Transactional Emails Importance | Magento Guide

As I was writing in the previous article Magento Transactional emails are most of the times ignored, for the most part disabled and/or not considered important but these are, and will be your most opened emails, EVER. What if you also get subscribers to interact with them, click links, and tell Gmail, Verizon, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc that your emails are relevant? You have an opportunity to get so much more out of transactional, with so very little effort.

Transactional emails in Magento are not hard to customize and over the years we have built templates and have tried to improve them while keeping in mind two very important goals:

1. keep messaging clear
2. have relevant links that entice the subscriber to a click

Magento Transactional Emails are the New Order, Order Update, New Account, New Shipment, Forgot Password, New Credit Memo, etc. You can find and configure them in both Magento 1 and Magento 2 but before jumping to designing emails make sure to check your default store email addresses. The email sender should definitely not be Customer Support, Sales, or General Contact – the sender should be your store’s name so the recipient can quickly understand who’s sending the email.

Check and update your Magento Store Email Addresses

Magento 1: System -> Configuration -> General -> Store Email Addresses

Magento 2: Stores -> Configuration -> General -> Store Email Addresses

Step 2: Configure and edit Transactional Emails in Magento

Magento 1:

Where to edit email templates: System -> Transactional Emails

Where to configure what emails go out: System -> Configuration -> Sales -> Sales Emails

-> Customer -> Customer Configuration

-> Customer -> Newsletter

Magento 2:

Transactional Email Design Goals

Now that you understand what you’re working with let’s discuss targets and designs

1. Get the message across – these are very important emails that always deliver information that is important to the customer. Failing to make it simple to read and/or understand details about an order, a shipment or how to reset a password will lead to the customer frustration and overloading the support team which will lead to higher costs.

The main target of a transactional email needs to be getting the main message across

2. Give recipients something relevant to click on:

• Provide relevant links and CTAs – add a top menu with relevant links to SHOP, MY ACCOUNT, the REWARDS program, CONTACT page, BLOG is always going to help.
• Add relevant content and CTAs after the main message is finished. i.e.
  • New Order Email? Add a bulleted list of what the customer will receive next and a CTA to his customer account (View Order)
  • Forgot pass email? Write a short blog post in which you recommend a service like LastPass and link it from the email: “Hey, by the way, this used to happen all the time to us too with soo many passwords but we found a solution to this. If you want to read more about how we resolved our password problems go to this article page”
  • Just be creative – put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think, what could he read that is relevant next to this notification or order update?
• Keep the design text heavy – I would recommend not using banners at all but if you do, just make sure the banners have very little text. Keep the emails text-heavy so they have great deliverability

Transactional Emails Troubleshooting

Customers are calling because they are not getting the order confirmations.

This typically can happen for 3 reasons only:

1. Customer email address is incorrect – in this case, there’s not much you can do
2. Emails are not going out – to test this just do exactly what the customer did and see if you’re getting the emails – if you are, all is good, if you are not, get your developer involved
3. Your domain has a poor reputation and emails are bouncing

• check your domain name against know spam blacklists (MXToolBox Blacklist Checker)
• get an SMTP extension and start a free trial with SendGridand next time a customer complains that they did not get a transactional email check out the logs and fix the problems
  • Amasty’s SMTP Email Settings for Magento 2  has been my go-to every time

Customers are calling to ask about the shipment

The problem here usually is that you or your fulfillment team does not create shipments – not creating shipments means you are not sending out Shipment Confirmation emails to your customers.