I recently joined Xero Shoes. They're one of the largest WooCommerce stores in the world. And as luck would have it we received the results of an accessibility (a11y) audit right after I started. That meant my first project is to dive deep into accessibility with WordPress & WooCommerce.
And the first item I looked into was making sure our sale prices were accessible. đ
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This article originally appeared on eCommerceFuel.
If youâve been in the eCommerce industry for a while youâve probably heard that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels out there. Some stats say that email marketing has a 36X return-on-investment (ROI).
But despite this many eCommerce entrepreneurs neglect their email list and they tend to go cold where your readers forget who you are and what you email them about.
When you have a cold email list, few readers open your emails. Email service providers like Google notice this and eventually funnel more and more emails into spam. This robs your readers the choice to even read your email. That defeats the purpose of the channel.
Today weâre going to explore how you can run a re engagement campaign for your email list. âď¸
Rather than just talk about how to do this theoretically weâre going to share actual numbers as we warm up the email list for eCommerceFuel.
Counterintuitively, by deleting users who will never open our emails deliverability for the whole list will go up and your open rate should increase. (hint: it did for us!) đ
Continue Reading…Itâs been a few months since Iâve written on my blog. Itâs not because I didnât have anything to say. There were a lot of things I wanted to talk about but I wanted to address the elephant in the room before I addressed smaller issues.
Just over a year ago I took on the role of product manager for WooCommerce. That means that I make sure weâre building the best possible software for our customers. I donât think up features willy nilly. I read the same blogs & books as our customers, I listen to the same podcasts as our customers, I go to the same conferences, I evaluate e-commerce platforms to see what they're doing and talking about, and I spend a lot of time talking to our customers.
I've successfully adopted the entrepreneur mindset which is great for my job. It means that I see an endless stream of opportunities. Every time I hear âIt sucks that …â, âI wish that …â, or âWhy does …â I know thereâs space for a product or service and my mind starts turning about all of the ways to fill that gap. Could we build a piece of software to fix that? Could we create an e-course on this topic? Could we promote this service in some way?
This is a good thing. We've created a whole bunch of new features in WooCommerce based on these conversations and we've gotten more customers and made the existing customers happier. When WooThemes wasn't interested in pursuing something I would do it on my own time. I've created & sold my own products. I've learned how to promote my products through content and I've learned how hard it can be to build and maintain a newsletter. These experiences gave me practical e-commerce knowledge instead of theory.
And then in May things changed. WooThemes was acquired by Automattic and we had new policies.
Aside from the uncertainty which appears anytime your life situation changes there was only one hurdle I had to cross. And that was the Conflict of Interest (COI)  policy. I wonât repeat the whole thing here but suffice it to say that you can do just about anything as long as you donât make money off of it. That means that I canât write any more books, and I canât create any new courses or plugins. I also had to open source or sell my existing plugins.
This is where the mindset & attitude I developed over the last couple years becomes a bit of a problem. I had assets that were generating a ton of revenue that only required occasional fixes and they had to be sold off. It was like asking me to give up free money.
Sigh. It's just frustrating.
I'm not here to debate the policy. The policy is the policy and it's here to stay. The only thing I can do is choose to accept it or to go out on my own. And I'm still here.
I want to give this a chance. Automattic is the top of the WordPress industry. There is no going higher. I'm working with some of the best people in the industry they are people who have passion and purpose. If you've ever read the book Drive you'd know that that's all you really need.
I love small businesses and I love the idea that people can take care of themselves. That's part of the reason I love WooCommerce so much. It's technology that frees people from working for terrible companies. They can create their own product, work for themselves, and sell their creativity in any way they see fit.
I disagree with the policy. I think Automatticians know how to prioritize their job over their side projects and I think the benefits of side projects outweigh the negatives. But as much as I believe this; it doesn't matter. The policy is the policy and you need to accept it or move on.
I've decided to push through this uncomfortable period. Not working is challenging for me right now. I'm so used to putting in 110% that it's weird to have free time in the day. I'm going to take advantage of this free time. I'm going to get back into my hobbies, spend more time with friends, and spend more time with my partner. For better or worse this policy is forcing me to spend time taking care of myself which is maybe something I've left by the way side. Make no mistake this is very uncomfortable for me. But on occasion it's good to be uncomfortable. How else are you supposed to grow?
WordPress 3.5 is about to be officially released and there is a lot of awesome stuff coming out like the new Media Manager and the ability to easily add your favorite plugins to your site. There is truly a lot of brilliant stuff. But there is one issue with the new release that not many people seem to be commenting on.
Automattic, the company that manages WordPress, has chosen to remove the Links Manager, and this is totally fine; very few people use it and Automattic is moving the functionality into a plugin so that the few people who do want to use it can continue to do so. The problem is that to maintain backwards compatibility Automattic left the code in their system so that the Links Manager isn't actually removed it's just hidden. Continue Reading…
I'm back at work after a two day WordCamp conference in Chicago. The sessions were fantastic! Most of them provided information that I've been meaning to look up or information about problems I'm bound to run into. I stayed primarily in the developer track and picked up a number of tricks to improve my sites. But as usual, I find more value in meeting other developers and picking their brains.
Hello world!
It's taken me about 5 years to get a web development blog up and running. I've always wanted to share what I was working on but I always held back because I wasn't happy with this or that. There's a million things to consider when starting a blog but I thought I should just start writing and figure the rest out as I go. I haven't even set up a theme or automated backups yet!
I'm not sure exactly how often I'll be creating content for the blog but I imagine that as I keep programming things that I'll take a few minutes and share what I learned. I hope that there is a nice mix of questions, tutorials, screencasts, etc.