October 4, 2022

Use WordPress to manage Marketing pages

Magento’s marketing page capabilities aren’t very good. The capabilities are severely limited. 

There are landing page builders and drag-and-drop extensions out there but we’ve found them difficult for our clients and their marketing teams to use. You may end up hiring a developer to install it and build the page in it, which is frustrating for you and no fun for a  developer.

One solution is to incorporate WordPress into your Magento store. WordPress is the most popular website builder on the market. Many designers and marketers know how to use it so you can quickly get great-looking landing pages and sales funnels online. It can also cut down on your development costs for seemingly basic content pages.

We’ll advise you proceed with caution if you go this route due to insecurities if WordPress and third-party plugins aren’t vetted, configured well, and updated/protected on your server. That said, here’s how you can get it done.

We’ll discuss two parts. The extensions you will need and the security points to consider.

Extensions

Fishpig offers the following three extensions to bolt WordPress onto your Magento store and heavily customize WordPress. This isn’t a WordPress tutorial so we won’t go into all the specifics but here are the highlights.

  1. The Root extension lets you install WordPress at the root of your domain. This means you can use WordPress for your marketing pages instead of using Magento.
  2. The Advanced Custom Fields extension lets you customize and extend WordPress. This is a common tool for WordPress developers and marketers. Between this and the Root extension, the flexibility is very high.
  3. If you’re looking for a middle ground that more heavily leans on Magento and is a  little more secure than completely leaning on WordPress for all content pages you can use the Content Blocks extension. This allows you to build the content blocks in WordPress using your favorite plugin and insert them into Magento CMS pages.

Security 

If you have decided to lean on WordPress please make sure it is maintained and secure. Seriously. An unmaintained, out-of-date, WordPress site is a fast way to get hacked and it can compromise the Magento code.

  • Lock down WordPress by changing your file permissions to at least 644 and folders to 755.  You can use a command like this but reference the security section of this guide to make sure you’re not breaking Magento’s permissions

find . type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

find . type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

  • Move your wp-config.php file up a directory and wp-content to a custom location
  • Be mindful of your plugins. Use as few plugins as possible. We recommend less than 10. There is nothing magical about this number but once you get above it you should consider the effort to maintain it and if a developer is needed to keep the integrity of your website in shape.
  • Keep WordPress up to date daily. This goes for the core, plugins, and theme.
  • Get familiar with the WP-CLI to handle automatic updates

Remarket to your customers

Studies show that it costs at least 5x more to acquire a new customer than to sell to existing ones. Additionally, the sales rate is 5-20% whereas existing customers are 60-70% more likely to buy. 

Your website should help you remarket to your existing customers. There are a lot of tools out there to help so start here. Until you need complex integrations for your customer journey, let’s not reinvent the wheel.

There are plenty of extensions out there to integrate Magento with your email marketing tool. Popular platforms like Klaviyo, Springbot, DotDigial, and MailChimp (if you must) all have extensions available to push your customers into a place where you can email them regularly. In our experience, those tools can amount to 15-25% of sales.

You can do a great job of remarketing to your customers using Customer Segmentation. This is breaking apart your customer base based on location, past purchase dates, products purchased, etc., and marketing specifically to them.

One strategy is to email customers upsells and add-ons. If you offer a product that expires or runs out you can set up automatic emails to remind customers about refills.

Another strategy is to email for birthdays, big events, when regular purchase windows arrive, or based on past purchase history.

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