How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails
Editorial Team
September 11, 2023
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 way, you’ll be able 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 fit to be customized as per branding and interaction.
You need to customize and send WooCommerce order status email notifications for that.
In this post, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of replacing default WooCommerce order notification emails with custom interactive ones.
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A WooCommerce order notification email is an automated series of emails sent to customers to inform them about their orders.
These transactional emails cover various stages of the order fulfillment process. It includes order confirmation, payment pending, order failed, order completed, and more.
In fact, WooCommerce has the default email templates for different order statuses:
For example, here is the default WooCommerce email template for new order purchases:
As you can see, the default emails look entirely bland. You cannot customize them and put your business logo. Not only that, you cannot even interact with your customers via feedback surveys or product recommendations.
That’s why you need a plugin that gives you CRM abilities to send emails and understands WooCommerce.
As a WooCommerce store owner, sending email notifications based on order statuses can help you in various ways.
Let’s look at some of these reasons:
Customizing the WooCommerce order notification emails will help create engaging customer interactions, increasing trust and loyalty.
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. For that, you need some serious coding skills.
But you can easily create custom 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/SMS broadcasts, 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, you can start by getting a copy of FunnelKit Automations and installing it on your WordPress website.
👉 Refer to our documentation to install and activate the FunnelKit Automations on your website.
Let’s set up and send a custom email when an order goes to pending.
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:
Here, we’ll use the WP Mail SMTP plugin.
Configure the settings through the setup wizard once you install WP Mail SMTP.
Proceed through the setup and configure your SMTP plugin.
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 emails settings.
For that, 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. So, we’ll disable the default WooCommerce email here.
Now, uncheck the option next to ‘Enable this email notification’ and save the changes.
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.
Go to Campaigns ⇨ Automations (Next Gen) under FunnelKit Automations.
From there, hit the ‘Add New Automations’ 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.
Clicking on ‘Create’ will set up a new automation.
Hit the ‘Select Trigger’ button and go to the WooCommerce tab. Here, we’ll choose the “Order Status Pending” event.
Once done, click ‘Done’ to add this event to your workflow.
Next, configure the event by clicking on the event.
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.
To add an action, click the (+) icon and hit ‘Action’.
Next, select the ‘Send Email’ action under Messaging.
Click on ‘Done’ to add this action to your automation workflow.
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.
Next, select your template type and craft your custom email accordingly.
Here, we’ll select the ‘Rich Text’ editor and write our custom email for pending order status.
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 the built-in visual email builder inside FunnelKit Automations:
Click on ‘Save’ when done.
Once everything is done, toggle the automation to ‘Active’. This will activate your automation on your website.
Well done! This is how you can create and send a custom email for the pending order status in WooCommerce.
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 for each order status change in WooCommerce.
Here, we have explored some valuable use cases for these automations and engage with your customers:
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.
Next, configure the FROM STATUS ‘Pending’ and TO STATUS as ‘Failed’ in your event.
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.
Sending a custom order delivered email is quite easy.
You just need to assign the ‘Completed’ status from the ‘Processing’ status.
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.
You can send a custom email once your customer’s order has been returned and refunded.
FunnelKit Automations provides the ‘Order Refunded’ event.
Next, you can compose an email about their refunds and some service feedback emails as well.
FunnelKit Automations also lets you send emails for WooCommerce custom order statuses.
You can create WooCommerce custom order status programmatically by two ways:
👉 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:
Next, you just have to send an email that the order has been packed and is awaiting the shipping partners to get it picked up.
Once everything goes well, you can send the WooCommerce order status shipped email notification. This way, you inform your customers of their order tracking status in 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’ve discussed. You can try and test various other opportunities when setting up your automated sequences.
In this section, we’ll answer the common questions related to WooCommerce order notification emails:
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 get notified of new WooCommerce orders when a customer purchases a product in your store. All you have to do is enter the admin email in the recipient email address field when setting up custom emails in FunnelKit Automations.
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.
Order notification emails are the critical components of an eCommerce business. They keep both your customers and staff in the loop about the order; thereby, 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 makes it an excellent marketing automation CRM tool to customize the content and layout of your emails. This way, you get complete control over the email messaging and branding of your business.
You can set up different email notifications for different order statuses, such as order processing email, pending orders, order refunds, failed orders, etc. Not just that, you can even send emails for your custom order statuses as well.
This way, you can improve the engagement on your emails and boost conversions with them through effective marketing campaigns.
So what are you waiting for?
It’s time to set up attractive WooCommerce order notification emails in WordPress.