Building your dream WooCommerce store is something that you dedicate a lot of your time and effort because you want it to be perfect. You take time to make your website look and feel exactly how you had pictured it.
From selecting the right theme to adding each product to your store and watching your online store slowly become a reality is a joyous occasion for the store owner. The completeness of your website is achieved when you can deliver a consistent user experience.
Why Use a Custom Email Template?
Perhaps this need to provide a consistent user experience that store owners often feel is one of the reasons why they don't want to use the stock mail template. Most importantly, there is a lack of personalization in the stock email templates.
The generic email used by WooCommerce gets its job done but, as far as the quality of interaction with the customer goes, it fails to deliver. The generic mail template may seem even robotic to your customers.
Furthermore, customizing the order email template gives you more flexibility and allows you to add your brand logo, alter the header, provide additional links to promote products and new offers. This is why most eCommerce store owners opt to use a customized email template for their business.
How to Access WooCommerce Email Setting?
Before we dive into the customization part, here are a few simple steps that you can take to change some basic features of your email templates. All you have to do is follow the steps below to access your email templates' fundamental changes.
WooCommerce→ Settings→ Emails→ Email Options
Once you have navigated to the email options, you have the ability to change basic features like the header image, title text, font color, footer text, etc. But, if you want to do more, let's say change the content. You will need to use a little coding but don't worry, it is unlikely to affect any core plugins.
Creating Custom Templates in WooCommerce
Creating a custom template in WooCommerce is much easier than you might think. All you have to do is go to the email setting as mentioned above, and find the particular option you are looking for, such as "Processing Order."
Once you've reached the setting, all you have to do is copy {file-path} to your theme folder. By doing so, you will be able to access a more advanced option to customize the order emails on your WooCommerce store. This is because the above process directly overrides the email template file.
How to Change the Email Template in WooCommerce?
WooCommerce searches for the email templates file before assigning one to the order email. The search happens on the theme's folder and so to change the email sent, all you need to do is select the template file you want to change and add it to the theme.
For example, let's say that you want to change the footer text color, which is by default set to a lighter shade of the base email color that you've selected. You will have to change the email-footer.php in order to change the color to something else. Therefore, you have to first locate the file.
wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/emails/email-footer.php
You then have to copy this to wp-content/themes/your-theme/woocommerce/emails/. Create the directory if your WoCommerce store does not already have the directories woocommerce/emails. Once you've made it this far, it is practically a walk in the park from here. All you have to do is open the email-footer.php and edit the following.
$credit = "
border: 0;
color: black;
font-family: Arial;
font-size: 12px;
line-height:125%;
text-align: center;
";
How to Change the Content of WooCommerce Email Template Using Hooks and Filters?
Changing the content of your WooCommerce plugin is slightly more complicated than simply adjusting color or adding notes. We make use of hooks and filters to make such changes. Suppose if you wanted to add the shipping method to the email you could use either 'woocommerce_email_after_order_table ', or 'woocommerce_email_before_order_table ', to add the content.
add_action( 'woocommerce_email_after_order_table',
'wdm_add_shipping_method_to_order_email', 10, 2 );
function wdm_add_shipping_method_to_order_email( $order, $is_admin_email ) {
echo '<p><h4>Shipping:</h4> ' . $order->get_shipping_method() . '</p>';
}
You need to keep in mind that although the process may seem easy and straightforward, it is always best to hire an expert like Virtina for coding operations like this. And in case you change the current theme, you'll also have to move the template file that you just modified for it to work in the new theme.
Customizing Your Email Template Using Plugins
One of the easier alternatives, especially if you are not very good with coding, is to opt for a plugin to customize your WooCommerce email templates. With a plugin, your email customization becomes a lot easier and straight forward.
Two of the major plugins that are most popular among WooCommerce store owners are Mailchimp and Jilt. However, Mailchimp is probably your ideal choice as it lets you customize aesthetic features, color, and font but also enables you to add recommended products to transactional emails.
Furthermore, you can also set up a streamlined abandoned cart email, which is quintessential for any eCommerce store today. You can also track and segment your customers based on their purchase behavior.
Conclusion
The ability to customize your order email template is quintessential for your WooCommerce store. If you are familiar with code, you can easily customize the template with a few simple code lines. Even if you have no clue about code, you can always make use of advanced plugins like Mailchimp.
However, you do need an expert to set up the plugin to ensure that it works well-aligned with your core plugins. An expert can easily ensure that the order mail works and looks exactly the way you want whether it be through code or plugin.
