Wix email marketing: send your first campaign in one hour
Updated: 2 days ago
Your Wix site comes with a complete email marketing tool, and on most of the sites we manage, nobody has ever opened it. Yet an email sent to your own customers is still the cheapest and most profitable channel a shop owner or freelancer has.
Here is how to send your first campaign in one hour, properly, without adding another tool to your stack.
The tool is already in your site, and it is asleep
Open your Wix site dashboard, go to Marketing, then Email Marketing. Everything is there: a campaign editor, your contacts, open and click statistics. The free tier already lets you send a few campaigns a month to several thousand contacts, which covers the needs of a local shop or an independent practice with room to spare.
Paid tiers only make sense once you send weekly to a large list.
In our projects, the picture is almost always the same: the client has had a site for two or three years, a contact form feeding their contact list, sometimes an online store with hundreds of orders, and zero emails sent. The list exists. It is waiting.
Why is it worth it? Because an email goes to people who already know you. On social media, your post reaches a fraction of your followers, decided by an algorithm. An email lands in each person's inbox. It is not magic, but it is reliable.
Building your list properly: GDPR and consent
First habit to drop: importing every email address you have lying around. GDPR (and in France the CNIL guidelines) is clear for individuals: you need explicit consent to send commercial messages. A customer who has bought from you may receive offers for similar products or services, provided they were told and can easily opt out.
Someone who wrote to you once with a question did not say yes to a newsletter.
In practice, Wix gives each contact a subscription status: subscribed, unsubscribed, or never subscribed. Only send campaigns to subscribed contacts. To grow that list by the book, three levers are enough:
A checkbox reading "I would like to receive your news" on your contact form and at checkout in your store, unticked by default.
A newsletter sign-up block in the site footer, with an honest sentence about what people will receive and how often.
In the shop or at the practice, a verbal sign-up is not enough: have the person type their address on a tablet or a form, with the same checkbox.
Wix automatically adds the unsubscribe link at the bottom of every campaign and removes anyone who clicks it. There is nothing for you to manage. On the other hand, you must show your sender name and your business address, and never hide who is sending.
A concrete example: a florist we work with had 1,100 contacts in her site after three years of online orders. After sorting, only 380 had ticked the newsletter box. Those 380 people are the ones she wrote to, and that is exactly right: a short, consenting list opens more, clicks more, and does not land you in the spam folder.
A simple template, and what to send
The Wix campaign editor offers dozens of templates. Our advice: pick the plainest one and keep it for every campaign. A logo, a headline, one image, two or three paragraphs, one button. That is all. Your customers do not want a magazine, they want to know in ten seconds what you have to tell them.
Format matters less than content. Here is what works best in the campaigns we have seen go out from our clients:
For a shop owner: the season's new arrivals, a subscriber-only offer (a code valid for one week), special opening hours before the holidays, an in-store event.
For a freelancer or a professional practice: a practical tip related to your trade, a regulatory change that affects your clients, newly opened appointment slots, a new service.
For a restaurant or a venue: the menu of the month, a special evening, bookings opening for a key date.
One simple rule: one email, one topic, one button. If you have three things to say, keep two for next time. And sign with your first name: an email from a person gets read, an email from a "marketing team" gets deleted.
For the subject line, be descriptive and short, under 50 characters. "Our Mother's Day bouquets, order by Friday" beats any clever hook. Avoid capitals and rows of exclamation marks; spam filters hate them.
A realistic frequency and how to read the results
The question we hear every time: how often? Our answer for a small business: once a month, kept up for six months, beats once a week abandoned after three. Block a fixed slot, say the first Tuesday of the month, one hour, and write the campaign in one sitting.
If you genuinely have something to say in between, send it, but never send just to fill the calendar.
After sending, Wix gives you three numbers. Open rate: for a small consenting list, 35 to 50% is common; below 20%, your subject line or your list has a problem. Click rate: a few percent is normal; what matters is comparing one campaign with the next.
Unsubscribe rate: under 0.5% you are fine; above 1% you are sending too often, or to people who never asked.
Do not take open rates literally: some mail clients open emails automatically to protect their users, which inflates the figure. Clicks and, for a store, the sales that follow the send are your real indicators. Our florist saw her online orders double in the 48 hours after her first campaign.
Not a miracle: 380 people got a reminder at the right moment.
Where to start
Open Marketing then Email Marketing in your Wix dashboard and check how many contacts have the subscribed status. That is your real starting list.
Add the newsletter checkbox to your contact form and, if you have a store, at checkout. Add a sign-up block in the footer.
Pick a plain template, add your logo, colours and signature. Save it as the base for every campaign.
Write your first campaign on a single topic, with a single button, and send yourself a test before sending it to the list.
Put the next send date in your calendar, one month later, and look at the first campaign's results just before writing the next one.
What we take away
Wix email marketing is not one more tool to learn: it is already in your site, connected to your contacts and your store. The real work is not technical; it is building a consenting list and keeping a monthly rhythm.
A short, clean list, a plain template, one topic per email: with that, your first campaign takes an hour and the next ones take less. In the jungle of channels that change their rules every six months, your email list is the only ground you truly own.
Would you rather have it done for you? We set it up: email marketing configured on your Wix site, consent checkboxes, a template in your colours and a first campaign ready to send. Book a slot with les défricheurs agency or take a look at our Wix services.
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