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How to Customize and Send WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

Editorial Team
September 11, 2023
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 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.

What is a WooCommerce Order Notification Email?

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:

  • Pending payment
  • Failed
  • Processing
  • Completed
  • On hold
  • Cancelled
  • Refunded
  • Draft
🔔 If you want to learn about each order status and what it signifies, we have a detailed post on WooCommerce order status.

For example, here is the default WooCommerce email template for new order purchases:

Default WooCommerce email for new order

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.

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.

Let’s look at some of these reasons:

  • Consistent 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.
  • Information clarity - You can clearly and concisely present critical customers orders information, such as order details, shipping information, etc., by customizing the content and layout of default WooCommerce order notification emails.
  • Marketing opportunities - You get plenty of opportunities to offer upsells and cross-sells through your customized emails. Include relevant product recommendations, attractive discounts, etc., to encourage customers to explore your offers.
  • Consistent communication - Your communication style and tone will become consistent after customizing the email templates. This will further help build a strong brand identity that will help foster 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. 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.

Step 1: Install and configure the SMTP plugin

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.

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 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 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 Campaigns ⇨ Automations (Next Gen) under FunnelKit Automations.

From there, hit the ‘Add New Automations’ button.

Go to Automations and click on the add new 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 Trigger’ 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 the event by clicking on the 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.

  • Rich Text - Write usual plain-text emails using the rich text editor
  • HTML - Write emails using HTML
  • Visual Builder - Design custom emails with the built-in drag-and-drop visual email builder

Here, we’ll select the ‘Rich Text’ editor and write our 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 the built-in visual email builder inside FunnelKit Automations:

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

Click on ‘Save’ when done.

Step 7: Activate your 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 for each order status change 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 by 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 get it picked 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 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.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

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.

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.

Boost Your Engagement and Conversions with Custom WooCommerce Order Notification Emails

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.

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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