How to customize WooCommerce emails: The complete guide [2023]

Want to know how to customize WooCommerce emails? Great idea. It’ll help you get more conversions and sales. 

Let’s be honest: The standard email templates in WooCommerce are not exactly impressive. You need to customize them to make them attractive to gradually build brand recognition.

Otherwise, you’ll have dull, generic emails that every other WooCommerce store is probably sending their customers. 

You want your emails to be more brand-specific to reflect your brand’s personality. For this, you’ll need a powerful plugin with unlimited customization options.

That’s what this post discusses.

First, you’ll learn the standard types of WooCommerce emails, how to customize WooCommerce emails the standard way, and finally, how to customize WooCommerce emails with a plugin.

Let’s get started!

Standard WooCommerce email types

WooCommerce emails include both marketing and transactional emails. Transactional emails are automatically sent to a customer after they interact with your online store at any point during their order, from sign-up to completion. These emails include:

• New order: These are triggered and automatically sent to the store admin when a customer places a new order.
• Canceled order: Sent to customers to notify them that their order cancellation is successful.
• Failed order: These are automated emails sent to customers if an order they tried to place failed.
• Order on-hold: If an order has been placed on hold, these emails notify the customer. They also include the order details.
• Processing order: These emails also contain the order details and are sent to customers after payment has been made.
• Completed order: Sent to customers after their order has been processed and shipped, and shows that the order is complete.
• Refunded order: When customers’ orders are refunded, they automatically receive a refunded order email.
• Customer invoice/order details: These are sent to customers manually when they have an order that requires payment.
• Customer note: Sent to the customer when the admin edits their order.
• Reset password: These are sent to customers when they reset their passwords. 
• New account. When a customer creates a new account, they automatically receive this email.

Emails you send through WooCommerce need a trigger to make their way into your customer’s inbox automatically. Therefore, you’ll first need to make sure you enable your WooCommerce emails.

If not checked, click manage and navigate to the enable email notification prompt, then click on it.

5 ways to customize WooCommerce emails

There are different ways to customize WooCommerce emails, depending on your needs and skills. We’ll cover five of them briefly in this section. 

In the next sections, we’ll go into more detail about two of them. One’s a limited method that allows you to customize in WooCommerce. The other offers more advanced functionality and uses the Omnisend plugin.

Here are five ways to customize WooCommerce emails to match your brand and style:

1. Use the global settings

WooCommerce provides a set of straightforward global settings that allow the customization of some basic aspects of your emails. These include the sender name, email address, and subject line for all emails sent by your store. 

You can access these settings by navigating to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails in your WordPress dashboard.

2. Modify the default email templates

WooCommerce comes with a set of default email templates that you can modify to match your brand and style. You can edit the PHP files that contain the default email templates, or copy them to your child theme and modify them there. 

Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails, then click the Manage button at the far right of the email you’d like to customize. A note at the bottom of the selected template’s page will tell you the PHP template(s) associated with that email.

3. Edit the HTML template

Directly editing the HTML and CSS styling of email templates is an advanced way to customize the appearance of your WooCommerce emails. This gives developers complete control over the email structure and design but requires coding skills.

You can edit the HTML file that contains the wrapper for all email templates, or copy it to your child theme and modify it there. Remember, WooCommerce allows you to choose between three different email types, namely HTML, plain text, and multipart.

4. Use WooCommerce hooks

You can use WooCommerce hooks, such as woocommerce_email_header( $email_heading, $email ), to add content to your email’s layout. This requires some knowledge of PHP and WordPress development. 

Hooks work by adding snippets to your child theme’s functions.php file. Your choice of hooks will be guided by what you want to add and where you’d like to place it. Be aware that WooCommerce hooks don’t allow you to modify existing text (for that, you must customize the template). 

5. Use a plugin

Dedicated email customization plugins like Omnisend provide easy to use drag-and-drop editors to customize every element of your emails without coding. 

They also have pre-built templates, dynamic content block capabilities, and more, which give the flexibility to create beautiful, branded emails. This is the most convenient way to customize your WooCommerce emails.

How to customize emails in WooCommerce 

WooCommerce provides the option to customize emails but to a limited extent. 

On WooCommerce Settings > Emails page, scroll all the way down to the end of the email list mentioned earlier. You’ll see email template customization options, as shown below.

Here, you can customize the following:

• Header image: An image, such as your logo, that you’d like displayed on top of all your emails.
• Footer text: Includes information, such as your contact information, a link to your website, or anything else you’d like at the bottom of each of your emails.
• Base color: Refers to the color on the background of your email title, links, and headings.
• Background color: The background color of the email.
• Body background color: The background color of your email content.
• Body text color: The color of all text in the email 

Customizing these colors is critical for branding. It creates consistency and ensures a great user experience. 

You can also customize each email individually. You can go to the email list and click Manage as illustrated below.

Here, you can customize the subject line, heading, and additional content like thank you notes, links to return policies, discounts for the next orders, etc.

This lets you personalize emails for specific customers. Click Save Changes to complete the process.

See? 

The options to customize WooCommerce emails are very limited, and it won’t be easy to build your brand effectively with WooCommerce alone.

You’ll need a plugin, like Omnisend, to customize your email templates further and make the most of your transactional notifications. And we will show you just how in the next section.

How to customize WooCommerce emails with Omnisend

Another way through which you can customize WooCommerce emails is with Omnisend. This plugin is rated 4.9 stars (out of 5), has better templates, is easy to use, and most importantly, it’s free.

Here’s how to customize your standard WooCommerce transactional emails with Omnisend so they’re not looking like thousands of other email notifications out there.

Step 1: Get the Omnisend plugin

The Omnisend for WooCommerce plugin lets you connect your store with Omnisend and access all its customization features.

Here’s the step-by-step process on how to achieve this:

• Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, Search for Omnisend in the plugin directory, and select it.

• The Omnisend plugin page will load. Click the Install and Activate button and wait for the plugin to install.
• Click Manage Plugin, and you’ll land on the page below.

If you already have an Omnisend account that’s not connected to any brand, click on Connect your account. If you haven’t created an Omnisend account or connected it to a store yet, click on Create new account.

If your existing Omnisend account is already connected to another store, you’d have to create an empty brand first. You can find a guide on how to do that here. Once you have an empty brand, proceed to click on the Connect your account button. 

• If you select Create new account, you’ll go through the account registration process for Omnisend before getting redirected to the WooCommerce page below.

• Click on Approve and complete the process. 

Once you register, you’ll be able to create and customize WooCommerce emails. 

Step 2: Configure campaign settings

During this stage, you get to set up how your emails appear in your customers’ inboxes. To activate these settings inside Omnisend, go to Campaigns > Create email campaign.

Start customizing the Campaign settings. Here’s what you can change:

• Subject line: This is the part of your email readers interact with first, even before opening your emails.
• Sender’s email address: It’s how your senders will see who the email came from. Make sure it’s professional and aligned with your business.
• Preheader: This is a short text that helps clarify the contents of your subject line. Here, you can get creative and make it captivating.
• Sender’s name: Your brand name.

Once you’re done, you can preview what your email will look like on the recipient’s end. 

Then scroll down to the bottom of your page and click Next Step when you’re done customizing your generic information.

Step 3: Choose an email template

This is the next step after customizing your campaign settings.

Here, you can select a template for your email, depending on your campaign. The Omnisend template library provides plenty of themes to try out. 

You can use them as they are or use Omnisend’s drag-and-drop email builder to customize them. Use the goal menu on the left to help.

The two types of templates include:

Standard templates

These are fully customizable templates and include blank templates that you can build from scratch.

Themed templates

These are professionally-designed templates you can customize. All you need to do is add your logo, content, and your contact details. 

You can, however, still change these themes to fit your brand image — change the design, color, font, header, and images and save it for future use. 

Additionally, you can add more content to these templates by dragging new blocks and changing the content inside these blocks. 

You’ll have the freedom to change the sizes of the blocks as well as their design. This will let you optimize your email templates for different devices.

In short, you’ll have complete control over how your emails look with this powerful plugin. This way, you can actualize all your email campaign ideas.

Step 4: Customize WooCommerce email

Omnisend provides unique tools that let you edit your emails for more optimized marketing and transactional campaigns. Unlike with WooCommerce, you’ll have more freedom over the content in your emails.

Under Email settings, you’ll be able to change your email width, and email background color under Theme settings, as shown below. 

Be sure to test your width to make sure it’s not distorted on other devices, such as mobile phones, before sending out your emails.

Then, you can customize the items on your menu. Here’s how each one of them works:

• The Quick add tab shows you all the items on the menu that you can customize, like text, logo, button, preheader, and email. 

• On your Quick add tab, scroll down to the Preheader option and drag and drop it to your email. You’ll be able to change the text size, style, font, colors, etc.

• Open Quick add and drag and drop the text item on your email. The text editing options will appear on your right side, and you can change your email content.

Simply highlight the text, and you can change the font style, size, paragraph style, text color, link color, and even add personalization tags.

• Next, you can edit your CTA button by dragging it from the Quick add menu into the email content.

You can then edit the text on the CTA button using the text edit options on the right-side panel and add a link that the button redirects your users to.

Additionally, you’ll be able to edit the button style by clicking on Button Settings, still on your right-hand panel. Here, you can change the font, font size, button shape, button text, background colors, border width, color, style, and paddings.

• To add a logo to your email content, drag it from the Quick add menu.

• To add an image to your email content, select Image on your Quick add menu. Then, select the file you want to upload in the JPG, PNG, or GIF formats. 

Remove the image padding by checking the option on your right side panel, then add a URL on your image, and alt text, if necessary. You can resize your image by selecting it and dragging your mouse.

• You can also send discount codes for your WooCommerce store through Omnisend. Drag the Discount item from the Quick add menu, drop it on your email, and type in the code. Then, edit the code settings on the panel on your right side.

Such changes include selecting the discount type, specifying the discount value, selecting which order types the discount applies to, and so forth. 

• Just like the email header, your email footer needs to be neat and professional. In the email footer box, include items such as your social media links, link to your website, company logo, a CTA, an unsubscribe button, etc.

Omnisend gives you the option to send a test email before you can eventually save your changes and send real emails. In the email editor, there’s a send test email option in the top right corner.

You can also choose to save your draft as a template for future use. For this, instead of choosing the send test email option, click on the arrow sign beside it and select Save as template.

When you’re done, click Finish editing and move to the next step.

Step 5: Choose your recipients

Now, you can choose your recipients and schedule your email campaign. You can send your campaigns by segments or to all your contacts. 

Omnisend gives you the option to filter your recipients, so your emails only go to the right crowd. For instance, you can send emails to your audience in a specific location and exclude recipients that didn’t open your previous emails.

Once you’re done specifying your recipients, you can either choose to send your email immediately or schedule it for later.

Helpful resources for customizing WooCommerce emails

Now you know how to edit WooCommerce emails with Omnisend. It’s simple, effective, and ensures that you make the most out of all your email campaigns. 

Here are more resources to help you with customizing WooCommerce emails using the Omnisend plugin.

• The email preheader: what it is and 10 best practices
• 105 of the best email subject lines ever (Updated for 2023)
• The ultimate guide to using email images to boost your sales
• 35 engaging welcome email subject lines [+Tester]
• Killer email newsletter designs for better engagement (Guide + Checklist)

Wrap up

Whether it’s through cart recovery emails, thank you emails, or order completion notifications, you want to make sure your customers open your emails and that your brand stays at the top of their mind. 

For this, you need more than WooCommerce’s generic emails. You need emails that are more specific, aesthetically pleasing, and most importantly, ones that have your brand written all over them. And Omnisend is just the plugin you need to make this possible.