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How to create newsletters for your online shop

Customer Success Team

Last updated on Jul 10, 2024

You have a successful online store and want to keep your customers updated, offer interesting and helpful content, announce new products or events? Then, we have a curated solution for you!

All you need is to create newsletters to help you gain traffic, keep your customers in the know, and build brand loyalty.

A few words about the structure of the newsletter.

Of course, this might differ depending on the email, but here’s a general guide from us:

  • A catchy subject line is one of the most important parts of the newsletter. In most cases, your subscribers will make their decisions on open the email or not depending on the subject line. So, keep it short, creative, and as informative as possible.
  • Uncluttered layout and appealing design. Try to attract your subscribers with visual content. Add images, use creative fonts, break up blocks of text, and establish visual hierarchy.
  • A greeting. You can create a universal greeting, or customize it and greet your subscribers by their names.
  • Insightful and engaging copy. Keep your messages informative, interesting, and educational. Make your customers more conformable and don’t talk about deals only.
  • A strong call-to-action button. Encourage readers to go to your website, making the button bright and inviting.
  • A sender’s name. It helps to humanize the brand and make the interaction more personal. Adding a photo of your face also increases the human connection.
  • Contacts. Add your email address, and links to social media pages.
  • An unsubscribe button. Always give your subscribers a chance to unsubscribe from your list – it helps to maintain credibility.

You can keep in touch with your existing and potential customers by sending marketing emails and newsletters with the help of Mailchimp.

\ Mailchimp is user-friendly and easy to set-up, making it one of the single most popular platforms on the market and an easy win for small business owners with limited experience looking to up their email marketing game.

To connect Mailchimp to your Ucraft store:

  1. From your eCommerce App, go to Marketing → Newsletters.
  2. Click Connect Mailchimp or click Sign up Free below the button if you don’t have a Mailchimp account yet.
  3. Follow the wizard steps:
  • Choose the Mailchimp audience. Customers from your store will automatically get to the connected audience. Those who do not opt-in for your emails will be transferred to the Mailchimp audience as unsubscribed members. You can send them only ads, postcards, and transactional emails like order notifications.
  • (Optional) Export your current store data to Mailchimp. This way you will see everything you know about your customers in your Mailchimp account which will let you add a personal touch to your email campaigns.
  • (Optional) Connect your site to Mailchimp. This will allow you to set up Mailchimp’s pop-up signup form on the connected site that will prompt customers to opt-in for your emails. And it will let you set up retargeting emails in Mailchimp to remind customers of your store and encourage them to place orders.

After finishing these steps, you will see the name of the Mailchimp account that you’ve connected.

Creating an email campaign

After you’ve connected Mailchimp to your Ucraft store, you are all set to start sending out newsletters. To do that, you will need to create an email campaign in your Mailchimp account.

To create an email campaign:

1. From your eCommerce App, go to Marketing → Newsletters.

2. Click Create Newsletter. You’ll be taken to the Mailchimp website.

3. Choose the type of email campaign you want to create: regular, automated, or plain-text. Learn the difference between these types of campaigns in Mailchimp’s guide: Getting Started with Campaigns.

4. Enter the Campaign Name.

5. Click Begin.

6. Set up your email campaign. You’ll see Mailchimp’s hints at every step of the setup.

7. Preview and test your email campaign.

8. Click Schedule and choose when you want the email to be sent out or click Send to send the emails straight away.

That’s it! Your email will be sent out.

Build a customer list

And, it's time to start a lead generation campaign and collect an email list.

You can use one of the options below or combine them for better effect.

  • Adding newsletter signup at checkout. To do so simply open eCommerce App on Dashboard → Settings → General → Cart & Checkout → scroll down and enable the “Request customers' approval for your marketing emails at checkout” function.

Want to use another platform but Mailchimp. No problem! You can export a list of your customers’ emails manually to further upload it to the mailing service that you will use to send out newsletters.

To export email contacts:

  1. From your eCommerce App, go to Marketing → Newsletters.
  2. Click Export Contacts under Export your email contacts.
  • Adding an email capture popup on your website. You can use our integration with Hello Bar for it. Please check this article for more insight.
  • Using our Form and Subscription elements.
  • Last but not least you can add email capture popup in your store.

To add Mailchimp email capture popup to your store:

1. Connect Mailchimp to your store.

2. Connect your site to Mailchimp if you haven’t done it yet: go to Marketing → Newsletters and click Connect site.

3. Enter your site domain name where your store is located and where you want to add the popup, e.g. https://example.com

4. Click the Connect site and enter your site name.

Copy the HTML tag, then navigate to Site Setting App on Dashboard → Code injection and paste it in the field. \ ​

5. On the Newsletters page, scroll to the Email sign-up settings section and click Create Popup Form. You’ll be redirected to your Mailchimp account.

6. Follow Mailchimp wizard to customize your email capture popup: choose fonts, layout, positions, how soon the popup should show up, etc.\ ​

7. Click Edit above, in the line that says that your pop-up is currently disabled.

8. Switch the toggle next to your connected site where you want to show the popup.

9. Click Save & Publish in the right upper corner.

The email capture popup that you created in Mailchimp will appear on your site. Customers who sign up in this popup will be automatically added to your Mailchimp audience.

Note: To have it active you'll need to connect a Custom Domain to your Ucraft site.

If you have any questions or concerns, contact us directly via the Live Chatbox, located in the lower right corner. Our Support Team will provide you with top-notch quality support, 24/7*.*