Do you want to receive Slack notifications when a WordPress email is opened?
Setting up real-time notifications on Slack is a great way to track email opens. These alerts can serve as reminders for your team in case you’d like to personally follow up with a user after they’ve opened a certain email.
In this post, we’ll show you how you can set up Slack to trigger notifications upon email opens.
When Should You Set Up Slack Alerts for Email Opens?
It can be extremely useful in various situations to have Slack alerts when a user opens your emails.
For example, Slack notifications work great as reminders for a follow-up when a subscription or order cancellation email is opened by a customer. This allows your team to personally follow up with the customer if that’s a part of your sales strategy.
It’s entirely up to you how you want to take advantage of your ability to get Slack notifications for email opens.
How to Get Slack Alerts When Your Emails Are Opened
To set up Slack notifications for WordPress email opens, just follow these steps:
In This Article
1. Install WP Mail SMTP
Firstly, make sure you have WP Mail SMTP installed on your site. WP Mail SMTP is the most reliable solution for fixing WordPress email deliverability issues.
Moreover, it integrates seamlessly with plugins like Uncanny Automator to connect with third-party apps like Slack to make your workflow more efficient.
In fact, WP Mail SMTP natively supports email failure alerts, which is a great feature to have if you want to identify email issues as fast as possible.
After installing WP Mail SMTP, connect it with a mailer service to force your WordPress site to route all your emails through the mailer. This will make sure that your emails are delivered without fail at all times.
See this guide on WP Mail SMTP Mailers for setup instructions.
2. Install Uncanny Automator
Uncanny Automator is a WordPress automation plugin. It supports hundreds of apps and plugins that can be connected together to automate almost every kind of business process for you.
You can get started with Uncanny Automator by getting it from WordPress directory for free. However, you only get 1,000 credits in the free version. This means that you can only receive the first 1,000 Slack notifications for free using Uncanny Automator. You’ll need to buy the Pro version after that.
For setup instructions, see this guide on installing WordPress plugins.
3. Create a New Recipe
After installing the plugins, go to Automator » Add New from your WordPress sidebar menu.
This will take you to the recipe editor, where you can create automated workflows between different plugins and apps.
Select Everyone here so that the automation is triggered by all users, whether they’re logged in to your site or not. Then press Confirm to proceed.
Here, you can give a title for your recipe so you can easily identify it later on from your dashboard. After that, you’ll have to choose an app or plugin that you want to set up as your automation trigger.
4. Set Up the Trigger
For this example, we need to select WP Mail SMTP Pro as the trigger plugin so we can automate an action when your WordPress emails are opened.
Selecting WP Mail SMTP Pro will open a new set of options where you can select different types of triggers depending on what you need for your workflow.
For our purposes, we’re going to select the “An email with specific text in the subject line is opened” trigger.
You should see a field where you can enter the specific email subject line text that should trigger a Slack notification when opened.
In this example, let’s assume that we’re interested in getting an alert when a user opens an email containing the word “cancelled” in the subject line. So, we’ll enter this text into the Text to Match field and press Save.
Great! Your trigger is now set up.
Now, we’ll connect Slack to Uncanny Automator and use it as the action of our automation.
5. Connect Slack With Uncanny Automator
Before we can set up an action for the trigger defined above, we must first connect Slack with Uncanny Automator.
To do this, look under the Actions section and select Add Action.
This will open a list of apps that can be used to perform an automated action based on your defined trigger. Here, find Slack in the list of apps.
If you’re using Uncanny Automator for the first time, you’ll first have to create your account and then connect with your Slack.
After clicking on Slack, a modal will open requiring you to sign up for Uncanny Automator account. Click on Sign Up to get to the next step.
Follow the on-screen instructions to create your account. When you’re done, return to the modal and click on the Connect Account button next to the second item.
This will open another modal. Click on the Connect Slack Workspace button on the bottom to continue.
Uncanny Automator will require permission to access your Slack workspace. Click on Allow to proceed.
You should see a success message, showing a preview of the Uncanny Automator bot as it will appear in your Slack workspace. You can change the name and icon of the bot if you’d like or leave it the way it is.
Close this modal to finish the Slack connection process. You can now select the action that you’d like Slack to perform.
6. Set Up the Action
In this example, we’ll pick the Send a message to a channel action. This is what we need to trigger a Slack notification every time a user opens a WordPress email matching a specific text in the subject line.
After selecting the aforementioned action, use the dropdown menu to select a Slack channel where you want to receive the email open alerts.
Move below to the Message text box. Here, you can edit the message you’d like the Slack notification to contain.
You can make the notification messages more useful by including important details from the trigger email. To add specific details from the emails, click on the Asterisk (*) button and use search tokens as needed.
We used the “email subject” and “to email” tokens so that every Slack alert triggered by email opens includes the full subject of that email as well as the address of the user it was sent to.
These details can be really useful as it reveals which user opened a specific email, allowing the sales team to plan a follow-up more efficiently.
7. Add Uncanny Automator Bot to Slack to Receive Alerts
We’re nearly finished setting up Slack alerts for WordPress email opens.
All that remains now is to make sure that you’ve added the Uncanny Automator bot to the Slack channel where you want to receiven notifications.
To do this, simply go to the Slack channel and type in @uncannyautomator and click on the popup with the option to add this app to your channel. Then press enter.
You should now see a message asking if you’d like to add Uncanny Automator to your channel. Click on Add to Channel.
Fantastic! Now every time a user opens a WordPress email with a subject text that you defined as the trigger, you’ll receive a notification for it in your Slack channel. It will look something like this:
And that’s it! You can now set up Slack alerts for WordPress email opens and improve the efficiency of various marketing processes for your business.
Next, Explore WPForms Features
If you’re looking for a contact form builder for your site, check out our in-depth WPForms review to learn why it may be the best option for you.
Ready to fix your emails? Get started today with the best WordPress SMTP plugin. If you don’t have the time to fix your emails, you can get full White Glove Setup assistance as an extra purchase, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee for all paid plans.
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