WooCommerce Email Templates: How to Design Beautiful Custom Emails

Customizing pre-designed WooCommerce email templates is one of the most effective ways to create visually appealing, brand-consistent emails for your customers.

Every WooCommerce order triggers a chain of emails, such as order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets, invoices, and most store owners never touch a single one. That's a problem.

Those default emails, with their plain white layouts and generic wording, are silent brand killers.

They land in your customer's inbox looking like they came from any store, not your store.

Transactional emails have 60-80% open rates, which is the prime real estate you're currently wasting on WooCommerce's out-of-the-box templates.

Customizing your WooCommerce email templates lets you turn every automated message into a branded touchpoint that builds trust, reduces support tickets, and quietly drives repeat purchases.

Whether you want to tweak colors and logos with a plugin or get full control by editing the template files directly, the process is more accessible than most store owners realize.

In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:

• What WooCommerce email templates are
• The different types of templates for various use cases
• How to customize existing templates
• How to create your own custom email templates
• Best practices to get the most out of your email communication 

What Are WooCommerce Email Templates?

WooCommerce email templates are pre-designed layouts that control the format and content of emails sent to customers and store admins. These emails are triggered by key events in your store’s operation, such as new orders, account creation, abandoned carts, review requests, and more.

By default, WooCommerce offers transactional email templates, which include:

• New order
• Cancelled order
• Failed order
• Order on hold
• Processing order
• Completed order
• Refunded order
• Customer note
• Password reset
• New account

These templates help keep customers informed throughout their buying journey. 

To build a complete email marketing strategy, you'll likely want to go beyond just transactional updates. Email communication can be segmented into stages such as:

• Onboarding: Welcoming and guiding new users (e.g., welcome emails, first-order confirmations)
• Nurturing: Educating users with content like newsletters or product tutorials
• Promotional: Driving sales through announcements and discount offers
• Transactional: Updating customers about orders and account changes (covered by default WooCommerce templates)
• Behavioral: Reacting to user activity with emails like cart recovery or review requests

Since WooCommerce supports only transactional emails by default, you’ll need plugins to send and customize other types of emails. 

Additionally, these plugins provide more engaging transactional email templates, which are crucial since users typically skim emails in just 10 seconds.

Custom templates boost professionalism, improve user experience, personalize communication, and ultimately help drive sales.

How to Edit WooCommerce Emails Using Built-In Settings?

Before installing any plugins, it is worth knowing what WooCommerce offers natively. The built-in email settings give you basic control over colors, branding, and content for all 11 email templates.

To access these settings, navigate to WooCommerce ⇨ Settings ⇨ Emails in your WordPress dashboard.

Click the 'Manage' button next to any email template to edit its subject line, email heading, and additional content.

Use placeholder values like {site_title}, {order_number}, and {order_date} to dynamically insert store and order information.

The additional content field lets you add a custom message at the bottom of the email, such as a thank-you note or a link to your returns policy.

Scroll below the template list to find the global email design options. These settings apply to all email templates at once:

• Header Image: Upload a logo or banner that appears at the top of every email.
• Footer Text: Customize the text at the bottom of every email. Include your store URL and contact information.
• Base Color: Controls the color of headings, links, and the header background.
• Background Color: Sets the outer background color of the email.
• Body Background Color: Sets the inner content area background.
• Body Text Color: Controls the color of all body text.

See a live preview of your changes.

WooCommerce also lets you add a Purchase Note to individual products. Go to Products > Edit on any product, scroll to Product Data > Advanced, and add text in the Purchase Note field.

This note appears in the order email for that specific product. Use it for download instructions, care guides, warranty information, or a product-specific discount code for the customer's next purchase.

Limitations of the built-in settings:

The native WooCommerce email editor only changes colors, text, and a header image.

You cannot rearrange the email layout, add custom content blocks, insert product recommendation sections, or build multi-column email designs.

There is no drag-and-drop editor.

For store owners who want full control over their email designs, a dedicated email customizer plugin is the better option.

How to Design Emails Using Pre-Designed WooCommerce Email Templates?

We’ll set up an automation to send emails when a specific event is triggered.

From here, we’ll customize that email template to fit our brand using a simple drag-and-drop functionality.

And we’ll do all this using FunnelKit Automations - the best WooCommerce and WordPress CRM.

Make sure to install and activate both the free and pro versions of this plugin.

Let's design the abandoned cart recovery email, which is important for eCommerce stores.

Step 1: Create an abandoned cart reminder automation

Go to the FunnelKit ⇨ Automations section and hit the 'Create Automation' button.

You’ll see various pre-built automation recipes to help you set up automated workflows.

Click on the 'Abandoned Cart Reminder' recipe.

Next, hit the 'Import' button and enter the name of your automated recipe.

Lastly, click on 'Create'. Now, your cart abandonment automation will be imported.

Step 2: Import your WooCommerce email template

Learn how to set up a complete cart abandonment recovery workflow.

We’ll directly go to the 'Send Email' action step.

It’ll open up the email action window.

This is where you can edit the subject line and choose your email template.

As you can see, we’ve included the cart billing email and first name merge tags. You can personalize your subject line by clicking on {{..}}.

You can choose the enhanced visual builder, rich text editor, raw HTML, or basic visual builder.

Select Visual Builder (New) and hit 'Edit' to customize your email.

You'll see various pre-designed WooCommerce email templates to choose from. Just hover on the 'Abandoned Cart' email template and hit 'Preview'.

Here, you can see the complete preview of your selected email template.

If you’re satisfied with the design, hit the ‘Import Template’ button.

It’ll import the WooCommerce email template into your workspace.

Step 3: Customize the WooCommerce email template

It’s time to customize your email template.

On the left, you’ll see various blocks, structures, and layout sections. On the right, you’ll see the email template you can edit in real time.

• Add your business logo

Start by uploading your brand logo.

Click on the logo, hit the image icon, and click on the ‘Upload’ button.

Upload the file from your device or select an already uploaded one from the media library and click on ‘Select Image’.

Your business logo will be updated here.

• Edit your header section

Select your header, and you’ll see different customization options on the left.

You can customize the font, alignment, line height, padding, show on desktop toggle, or set display condition for this section.

Double-click on the text and edit it.

• Customize your call-to-action button

Next, edit the call-to-action button.

You can use the cart link block available for cart abandonment email sequences.

It already has a cart recovery link that abandoned users can use to return to their cart and complete the purchase.

You can even auto-apply coupons in cart recovery URLs using merge tags to incentivize users to complete their purchases.

In addition, you can customize the button's position, font, border style, border radius, padding, container padding, etc.

• Update the shopping cart layout

Click on the WooCommerce cart items block.

Here, define the layout you want to offer in your email: Cart items or product.

Enable or disable the product images, titles, attributes, quantities, and prices of a cart.

You can even configure the image widths, separator style, separator color, padding, and more.

• Edit the benefits section

As you can see, this section has three columns. For that, set the heading, image and text for your benefits section.

• Customize the frequently asked questions section

Customize your brand’s FAQ section in the email. This will help build trust with new users.

• Add social media icons

Drag and drop the 'Social' block to your email workspace.

Click on the plus (+) icon and select all the social media icons of your business.

Set the style, size, and gap of your social media icons.

Hit the ‘Save’ button when done.

Make sure to check your email's responsiveness on desktop and mobile.

You can even see the full preview of your emails and send a test email to recipients.

Step 4: Activate your automation

Go back to your workflow and turn the automation toggle to 'Active'.

This is how you can customize automated emails using pre-designed WooCommerce email templates.

You can follow the same process for email customization when sending announcement or broadcast emails.

Free and Premium WooCommerce Email Templates Available

FunnelKit Automations provides an extensive library of beautifully designed WooCommerce email templates, covering both transactional and marketing emails.

You get prebuilt templates for all your core transactional emails, such as New Order, Order Confirmation, New Order etc.

These are the essential emails that WooCommerce sends to communicate order statuses and account activities.

With the built-in drag-and-drop visual email builder, you can easily customize each template and add your brand colors, logos, images, and dynamic content such as the customer name, order summary, and more.

Unlike the default WooCommerce emails, these templates aren't just functional; they’re designed to look good and convert.

Here is a preview of the custom order processing prebuilt email template by FunnelKit Automations:

You can also watch the video below:

In addition to transactional emails, you get a wide range of marketing-focused email templates.

These templates help you nurture leads, recover lost sales, promote products, and re-engage customers.

Here’s a quick overview of the marketing email templates available:

Best WooCommerce Email Templates Customizer Plugins

There are several WordPress plugins that let you customize WooCommerce email templates. Let's look at the top options:

1. FunnelKit Automations

FunnelKit Automations is a powerful automation and marketing broadcast CRM for WordPress and WooCommerce.

It lets you design and automate all kinds of emails, including cart abandonment, winback, follow-up, welcome, and more.

Features of FunnelKit Automations:

• Pre-designed email templates - Import and customize them, and send beautiful emails to your users. You get access to a wide array of transactional and marketing WooCommerce email templates.
  
• Easy drag-and-drop content blocks - Design beautiful emails with drag-and-drop content blocks, such as images, text, buttons, menus, etc. Get access to WooCommerce blocks, including the order summary, cart item, product, coupon, and more, to customize WooCommerce email templates.
  
• Personalization merge tags - Personalize your emails by including merge tags. They add dynamic value to your email content, such as the user’s name, preferences, order data, form submissions, and more.
  
• Dynamic coupons - Create personalized dynamic discount coupon codes with limited-time offers to encourage users to shop from your online store. You can even set usage limits and restrictions for your coupons.
  
• A/B split path testing - A/B test and optimize your marketing automations by split testing email subject lines, email content, email designs, discount coupons, delays between emails, etc. You can split-test up to 3 paths to help you start making profits.

There are many other features, such as conditional displays, saving custom layouts, pre-built recipes, rule-based automated workflows, and more.

Pricing:

FunnelKit Automations offers a free (lite) version. However, the visual email builder and templates are included in the premium version, which unlocks advanced features and starts at $99.50 a year.

Customer reviews:

Users have rated 5 out of 5 stars (320+ reviews) with 20,000+ active installations on WordPress.org.

2. Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce

This email template customizer plugin by VillaTheme lets you build and customize email templates for WooCommerce.

It has different base elements, WooCommerce elements, and development tools to help you build a well-designed email.

Features of Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce:

• Design attractive WooCommerce emails - Create beautiful WooCommerce transactional emails with basic and WooCommerce elements using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
  
• Customizable blocks - Create customizable blocks and add them to any email template you want. This saves you a lot of time when setting up your emails.
  
• Responsive design - Its responsive point functionality helps you ensure your emails are compatible across multiple devices.

Besides this, it offers email previews and tests, customer interaction reports, the ability to attach files to emails, and more.

Pricing plan:

It has a free version with limited features available on the WordPress repository. The premium version unlocks all its features and costs $32, including 6 months of support. You can extend its support to 12 months for $10.13.

Customer reviews:

4.6 out of 5 stars based on 104 reviews with 20,000+ active installations (WordPress.org).

3. Email Customizer for WooCommerce

Email Customizer for WooCommerce allows you to create professional emails for your customers.

You can design your email templates or customize any pre-designed ones for different transactional emails using drag-and-drop elements.

Features of Email Customizer for WooCommerce:

• Pre-designed email templates - This plugin offers 11 readymade email templates that you can customize and use for communication.
  
• Easy customization - Customize your email design by configuring the style, header, footer, and email hooks such as order meta, order table, etc. It offers 20+ essential elements to design your emails quickly.
  
• General and basic WooCommerce elements - You get access to general elements such as text, images, buttons, etc., and WooCommerce elements such as customer details, order elements, billing and shipping details, and more.

Pricing:

It has a free version available. Upgrade to the Pro version for $39 annually to access its full functionality on a single website.

Customer reviews:

4.3 out of 5 stars based on 103 customer reviews with 10,000+ active installations (WordPress.org).

5 Must-Have WooCommerce Email Templates to Have in Your Store

We have listed some brilliant ideas for creating WordPress email templates below:

1. Order confirmation email template

Many marketers don’t focus much on order confirmation emails. They consider these emails to be often sent out of necessity after the purchase is made.

However, order confirmation emails enhance conversions and improve retention rates.

Therefore, you should focus on setting up a branded order confirmation email template on your WordPress site.

FunnelKit has 2 pre-designed order thank-you email templates available. Here is a widely used FunnelKit template for WooCommerce order notification emails:

You can even send separate emails for each product in an order and design them elegantly with FunnelKit Automations.

In addition, you can customize transactional email templates, such as shipment tracking, subscription, order cancellation, refund, and more.

2. Product education email

Some products require educating your customers so that they can use them effectively and to their full potential.

Providing clear instructions allows customers to understand the product’s features, benefits, and best practices.

This enhances the customer experience, reduces support inquiries, and increases customer satisfaction.

See one of the most used product education email templates of FunnelKit - feel free to customize this template at any time.

Therefore, setting up perfect product education email templates is the best way to proceed.

3. Upsell or product recommendation email template

Offering upsells or product recommendations in your emails is a strategic way to leverage high engagement and build stronger customer relationships.

By suggesting relevant products, you can increase the potential for additional sales and enhance customers' overall experience with your brand.

Here’s a popular product recommendation email template offered by FunnelKit:

This will allow you to benefit from the high engagement within these emails, building your rapport along the way.

4. Newsletter email template

81% of B2B marketers prefer email newsletters as the most effective form of content marketing.

Email newsletters offer incredible opportunities to connect with the people that matter most to your business.

See the newsletter email template in WooCommerce:

Therefore, having a great WooCommerce email newsletter template at your disposal helps deliver the right message to the right people quickly.

5. Flash sale template

Many eCommerce store owners consider flash sales a foolproof selling strategy because they increase click-to-open rates by 74%.

Such flash sales create a sense of urgency, allowing shoppers to explore your store, research the products, and opt to buy them.

Here is the flash sale template in WooCommerce:

Therefore, having flash sale templates lets you inform your contacts about the sales running on your store.

Creating Custom WooCommerce Email Templates and Using Them in Automations or Broadcasts

Creating custom email templates in WooCommerce can enhance your customer experience by providing personalized, branded email content.

These templates can be easily customized and used in your future email campaigns.

It helps you save time by letting you reuse email templates rather than designing emails from scratch every time.

1. Creating custom email templates

FunnelKit Automations allows you to create custom emails and save them as templates.

To do that, go to the Emails section and click on the 'Create Template' button.

Enter the name of your template and create it.

The process for setting up email templates is the same as discussed above.

We also have a new post coming up to help you design custom email templates in WooCommerce. Stay tuned for that.

2. Using your email templates in automations or broadcasts

You can use this email template when creating your broadcasts or setting up automated sequences in FunnelKit Automations.

When creating emails, click on the 'Templates' button.

Select a custom template you’ve created and click ‘Apply’. That template will be imported to your automation or broadcast screen.

Now, you can activate that automation or send the broadcast.

This is how you can create custom email templates in WooCommerce.

Stay tuned for our step-by-step, detailed post on WooCommerce custom email templates.

7 Best Practices to Make Your WooCommerce Emails Convert

Customizing email templates enhances customer experience and reinforces your brand identity.

Here are some best practices to follow when customizing your WooCommerce email templates:

1. Keep your email design consistent across all emails

Ensure your email design reflects your brand’s color theme and font typography. Your logo should be placed at the top of every email.

FunnelKit Automations lets you set up global email styles to configure your brand logo and other design elements that can be inserted into your emails automatically.

Use a tone and style that replicates your brand’s personality.

2. Keep emails simple and clear

Keep the content of your emails concise and to the point. There is no need to elaborate. Share your support email ID or a URL so they can visit to clear their queries.

Use a clean and simple layout that makes your emails easy to read and navigate. 

Make your call to action (CTA) buttons or links clear and prominently visible.

3. Ensure mobile responsiveness

Email is accessed by over 1.7 billion people on their mobile devices. Therefore, make sure your emails look good on all devices, especially mobile phones.

FunnelKit Automations lets you switch between desktop and mobile view when customizing your WooCommerce email templates.

This allows you to test your emails on various devices and screen sizes to ensure their compatibility.

4. Personalize your emails

Address your users by their first names to add a personal touch, and include dynamic content, such as product recommendations based on past purchases.

For this, FunnelKit Automations provides merge tags that use dynamic data to personalize your emails.

Use segmentation to send targeted emails based on customer behavior and preferences.

5. Optimize for email deliverability

Use clear, professional language to avoid triggering spam filters. Ensure your sender name and email address are recognizable to your recipients.

Always make sure to use an SMTP plugin when sending emails from WooCommerce.

Go through this detailed guide on fixing the WooCommerce not sending emails issue.

6. Use visuals wisely

Use high-resolution images that load quickly and ensure a seamless visual experience.

Maintain a balance between text and images to avoid overwhelming your readers with too much information.

Include alt text for images to enhance accessibility and readability in case images fail to load.

7. Test and optimize each element in your email

Perform A/B testing on different elements such as subject lines, CTAs, and layouts to determine what works best for you.

FunnelKit Automations allows you to perform A/B tests on both automations and email broadcasts.

Regularly review and update your WooCommerce email templates to keep them fresh and effective.

Monitor metrics like open rates, conversion rates, and click-through rates to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are You Ready to Make an Impact with WooCommerce Email Templates?

In this article, we’ve covered the importance of email templates, customization options, and best practices.

Customizing your WooCommerce email templates is a powerful way to enhance business communication and customer engagement.

With the right tool, like FunnelKit Automations, you can create beautiful emails that reflect your brand identity.

You can handle everything from styled order confirmations and shipping notifications to abandoned cart recovery sequences and post-purchase follow-ups.

Take the next step in optimizing your WooCommerce store's email templates by implementing the tips and techniques discussed in this article.

It's high time to show your creativity when designing custom emails for your users.

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