I could clearly see what emails have not been delivered.
The server had rejected them.
“Why wasn’t I notified?”
And the first thought that came up to my mind was – “Why wasn’t I notified about this?”
Because from a developer perspective, it would be so simple to write some code that would send me an email (esp. when my account is on fire, metaphorically speaking).
And when email delivery fails – I mean, that’s the whole point of me using your platform!
It was your only job… to send emails.
To send important emails, time-sensitive emails. NOT marketing emails.
semi-accurate representation of the team at elastic email when their service fails.
But they hadn’t sent me any email notifications.
It was just appalling.
So that’s the first point where they lost my trust.
I was thinking – “something doesn’t add up”. They can design a website/user-interface that’s so slick, but, when the core of their service fails, they’re not sending me an email notification?!
I contacted their customer support and the customer support was acting like this was normal – “Oh yeah. I’m sorry. Uh, we’ve got to get it checked out.”
I mean, you are not supposed to wait for me to get that checked out. It raised even more questions within my head.
So the customer support from Elastic Email came back. The gist of what they said was this:
The IP address that we’re using to send emails, the reputation for that has gone bad. It is not your fault, but as many accounts share the same IP, some other account was sending low-quality emails and now everyone sharing the IP is suffering.
I may have paraphrased their reply
And I would have expected them to add something like this:
“And… the abusive account was quickly kicked out and the rest of the accounts have been moved to a new IP with good reputation. We apologise for this, and would like to compensate you with free hot chocolate for life”, but NO…
three words that customer support should have added to avoid confusion.
Instead, they added that buying a dedicated IP address “may” resolve this.
So a bit of sales 101 to Elastic Email and you, the reader – the best time to upsell is NOT after you’ve broken your delivery promise.
Then, I go out on the internet and dig deeper about Elastic Email’s deliverability.
I find out a lot of bad reviews. People are furious on the internet about how bad their deliverability is.
And then I tell myself -“you do get what you pay for”. Elastic Email was one of the cheapest services out there.
So this time I think, okay let’s move to SendGrid.
SendGrid seemed like a big company with a 100 million dollar revenue. They were acquired by Twilio another massive company.
Migration to SendGrid
So I go in and to my surprise, they were just five DNS records I had to change. That’s it. We were using Cloudflare for DNS and quickly changed it.
On the WordPress side, we installed the WP Mail SMTP plugin, and just input the SendGrid configuration API key. That’s it.
A quick test with a forgot password email and a sample woo-commerce purchase was done. The emails came fast. I saw reports on SendGrid as it was happening.
So I was happy. It felt relatively more transparent at the time.
Peace didn’t last long
Again, I received reports of some people not receiving emails. And I’m like, okay, so why is this happening again?
So I contact SendGrid’s support.
Bombarded with our own customer support tickets on one side, and on the other side, emails escalated from our own team saying – “Hey, nobody’s getting emails. People are angry. They’re not able to get inside!”
Imagine somebody who just comes in and pays for your product and then they don’t get to use it. So this was a stressful situation.
My experience with SendGrid’s customer support was bad. I remember they didn’t even read my message fully and replied with scripts.
After a few exchanges, I get a similar response –
“I’m sorry, but your account uses shared IP addresses to send emails. So you don’t have control over the reputation of the IP. Please get a dedicated IP address to have better control of the reputation.”
Digging deeper into dedicated IP address for email
Feeling like that might be my only choice, I read more about dedicated IP addresses.
And I find contradictory information on their own documentation about dedicated IP addresses.
They actually don’t recommend dedicated IP if we sent less than 100K emails per month. And we didn’t. We had about 300-400 new signups per day. So that’s about 12K emails per month. But the rest of the emails didn’t add up to 100K.
Buying a dedicated IP address isn’t going to solve it. They had a full guide for IP warmup. Basically, you have to send in lower volumes at first and build reputation. Then you can slowly increase the volume.
Reading all this I think – “How is this so hard? Esp. sending something as simple as welcome emails and password reset emails.”
It’s not even marketing emails!
And our users are not going to wait for me to build IP reputation. Our domain had good reputation already due to our history of sending emails with best practices.
The only other solution was to set up everything ourselves on our servers and hire an email-deliverability expert to find the best strategy for warming up the IP.
I was almost on the verge of just hiring an email deliverability expert. For the scale at which we were operating, the whole thing seemed unnecessary. But I felt like this was the last choice left!
But… while researching a bit more about dedicated IP addresses, I discovered Postmark. And what I read on their blog was a refreshing, logical take on the subject.
They were the first company to discourage buying a dedicated IP address, unless you really need it. In fact you couldn’t buy it directly.
You had to ‘make a request’, and there was a clear eligibility guideline – more than 300K emails per month minimum.
They had a delightful website. I fell in love the first time. But then I do fall in love with websites often too soon. I put them on a pedestal and sing ballads. So I stay careful.
But then, I signed up for the free trial and loved the entire experience. Even the way they explained the concepts and communicated the benefits was outstanding.
Everything I read and saw made me go – “This is what everyone should have been doing in the first place”
Final Switch
Again, I changed a few DNS records on my side. On the WordPress side, I switched from SendGrid to Postmark using the WP Mail SMTP‘s Other SMTP option.
And then the emails started flowing. And this was the best. There were no problems. Nobody complained about emails going to spam. Emails were quick as expected for transactional emails.
And also, the UI of Postmark was so far the best.
WILDBIT – THE COMPANY BEHIND IT
I was so in love with the design, writing and the product, I looked up the company that made it. As expected they weren’t your run-of-the-mill software company.
They gave so much importance to their brand and the messaging. They had a page dedicated to each role in their company with clear guidelines of what’s good and bad.
And as of now, Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign. I really hope they maintain the standard and do not mess up the product (or the team).
TL;DR
If you’re looking for a transactional email service just go and try Postmark. Avoid Elastic Email or SendGrid.
I hope this article saves you from the same frustration I went through. Thank me later in the comments if this did help. It took me a long time to write this up.
I started my journey as a freelancer who worked mostly with spammy marketers or informational product sellers. Most of them wanted to have the same brand voice, same copywriting style, same sequences, conversion tricks.
But one thing that struck me immediately was how advanced these ‘spammy’ marketers were in their marketing stack. Their copywriting skills, ability to profile customers, segmentation, funnel automation were all top-notch.
But they have unremarkable products.
But the rest of the business compensated for it so well.
I say unremarkable because I wonder how many of them can honestly expose their NPS publicly. (Net-Promoter-Score)
What % of their customers will happily recommend them to friends?
I know many have good testimonials, but the problem with informational and coaching products is that it depends a lot on psychographics than demographics and the success rate can be far less than what they project it to be.
And often they say, “Well, you need to put in the work” and if we don’t get results, it simply means we didn’t put enough work in. It has a scary resemblance to people selling faith.
I think it would be better if they simply acknowledge their product can evolve and get better, and is not for everybody and can fail even if they put in the work.
Their marketing was so advanced that they made sales and often sold their own marketing strategies as the product itself.
Which is why often it feels like ‘people selling courses to teach people how to sell courses to teach people how to sell courses to teach people how to sell courses‘ – I think.
The other day, I found some plugins installed by a junior WordPress developer on a LMS membership site I’m building for a client.
I was scanning through them and found one of them had the version number 0.16.8.
I immediately disabled it and instructed him never to install such plugins again on a site which is going to be used by thousands of students once it is live.
How did I know not to use something just by looking at a number?
I’ll explain in this post.
WordPress has about 56,888 plugins as of writing this article for the first time.
You might be surprised to know that a plugin’s code is reviewed only the first time! After that the developer is free to update (or abandon) as they wish.
So its better that you know a little bit about version numbers and what they mean. This will help you save a lot of your headaches and keep your site safe.
All plugins have version number in the format X.Y.Z
The first number X is the major version number. The second number Y is minor version number. The third number Z is patch version number.
When a plugin is updated with a bug fix or similar small fixes, only the last number is changed.
When a feature is added, the middle number is changed.
Usually if the middle or the last number is changed, it means that nothing in your plugin should break. Updating it is not expected to break anything.
But this isn’t a guarantee by any means and often developers have subjective usage and opinions. Still, it helps avoid a lot of problems to simply even understand these numbers.
If the first number is changed, then a major set of breaking changes have been done. This usually means the update can break inter-communication with dependent plugins/themes etc.
So why did I ask him to not use a plugin with a version number like 0.16.8?
Because if the first number is 0, it usually means its alpha version software. The developer is telling you that it is not ready for production and you can use it at your own risk.
Usually if you have low-profile, low-risk sites (like a new website with low traffic), then you might want to use it.
But if you have a site that you depend on for leads / sales regularly you are better off using plugins with minimum version number 2.x.x
Additionally, I recommend that you use as less plugins as possible, and only those that are recommended by popular and trusted plugins / developers to avoid a site spaghetti.
