Once in a blue moon, you stumble across a product or service that is… well, totally amazing! And let me tell you, Jilt is just that. π Basically, Jilt is a service that will allow you to automatically recover abandoned ecommerce orders. You’d be surprised how many of your customers just stop, drop, and roll. Once you set it up, you literally never have to touch it again! And you’ll instantly start seeing more profit. For me, this really is the best product I’ve found in 2017 and going into 2018. Check out my in-depth Jilt review below.
Jilt Review
First off, let’s discuss a little bit about the team behind Jilt, especially since this is a product that seems to have come out of nowhere. Jilt was created and is developed by the SkyVerge team, which is made up of over 20 people. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are official WooCommerce partners and have over 50 premium WooCommerce extensions on the marketplace! Basically, these guys know the ecommerce space inside and out. In fact, I have worked with Beka Rice, their head of product, before on some content collaboration. They are a great group of talented people!
Basically, from what I can gather, they found a niche that wasn’t being filled in the ecommerce space, especially the WordPress niche, and so Jilt was born. Jilt essentially helps ecommerce stores recover lost sales due to shopping cart abandonment. And while at first, you might not think that many people are leaving your site without purchasing… think again. I can throw stats at you but the best way is to actually give Jilt a try and see for yourself.
Just How Well Does it Work?
Take a look for yourself. This is a screenshot straight from my Jilt dashboard. I have only been running this for the past 30 days on my perfmatters site (I’ll make sure to come back and post more updates). And as you can see, it is running at a 42.9% recovery rate! But wait, the best part is… at this volume, I don’t have to pay Jilt a dime! π That’s right… no fees and I’m in the free tier.
So basically right now Jilt is essentially giving me free money! Unless your Bill Gates, I’m pretty sure you’d take some free money. Now of course, once you get into higher sales volumes you’ll need to pay a little… but there pricing is incredibly fair. The beauty of their pricing is though that you won’t pay anything for low volume. So it’s perfect for those just starting out.
How Jilt Works
Jilt has easy integrations for WooCommerce, Shopify, and Easy Digital Downloads (which is what I use). Basically, you just install their free plugin and you’re good to go. We’ll dive into more of the installation and setup further below. Once your shop is connected to Jilt it monitors incoming customers. Those that start to purchase a product on your site but end up abandoning, it records this and kickstarts an automated email campaign to try and grab them back.
For example, you can see my campaigns setup below. I have 3 different automated emails setup with Jilt that go out. The first goes out after 6 hours, the 2nd after 4 days, and the final one after 10 days.
Here are how I have my emails set up. I’m not ashamed to admit I copied some of the wording from examples that WP Mayor used when they were configuring Jilt on their own store. Jilt also lets you easily send test emails while configuring this. Feel free to copy away!
Email #1 (sent after 6 hours)
Subject line: Brian, did you forget something?
The name in the subject line above is of course dynamic. And the product info in the email is dummy data. It will show your actual product.
Email #2 (sent after 4 days)
Subject line: Weβre still holding the cart for you
Since Jilt has a direct integration with your ecommerce store, it allows you to dynamically create discount codes on the fly in you automatic email campaigns! Pretty cool stuff.
Email #3 (sent after 10 days)
Subject line: Hurry, your cart will expire β¦
Jilt Pricing
Now let’s jump into the pricing, as this is really a selling point of their product! As they have said on their pricing page:
Our goal at Jilt is simple: to help you increase your revenue.
I full heartedly believe they mean that. Jilt is not about to gouge you with hidden fees or crazy monthly prices which you sometimes see in the SaaS industry. Their pricing is all based on how many customers you engage with each month. Every plan, no matter what, includes the following:
- Unlimited campaigns
- Unlimited shops
- Dynamic discounts
You pay only for customers that you actually reach through your campaigns. If you have 1,500 customers but email only 250 of them in a month, youβll pay only for those 250, no matter how many times you contact them. Here is a simple breakdown of their monthly pricing tiers.
# of emails sent | Monthly price π° |
---|---|
0 β 25 | Free! |
26 β 50 | $49 |
51 β 100 | $79 |
151 β 250 | $99 |
251 β 500 | $129 |
501 β 750 | $149 |
751 β 1,000 | $179 |
1,001 β 1,500 | $199 |
1,501 β 2,000 | $229 |
2,001 β 2,500 | $249 |
2,501 β 3,000 | $279 |
3,001 β 4,000 | $299 |
And remember, you’re only sending out emails to people who abandoned a purchase, not your entire email list. It’s just a small portion of people.
How to Setup Jilt With Easy Digital Downloads
I use Easy Digital Downloads, so I’ll give you a quick run down on how to set that up. But here are some quick access links for other platforms:
Step 1
Head over to Jilt.com and create a free account.
Step 2
Download and install the free Easy Digital Downloads Jilt plugin.
Step 3
Back in Jilt, grab your secret key as you are setting up your store. Remember, you can create as many stores as you want. π
Paste the secret key in the Jilt integration tab in Easy Digital Downloads. And boom, you’re all done! That was pretty easy. You can then manage all your campaign stuff from the Jilt dashboard of which we’ll go into a little more below.
Diving Into the Jilt Dashboard
Now that your Jilt store is connected to your ecommerce site, let’s explore a little bit of the dashboard. The very first thing you’re going to want to do is verify your domain. By setting up your DKIM and SPF records you can ensure the emails from Jilt hit the customers inboxes. You add the DNS records with your DNS provider or domain registrar. I personally use DNS Made Easy for all my sites.
You’ll then want to setup your campaign emails. I already showed you earlier in the post how I have three different emails that automatically go out. Here is how the Jilt builder looks. It’s pretty easy to use, everything is in a WYSIWYG editor and you can even tweak the HTML if needed. There is a “Sent test email” option as well which comes in very handy. I probably sent 10+ test emails while I was setting everything up. (Note: They are also working on a brand new shiny editor which is coming soon!)
Note: They are also going to be adding purchase follow up emails.
As I showed you above, you can have dynamic discounts that appear in your emails. You can create multiple discounts for your ecommerce stores. Perhaps you want a 15% off discount in the 2nd email and a whopping 50% off discount in the final email. You can easily do that here.
The outbound emails screen is awesome! It shows you all the emails that have been sent out, along with the order numbers corresponding to your ecommerce store, and emails that are still scheduled to go out. Basically, you can see everything that is going on as far as your automation goes.
If you want to see order activity on your store you can do that to! See placed orders vs abandoned orders. In fact, I use the Jilt dashboard now sometimes more than my own EDD dashboard lol. It’s awesome.
Just recently they updated it so all the links now automatically contain UTM parameters, which is great for tracking in Google Analytics.
And last but not least, you have your Jilt home dashboard. Easily monitor the recovery rate of abandoned orders and see how well Jilt is working for you.
Summary
I was completely blown away by Jilt. As someone who has worked with WordPress for over 10 years, I have tried thousands of plugins and SaaS solutions/tools. I still can’t believe I am in the free tier above and not paying a penny! It really is built to scale with you as you go. I’m not an affiliate of Jilt, just one totally blown away customer. π
All in all, it took me about 25 minutes to set everything up and I haven’t touched it since! And now I’m recovering abandoned orders. If you have an ecommerce store, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving Jilt a try, and everything to gain.
If you’ve already tried Jilt or have any questions about how it works, I’d love to chat below in the comments.
That’s an interesting plugin. I loved how they don’t bind you with a fixed pricing instead offer dynamic pricing with a free tire.
Thanks for the share Brian. A new cool tool going to my toolbox.
Ya, their pricing for ecommerce stores is awesome! It’s rare to see.
Have you used Conversio (conversio.com)? If so how does it compare to Jilt? I totally trust SkyVerge and Beka is the best! Looking forward to trying Jilt. Thank you.
Hey Richard,
I have seen Conversio before but never bit the bullet and did the trial. It’s funny how Jilt’s free plan really was a big motivator. I think they priced themselves really smart in the market to capture smaller developers who once see it actually work, would be happy to pay as they grow.
Also, 30 days sometimes might not be longer enough depending on the volume. However, I am totally blown away by how well shopping cart abandonment tools work now… and will never go without one.
Very good plugin and pricing is awesome, thanks for sharing.
Nice post ;) Thx.
How do you get the email address from these people? I saw on both sites from you, that they have to put the address together with the credit card details. So if the send anything, they send it together.
Best Kevin
Hey Kevin,
The email is collected upon purchase. Jilt doesn’t collect any payment data as they are not a payment processor. We don’t even collect payment data on our sites, the payment data is stored in PayPal or Stripe. So everything is based on simply the email address. Hopefully that is helpful!