Subscription Email Campaign Management for Magento 2

Introduction

From classic retail to automotive industry, businesses are either making subscriptions their main model or a core part of it.

As a customer, engaging with subscription services is very convenient. People don’t want to remember to reorder a product every month. They are busy — that’s just another annoying thing on the to-do list that might be forgotten.

For a subscription based business, most of the customers will be returning visitors making multiple purchases assuring recurring delivery of goods.

Running a successful eCommerce business that offers subscription services or boxes on a persistent basis requires a good technical solution that drives the customers to the storefront.

Emails are one of the best marketing methods with the highest success rate, which make them perfect for driving customer traffic, i.e.reminding customers about expiring services using email campaigns maximises sales.

In this case study, we would like to explore a custom solution that Scandiweb built for one of the largest European car manufacturers to allow their customers to renew telematics services on their vehicles.

Business Challenges

  • Drive email campaigns based on vehicle data available in a 3rd party system
  • Ensure follow-up for non-engaged customers
  • Manage user opt-outs

Business Goals

  • Enable subscription service renewals for customers
  • Inform customers about expiring services in a timely manner
  • Increase the number of recurring sales

Feature Highlights and Objectives

While Magento 2 is a great platform for classic eCommerce experience and there are available solutions for generic email campaigns, there are, however, no sophisticated solutions for personalised experience based on business rules.

To achieve the business needs, a custom solution was developed that queries the database of available vehicles & customers. Depending on the state of the services, a customer would receive one of the two emails:

  1. Reminder email informing about services approaching expiry.
  2. Expiry email informing about service cancelation to urge re-activation.

Adjustable configuration

  • Enable / disable
  • Multi-website & store view friendly
  • Configurable reminder intervals
  • Email template selection

Queuing

  • Email generation in advance for the current day.
  • Assuring asynchronous delivery. This also ensures that email SMTP is not overloaded in a single HTTP request.
  • Generation for users that have opted-in only. Ability to opt-out by clicking a link in email.

Reporting

  • Admin grid that displays customer information, time until service expiry, vehicle in question, status of delivery and other related data.
  • Export to CSV.

Manual generation

  • Ability to generate emails at any time for particular customer & vehicle.

Email recipient whitelisting

  • To ensure delivery only to whitelisted email recipients in testing environments.

Logging

  • Job execution statuses within admin panel.

Solution overview

The email generation process is done through two phases:

  • Populating the queue
  • Sending out emails in the queue
Magento 2 email campaign solution schema

Code examples

Scheduler script that runs daily

Mail delivery script that runs every 5 minutes and sends out any items found in the queue

Screenshots

Configuration: multi-scope supported
Admin panel grid with delivered emails
Reminder email informing customer about expiring services

Compatibility

The developed Magento 2 extension can be adjusted to be compatible with any data sets that keep track of subscription products and their duration periods. Some examples:

  • Software licences
  • Automotive telematics services
  • Subscription boxes
  • Education subscriptions

Shoot an email to [email protected] if you own a subscription business and are interested in exploding your customer traffic and we will provide you with a non-binding quote!


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