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How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Editorial Team
July 30, 2024
How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Sending WooCommerce order notification emails is a great way to update your customers about their orders.

Setting up custom WooCommerce order notifications offers much-needed transparency throughout the order fulfillment process.

This will allow you to provide your customers with timely updates and improve their experience in your store.

Even though WooCommerce offers a steady system for handling order notifications, the default emails aren’t suitable for customizing according to your brand and interaction.

For that, you need to customize and send WooCommerce order status email notifications using a separate plugin.

In this post, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of replacing default WooCommerce order notification emails with custom interactive ones.

What is a WooCommerce Order Notification Email?

A WooCommerce order notification email is an automated email sent to customers to inform them about their order statuses.

Order notifications serve different purposes and are critical for streamlining the communication between the store, customers, and the store’s admin or staff.

These transactional emails cover various stages of the order fulfillment process. It includes order confirmation, payment pending, order failed, order refunds, and more.

Types of WooCommerce order notification emails

In fact, WooCommerce has the default email templates for different order statuses:

  • Pending payment - This indicates that the order has been created, but payment has not yet been received. WooCommerce does not automatically send an email for this status, but you can configure custom email notifications if needed.
  • Failed - Sent to the store admin if an order has failed.
  • Processing - Sent to the customer after payment and order processing has started.
  • Completed - Sent to the customer once the order has been completed.
  • On hold - Sent to the customer when an order is awaiting payment or requires manual confirmation for offline payments.
  • Cancelled - Sent to the customer when an order has been canceled.
  • Refunded - Sent to the customer when an order has been refunded.
  • Draft - Orders are created when customers start the checkout process.
🔔 If you want to learn about each order status and what it signifies, we have a detailed post on WooCommerce order status.

Why You Should Customize WooCommerce Order Notification Emails?

As a WooCommerce store owner, sending email notifications based on order statuses can help you in various ways.

Here is the default WooCommerce email template for new order purchases:

Default WooCommerce email for new order notification

As you can see, the default emails look entirely bland. You cannot customize them entirely for your brand. Furthermore, you cannot interact with your customers via feedback surveys or product recommendations.

Also, you can not even add your socials so that customers can connect with your brand.

That’s why you need a plugin that gives you CRM abilities to send emails and understands WooCommerce.

Plus, it should have several email templates and the power of an enhanced visual email builder, so you can design your emails without writing any code!

Here are some key reasons why customizing WooCommerce order notification emails can be beneficial:

  • Improved branding - Customizing WooCommerce order email notifications lets you maintain brand consistency across transactional emails. You can use your business logo, colors, and fonts in the email template, creating a professional look for your customers.
  • Personalization - Personalized emails get a 29% higher open rate and a 41% higher click-through rate than non-personalized emails. These emails are more engaging and make customers feel valued. This way, you’ll be able to create tailored and friendly communication.
  • Reduced support inquiries - By including additional order details or FAQs, you can proactively answer some of the most common customer questions, reducing support inquiries related to their orders.
  • Information clarity - By customizing the content and layout of default WooCommerce order notification emails, you can clearly and concisely present critical customer order information, such as order details, shipping information, etc.
  • Upsell opportunities - Customized emails offer plenty of opportunities to offer upsells or related products. Include relevant product recommendations, attractive discounts, etc., to encourage customers to explore your offers.
  • Enhanced communication - After customizing the email templates, your communication style and tone will become consistent. This will further help build a strong brand identity, fostering customer loyalty.

Customizing the WooCommerce order notification emails will help create engaging customer interactions, increasing trust and loyalty.

How to Send Custom WooCommerce Order Notification Emails? (Step-by-Step Guide)

Brand value is crucial in influencing user behavior and driving business success. Most businesses capture their user’s attention by using consistent branding elements in their store, emails, newsletters, etc.

However, WooCommerce uses default emails that can’t be customized to your brand’s look. To do so, you need some serious coding skills.

If you don’t want to write custom codes, you can easily customize emails with FunnelKit Automations.

FunnelKit Automations is the most potent marketing broadcast and automation CRM for WordPress.

You can set up automated sequences, send email broadcasts or SMS texts, track orders and conversions for each campaign, and more.

In this section, we’ll demonstrate the step-by-step process to send custom emails for different WooCommerce order statuses.

Before we begin, get a copy of FunnelKit Automations and install it on your WordPress website.

👉 Refer to our documentation to install and activate FunnelKit Automations on your website.

Let’s set up an automation that automatically sends a custom email when an order goes to pending status.

 Step 1: Install and configure the SMTP plugin on your website

Setting up an SMTP plugin on your WordPress website ensures your emails get delivered to your recipient’s inbox.

We recommend the following SMTP service providers:

  • WP Offload SES Lite for Amazon SES SMTP service provider
  • WP Mail SMTP for SendGrid, Mailgun, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
  • Elastic Email Sender for Elastic Email SMTP
  • Postmark for WordPress to set up Postmark SMTP

Here, we’ll use the WP Mail SMTP plugin. And don’t worry - it complies with the latest Google and Yahoo deliverability rules.

Configure the settings through the setup wizard once you install WP Mail SMTP.

Configure the WP Mail SMTP plugin that will help you to get your emails delivered to your recipient's inbox

Proceed through the setup and configure your SMTP plugin.

Step 2: Disable the default WooCommerce order notification emails

Before we start setting up custom WooCommerce order status email notifications, it’s important to disable the default WooCommerce emails. You can do it from WooCommerce email settings.

To do so, navigate to WooCommerce ⇨ Settings.

Under the ‘Emails’ section, click on ‘Manage’ next to the order status you want to disable the default notification and send a custom email.

Let’s say you want to send a custom new order purchase email after a successful purchase from the checkout page. So, we’ll disable the default WooCommerce email here.

Go to WooCommerce - Email settings and click on Manage next to the order status you want to disable default email notifications

Now, uncheck the option next to ‘Enable this email notification’ and save the changes.

Uncheck the option - Enable this email notification and your default email will get disabled for that order status.

This is how you can disable the default WooCommerce email notifications under each order status.

Now that you’ve disabled the default WooCommerce order notifications, it’s time to set up custom emails for better engagement.

Step 3: Go to FunnelKit Automations and add a new automation

Go to the Automations section in FunnelKit Automations.

From there, hit the ‘Create Automation’ button.

Go to Automations and click on the create automation button

You’ll be directed to the recipes section. Here, you can find some pre-built automated recipes for specific use cases.

These recipes can be imported and customized to set up your automated campaigns.

We’ll create a fresh automation. So, click on ‘Start from scratch’ and name your automation.

Name your automation as woocommerce order notification email for pending order status

Clicking on ‘Create’ will set up a new automation.

Step 4: Set up the ‘Order Status Pending’ event

Hit the ‘Select an Event’ button and go to the WooCommerce tab. Here, we’ll choose the “Order Status Pending” event.

Select the event trigger - Order Status Pending for woocommerce order notification email

Once done, click ‘Done’ to add this event to your workflow.

Next, configure this event.

Configure your event trigger for automation runs on a contact to help set up woocommerce order notification email

Here, we have configured this automation event to run multiple times on already active contacts in this automation. This way, this automation will run every time someone orders, not just the first time.

Hit ‘Save’ when done.

Step 5: Specify the ‘Send Email’ action

To add an action, click the (+) icon and hit ‘Action’.

Add action to your woocommerce order notification email workflow in FunnelKit Automations

Next, select the ‘Send Email’ action under Messaging.

Specify the send email action to your woocommerce order notification email automated sequence

Click on ‘Done’ to add this action to your automation workflow.

Step 6: Craft a custom email for pending order status

We’ll create a custom email for the WooCommerce pending order status here.

Enter the email subject line. As you can see, we’ve added a personalization of the first name in the subject line using merge tags.

Set up your email by entering the recipient email address using merge tags, subject line and email preview text

Next, select your template type and craft your custom email accordingly.

  • Visual Builder (New) - This enhanced drag-and-drop visual email builder lets you customize pre-designed email templates or create one from scratch.
  • Rich Text - Write usual plain-text emails using the rich text editor
  • Raw HTML - Write emails using HTML
  • Visual Builder - This is the old-generation email builder that lets you design basic custom emails

Select the ‘Rich Text’ editor and write your custom email for pending order status.

Write the body content of your woocommerce order notification email you want to send to your customer

As you can see, we’ve used the merge tags: {{order_id}} to display the order ID and {{order_items}} to fetch the order details.

Once done, click ‘Save & Close’ to return to your workflow screen.

If you want, you can even custom-design your branded emails with FunnelKit Automations’ built-in visual email builder.

It has various pre-designed email templates that you can import with a single click and customize according to your business requirements.

Pre-designed woocommerce order notification email templates

You get access to various WooCommerce blocks such as order summary, cart item, product, coupon, shipping/billing address, cart link, and more.

In addition, it has basic content blocks, such as images, text, columns, social icons, menus, lists, etc., to help you design beautiful emails.

FunnelKit Automations lets you design attractive emails using its built-in drag and drop visual email builder tool

Watch this tutorial to see how you can design emails with the enhanced visual builder:

How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Make sure to save your design when done.

Step 7: Activate your WooCommerce order notification email automation

Once everything is done, toggle the automation to ‘Active’. This will activate your automation on your website.

Activate your woocommerce order notification email automation to make it live

Well done! This is how you can create and send a custom email for the pending order status in WooCommerce.

Other Use Cases: Custom Automations for Different WooCommerce Order Statuses

We hope you’ve learned how to set up and send custom emails for WooCommerce pending order status.

FunnelKit Automations is not limited to this use case only. You can use it to change the status of each order in WooCommerce.

Here, we have explored some valuable use cases for these automations and engage with your customers:

Failed Orders in WooCommerce

For failed orders, the order status first goes to ‘Pending’. After a failed payment confirmation, the status changes to ‘Failed’.

So, choose the ‘Order Status Changed’ event trigger in FunnelKit Automations.

Choose the order status changed event for the woocommerce failed order notification email

Next, configure the FROM STATUS ‘Pending’ and TO STATUS as ‘Failed’ in your event.

Specify the from status - pending and to status - failed for your woocommerce order notification emails

Now that your event is set up, you can compose your failed order emails in the action step.

👉 You can even refer to our detailed blog post on WooCommerce failed orders here.

WooCommerce Order Delivered

Sending a custom order delivered email is quite easy.

You just need to assign the ‘Completed’ status from the ‘Processing’ status.

Set the Completed order status from Processing to make it woocommerce order completed delivered notification email

Now, you just have to craft an email regarding order delivery. You can even pitch product recommendations or add exciting discount coupons within this email to encourage another purchase.

Order Refunded

You can send a custom email once your customer’s order has been returned and refunded.

FunnelKit Automations provides the ‘Order Refunded’ event.

woocommerce order refunded notification email

Next, you can compose an email about their refunds and some service feedback emails as well.

WooCommerce Custom Order Status Email Notification

FunnelKit Automations also lets you send emails for WooCommerce custom order statuses.

You can create WooCommerce custom order status programmatically in two ways:

  • By adding a code snippet to your WordPress website
  • By using a WordPress plugin like Autocomplete WooCommerce Orders

👉 Check out our detailed guide on creating custom order statuses in WooCommerce.

Let’s say we have two custom order statuses: Order Placed and Awaiting Shipment.

You can assign the ‘Order Status Changed’ event as:

Setting up WooCommerce Custom Order Status Email Notification event trigger in FunnelKit Automations

Next, you just have to send an email that the order has been packed and is awaiting the shipping partners to pick it up.

Designing the WooCommerce custom order status email with drag and drop visual email builder in FunnelKit Automations

Once everything goes well, you can send the WooCommerce order status shipped email notification. This way, you can inform your customers of their order tracking status during the fulfillment journey.

This is how you can send WooCommerce custom order status email notifications with FunnelKit Automations.

These were some of the use cases we discussed. When setting up your automated sequences, you can test various other opportunities.

8 Effective Tips to Follow for Your WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Here are some effective best practices and tips for crafting and sending order notifications to your customers.

1. Improve email deliverability

Ensuring your WooCommerce order notifications reach your customers’ inboxes is crucial for maintaining a smooth customer experience.

Choose a reliable email service provider (ESP) and SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP for high deliverability rates.

Authenticate your emails by properly setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configurations. Make sure to follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy in your emails and business ethics.

2. Compelling subject lines

Use clear and engaging subject lines that encourage recipients to open your emails. 

Add action-oriented words like "Thank you for your purchase", "Your order is on its way", and more.

Maintain a tone that reflects your brand’s voice, whether formal, friendly, or fun.

3. Maintain brand consistency and enhance design readability

Use a simple and clean WooCommerce order notification email template that aligns with your brand design and aesthetics.

Break down information into simple bullet pointers or separate sections to enhance its readability.

Ensure your emails reflect your brand’s logo, colors, and overall style to make them instantly recognizable.

4. Personalization

Personalized emails have an opening rate of 82% more than generic emails.

Address your customers with their names in your emails to make them feel personal. Depending on the email, you can include other details such as their address, order details, and more.

If needed, reference specific products or services they purchased and any personalized recommendations or follow-ups.

5. Call to action

Your WooCommerce order notification email should always include a call to action (CTA), which allows users to take action. 

These CTAs could be used to track orders, manage orders, complete payment, etc.

Furthermore, you can encourage actions like leaving a review, following on social media, or signing up for newsletters.

6. Mobile optimization

There are more than 4.3 billion active email users globally, of which 1.7 billion+ use their mobile phones to open emails.

That’s why it’s crucial to design your emails optimized for mobile.

Make sure the fonts, images, and buttons are easy to click on small screens.

7. Add value with extra content

Suggest related products or complementary items like upsells and cross-sells they might be interested in.

Include discount codes or special offers for future purchases. This will help encourage repeat businesses.

You can even encourage customers to follow your brand on social media or ask them to leave a product review on your store.

8. A/B test and optimize

Experiment with different email subject lines, email designs, inside elements, and email content to see what resonates best with your audience.

Take advantage of A/B testing with FunnelKit Automations’ built-in split path testing feature.

This allows you to figure out which paths convert better and generate good results.

Watch this quick tutorial to learn everything about Split path testing:

How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Related to WooCommerce email order notification

In this section, we’ll answer the common questions related to WooCommerce order email notification:

1. Does WooCommerce send an order confirmation email?

Yes, WooCommerce sends a default order confirmation email. But this email looks quite dull and offers no personalization, branding, or marketing opportunities.

However, you can change it and send customized WooCommerce order notification emails we discussed in this post.

2. My WooCommerce custom order status email notification is not working. What should I do?

In case your WooCommerce custom order status email notification is not working, you can set up an automated email system that works.

With FunnelKit Automations, you can set up custom order status email notifications in WooCommerce with your business branding and personalization.

You just need to select the event and choose your custom order status. Then, set up the email action and write the text you want to send. We’ve discussed each of these details in this blog post.

3. How do I get notified of WooCommerce orders?

As a WordPress administrator, you can be notified of new WooCommerce orders when a customer purchases a product in your store.

To do so, enter the admin email in the recipient email address field when setting up custom emails in FunnelKit Automations.

WooCommerce new order email to admin and customer

Here, we have placed the admin merge tag in the recipient email field for new order purchases. This will send a WooCommerce new order email to the admin and customer.

You can send such custom WooCommerce emails to multiple recipients. You just need to enter the email addresses or email merge tags separated by a comma without any spaces.

4. How to setup email notifications in WooCommerce?

The default email notification options in WooCommerce are available inside the email settings. You can set up your email notifications by going to the particular order status.

However, if you want to send custom, branded email notifications to your users, our experts recommend using FunnelKit Automations. It’s a must-have tool in your repertoire if you want to set up automations and marketing campaigns for your business.

5. How do I add custom order status emails in WooCommerce?

You can add custom order emails in WooCommerce using FunnelKit Automations. Make sure to set up custom order statuses in your store.

Now, set up the order status changed event trigger and select that custom status inside FunnelKit Automations. Next, select the send email action and design your email. 

Once done, activate your automation, and it’ll send this custom order status email once this order status processes in the fulfillment journey.

6. Why is WooCommerce not sending order emails?

There are several reasons why WooCommerce might not send order emails. 

However, the first recommendation is to use an SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP to send emails from WooCommerce and WordPress.

Some common causes and potential solutions can be:

  • Spam filters - Check your spam filters and settings to ensure that emails don’t end up in the spam or junk folder.
  • Hosting server issues - Some hosting servers restrict email sending. That’s why it’s better to use a good email service provider like Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun, etc.
  • Email template customization - If you have customized email templates, the code might have some issues. That’s why we recommend using FunnelKit Automations to design your emails visually.
  • Plugin or theme issues - Conflicts with other plugins and themes can interfere with email sending. Deactivate all plugins except WooCommerce to see if the issue persists. For the theme, switch to a default WordPress theme to see if emails start working.

Boost Your Engagement and Conversions with Custom WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Order notification emails are critical components of an eCommerce business. They keep customers and staff informed about the order, improving the customer experience and streamlining the fulfillment process.

While your default WooCommerce emails look drab, you can send custom order notification emails with FunnelKit Automations.

FunnelKit Automations is an excellent marketing automation CRM tool that allows you to customize the content and layout of your emails. This gives you complete control over your business’s email messaging and branding.

You can set up different email notifications for different order statuses, such as order processing emails, pending orders, refunds, and failed orders. Not just that, you can even send emails for your custom order statuses.

This way, you can improve the engagement of your emails and boost conversions through effective marketing campaigns.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to set up attractive WooCommerce order notification emails in WordPress.

Author: Editorial Team
The Editorial Team at FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels) is a passionate group of writers and copy editors. We create well-researched posts on topics such as WordPress automation, sales funnels, online course creation, and more. We aim to deliver content that is interesting and actionable.
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