Using transactional emails with Shopify

Learn how to use and edit your transactional email templates and keep your communications consistent with the transactional email manager.

Overview

Create and turn on transactional email templates in your Shopify store to provide your customers with consistent and relevant order details. You can see a list of different events that happen in your Shopify store, such as a new account, account updates, or new order confirmations. You can also use the transactional email manager to choose which transactional emails you want to send out to your customers once a purchase is made.

Before you start

Things you need to know before you start:

• You must have a Shopify or Shopify Plus store connected to a Dotdigital account.
• The connected Dotdigital account must have the Ecommerce permission enabled.
• When you activate transactional email on your account, it counts towards your messaging allowance.

Shopify

• If you’re a Shopify user, you can’t turn all notifications off. There are two transactional emails that are automatically sent by Shopify: Order confirmation and New account confirmation. It’s suggested to replace the content in these transactional email campaigns with a Thank you! email. Order cancelled and Shipping confirmation transactional emails can be turned off by clearing the selection for these notifications when you are editing your store.

Shopify Plus

• If you’re a Shopify Plus user, to avoid duplicating emails, you must ask Shopify Plus support to turn off the notifications you want to replace by using a Dotdigital template, or ask to have all of them turned off:
  • customer_accounts_welcome
  • order_confirmation
  • shipping_update
  • order_cancelled
  • refund_notification

Create a branded transactional email template

Create brand familiarity with your contacts by branding your transactional email templates. You can upload a logo, add fonts, and change the colours of the template. To access the transactional email manager:

1. In Dotdigital, go to Settings > Shopify > Transactional email > Setup transactional email templates.
2. Set up your branding by editing the available fields:
   • Logo
     Select Choose file to upload an image of your logo to brand your transactional email template.
   • Font
     Select the font type you want to appear throughout your template.
   • Body text colour
     Select the primary body text colour of your template.
   • Heading text colour
     Select the heading text colour of your template.
   • Button/link colour
     Select the colour you want your buttons to appear as in your template.
   • Button text colour
     Select the colour you want your button text to appear as in your template.
   • Brand highlight colour
     Add a line of colour to your template, so customers can recognise your brand faster.
   • Email footer
     Add a footer to your transactional email template. This is a great place to put your legal text.
3. Select Generate templates.

   Or select Delete to delete the current transactional email template.

Once this is complete, you can turn on your templates.

Using the transactional email manager

You can turn on, swap, edit, or preview any of your transactional email templates in the Transactional email area. You can see all of your default email templates in this area, too. To manage your transactional email settings, go to Settings > Shopify > Transactional email.

If you have not created a transactional email template yet, select Setup transactional email templates. If you already created a transactional email template, select Configure brand styles to make changes.

Account notifications
In the Account notifications area, select Turn all off or Turn all on to turn all of your transactional email notifications on or off for your customers.

To activate a transactional email template, switch the toggle to On. To disable a transactional email template, switch the toggle to Off.

Each default template has an Actions drop-down menu. Expand the actions drop-down menu to preview, edit, or swap out the current template.

Design transactional email templates

To design your transactional email template:

1. Go to the App menu and select Email.
2. Select a campaign or create a new campaign.
   

   To learn more about creating a new email campaign, check out the Getting started - Introduction email campaign article.

3. Drag a text building block onto the EasyEditor canvas.
4. Enter variables into the text box. You must insert all variables into text building blocks.
5. Select Save.

Remove all unsupported building blocks

When designing your transactional email template, you must remove all unsupported building blocks. To learn more about unsupported building blocks for transactional email templates, check out Create and design a transactional email template.

You don’t have to remove your unsubscribe link because it’s automatically removed when you send the campaign.

To learn more about using EasyEditor, check out the EasyEditor area in the help centre.

Insert variables
Variables help to personalise your email campaign so that the information is correct and relevant to your customers’ orders. For example, if you create an order confirmation email campaign, you might use the following variables for your campaign layout:

Hi, {{ data.order.billing_address.first_name }}.
Thanks for your order {{ data.order.id }}!

Your order status is now: {{ data.order.order_status }}.
You've ordered the following products:

Items

{% for product in data.order.products %}
  {{ product.name }} ({{ product.sku }}) x {{ product.qty }}
  {% if product.option %}
    {% for option in product.options %} {{ option.name }}:{{ option.value }} | {% endfor %}
  {% endif %}
  Price:{{ product.price_inc_tax }}
------------------------------------
{% endfor %}

To learn more about the different types of variables you can use, check out Variables for transactional email templates in Shopify.

Subject line variables

You can only use four variables in the subject line of your transaction email template:

• @FIRSTNAME@
  Inserts the first name of your contact.
• @LASTNAME@
  Inserts the last name of your contact.
• @ORDER_ID@
  Inserts the order ID based on your contact’s purchase.
• @ORDER_NUMBER@
  Inserts the order number.

You can’t use other variables in your subject lines.

See also

• Shopify variables for transactional email templates