How to send email alerts when a new WooCommerce product is published

One of our WooCommerce Product Table plugin users recently asked how to email customers  when they publish a new WooCommerce product. We were stumped for a minute, and then discovered 2 simple and effective solutions that works for any WooCommerce store.

For years, thousands of people have implemented the steps in our tutorial about how to use MailChimp to send new posts by email. It has been read by 34,740 people to date! We've received dozens of comments form people saying how useful it is in sending email alerts for new WordPress blog posts. However, I didn't realise until now that you can also use these methods to send new product alerts for WooCommerce!

To send email notifications of new WooCommerce products, follow these steps to get the information you need. You can then use our other tutorial to set it all up.

Method 1: Link MailOptin with your MailChimp account

MailOptin is a WordPress plugin that emails new products to your Mailchimp audience. You can choose whether to send the email as soon as each product is adde to your store, or as a daily, weekly and monthly newsletter roundup of new products.

MailOptin is very easy to set up and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

To send email notification of new WooCommerce products, you’ll need the Pro or Agency plan. Get MailOptin, login to your WordPress site and install and activate it.

Step 1. Connect MailOptin to your Mailchimp account

Firstly, you need to get your Mailchimp API key:

1. Go to ‘Integrations’ under the MailOption Dashboard menu.
2. Click on the MailChimp tab to reveal the settings. Enter your API key and hit the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Step 2. Set up a new WooCommerce Product email automation

Next is to set up the email automation that will be responsible for emailing your MailChimp subscribers when you publish a new WooCommerce product.

1. Click ‘Emails’ under the MailOptin Dashboard menu.
2. Click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top and select ‘Email Automation’.

   

3. Enter a title for the campaign and select a type:
   • Choose ‘New Post Notification’ to send the email as soon as a new product is added.
   • Select ‘Posts Email Digest’ to create a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter digest of products added.

     

4. Now select a template. You will then be redirected to the email builder.
5. On the email builder, use the Body, Header, Content and Footer panels to customize the email template to your heart’s content. You have options to change colors, add a header image, add custom content and more.

The Settings panel is where the actual setup is done. Open it to set up the email subject and the maximum content length. Most importantly, select “Products” as the custom post type.

You can also restrict the automation to specific product categories and tags. This is ideal if you want to send an email when products are added to a specific category in WooCommerce.

Next, scroll down to the ‘Recipient’ section, select ‘Mailchimp’ and choose which of your MailChimp audiences (i.e. lists) the email will be delivered to:

When you are done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the top right corner and then toggle the activation switch to the right to enable the automation.

Method 2: Use RSS to do it directly from MailChimp

The MailChimp method of sending email alerts for new products uses RSS. MailChimp regularly checks your WooCommerce products RSS feed (either for your entire store, or a specific category). When it spots a new product, it sends out an email alert listing all the new products. When there are no products, no email notifications are sent.

This is a good option if you don't want to install any extra plugins on your site.

Step 1. Get your WooCommerce RSS feed URL's

To get started, you need to know your WooCommerce products RSS feed URL. Fortunately, it's really easy to figure this out. Just add /feed to the end of the URL.

If you want to send email alerts for all new products, then you need the WooCommerce shop page RSS feed URL. This is the address for your main shop page followed by /feed. For example, if your WooCommerce shop page is at https://producttable.barn2.com/shop/ then the RSS feed URL is https://producttable.barn2.com/shop/feed/.

If you want to send email alerts for products in a specific category, then you need the category page RSS feed URL. Similarly, just get the category page address and add /feed to it. For example, if your category is https://producttable.barn2.com/product-category/clothing/ then the RSS feed URL is https://producttable.barn2.com/product-category/clothing/feed/.

Category-specific RSS feeds can be useful if you want customers to choose which category to sign up to receive alerts for.

How do I know I've got the right WooCommerce RSS feed URL?

If you're unsure, then you can also find the RSS feed URL by visiting the page listing your products, right-clicking and choosing 'View Source'. This will open the source code for your page. Search for the word 'feed' and this will be the RSS feed URL for your WC products. For example, in this screenshot I have highlighted the correct URL for the WooCommerce product feed:

You can test the URL is valid by loading it in your browser. This will take you to an XML RSS feed listing all your products. It may look like gobbledegook, but this is what MailChimp needs to check so that it knows when you have added new products.

Step 2. Set up new product notifications in MailChimp

Armed with your WooCommerce product RSS feed URL (or URL's, if you're planning to send different alerts for different categories), it's time to set it up in MailChimp.

To do this, follow the instructions in our MailChimp tutorial. While it mostly focusses on how to send new blog posts by email, the instructions work equally for Woo products. Just make sure you use the RSS feed URL's that you saved in Step 1.

The tutorial covers everything you need to know including:

• How to display product images in your 'New product' email alerts.
• Setting up MailChimp and import subscribers.
• Creating MailChimp autoresponder campaigns to automatically email subscribers when new products are published.
• Adding 'New product alert' signup forms to your WordPress site - either for all products, or with tick boxes for each category.

Related: How to send WooCommerce emails to multiple recipients. 

How can I send email alerts for new products added to my product tables?

If you're using our WooCommerce Product Table WP plugin to list products in a table view, then this will work beautifully with both of the above methods.

Simply add products via Products → Add New in the WordPress admin in the usual way, and they will appear in your product tables. MailOptin will then send alerts of these new products to your customers.