Sending Emails

In this chapter we are going to cover how you can send emails with coupons to the customers who abandoned their carts. In general, you have two options. You can either do it manually or set up a CRON job to send emails automatically. We are going to take a closer look at those two methods.

Sending Emails Manually

In order to send an email with a coupon to a customer who abandoned their cart you need to go to Abandoned Carts tab and click the Send reminder button.

NoteThe Send reminder button is only available for the entries which have email address in their Customer Info Column.

send_reminder

After you press the Send reminder button a pop-up window will appear offering you one last chance to edit the Email that you are sending. After reviewing it, press the Send mail! button in the bottom right corner and you are all set.

The customer receives their reminder email with a coupon in it.

sent_mail

Automatic Email Sending

Sending email manually can be time-consuming if you have a lot of abandoned carts. This is why AbandonedCarts has the function to send email reminders automatically.

ImportantIf you want to use the scheduling features, your server has to support Cron functions. The cron daemon is a long running process that executes commands at specific dates and times. You can check if your server supports Cron commands by clicking the Test Cron button. scheduled_tasks

NoteIf your server does support Cron jobs, but this script shows that the feature is disabled, this means that the automatic creation of Cron commands is disabled. In that case, you can use this URL string - {path_to_your_site}/vendors/abandonedcarts/sendReminder.php in your hosting config panel.

If your server does not support Cron jobs, you can click on the My server does not support cron jobs button in order to receive instruction for alternative cron solutions.

To enable automatic sending you need to go to Control Panel tab end set the Scheduled tasks option to be Enabled. Once you do that, several new options will appear.

We will take a look at each one of the new options.

Type: Here you can choose the type of the schedule. You have two options:

  • Fixed dates: you can specify fixed dates and time for sending the email reminders.

  • Periodic: you can configure the sending of email reminders to be done every day/wee/month/year at specific time.

Schedule: With this option you will set the schedule.

NoteYou will see the options for the fixed dates functionality or the periodic functionality depending on the Type option.

ImportantKeep in mind that the scheduling time is a global variable for all stores in your OpenCart.