As Shopify continues to take the eCommerce world by storm, users can now either receive or send customized Shopify email notifications. These notifications serve as the following:
- Frequent requests from clients who are looking to optimize their communications with customers, OR
- A way for senders to personalize a Shopify store.
As you carefully design emails, you can make a powerful tool for communication out of it. It allows clients to add a personal touch at different points of the purchase journey. And this can be an extra valuable tool during busy shopping events.
Plus,
Shopify emails differ from the traditional business email format because these types of emails are sent automatically following an order to update customers on shipping, abandoned checkouts, customer accounts, etc. This also allows you to upsell to clients on bespoke emails and to add extra value to your project.
In this article, we’ll look at five best ways to add additional functionality to Shopify email notifications.
Table of Contents
Ensure Consistency
First and foremost, your Shopify email notifications must be consistent, no matter what. That means you should have polished notifs while using the same effective templates; only switch out templates when necessary. If you decide to switch templates constantly, it might confuse your email recipients. Have an efficient starting point for all your emails, which you can easily apply to each of the notifications that Shopify sends.
If you’re not sure which templates and features to use for your notifs, then it’s important to see which ones are doing well and which ones are problematic for recipients. Use those that work as much as possible until your clients want something new.
Have Responsive Emails
As much as you try to have clients read your emails, they can still ignore them, no matter how much work you put into their creation. While emails can be responsive, not all clients want to read them, to begin with.
One major problem is having your recipients try to read your email. If you try to send your email in an insufficient format, you’ll be forcing your readers to either squint and zoom in to read, or not read it at all.
Therefore, it’s better to do one of the following:
- Use a flexible layout that can expand or shrink to fit the user’s screen, OR
- Pick a width between 400 and 600 pixels.
Either way, you’ll provide a happy medium that doesn’t require mobile users to have to zoom in too much to read your emails.
Offer Discounts in Abandoned-Cart Emails
Let’s face it: abandoned-cart emails can be tedious on the shopper’s end.
However,
If that email is generic, then the tedious part will be even worse. In fact, according to the Baymard Institute, 69% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer can complete a sale. Although this might not affect shoppers, it can affect businesses, since it triggers a huge loss of potential sales for your clients. Therefore, you can reduce the number of abandoned carts by recovering them if you find a way to improve results in this area.
First, let’s look at abandoned checkouts.
Whenever someone abandons a cart before buying something online, an email explaining this will (and should) be sent a few hours after the potential customer has “bounced” away from making a purchase.
So, what can you do?
One of the best ways to rope customers back to make a purchase is to offer discounts. In fact, people love to save money on things; therefore, why not feed them this desire? If they receive an encouraging abandoned-checkout email with a discount code, they would be more apt to go back to the store and complete the sale. Therefore, it’s considered a call-to-action method (if you haven’t thought of a CTA already).
So, how can you implement this strategy? Here’s how:
- Create a percentage discount code or a monetary discount code (depending on the type of promotion you would like to offer to your client),
- Make a note of the name assigned to the discount code (i.e., “WelcomeBack”),
- Use that name when needed, so that you can make a customized template for future use,
- Create a call-to-action button labeled “Complete Purchase,” along with a dedicated destination for it.
All in all, this CTA is to try and sweeten the deal for clients and customers, thus turning them into conversions.
Provide Content
Who doesn’t want great content in an email? Otherwise, a plain-look email will receive no interactions and get tossed in the Trash folder. Besides the obvious content that’s included in the Shopify email notifications (i.e., order information), notifs are also a great way to add additional content or promotional info that recipients may be interested in. Here are just a few examples of additional incentives:
- Customer service information,
- Links to your social media,
- Special offers,
- Upcoming events/sales,
- Requests for reviews,
- “How to” content,
- Helpful links to instruction manuals or other guides,
- Links to various sections of your site,
- “Refer a friend” program info,
- Content that spotlights your most popular product,s
- Links to featured blog posts.
Also, you might want to display specific content for individual products on an email by using conditional Liquid operators. With a Liquid operator, you can add text or images that will appear when a product fulfills the criteria that you create.
Besides Liquid operators, you can also use the line item object to reference particular properties of a product that’s in shopping carts. How it works is that each line item represents a single line in a customer’s shopping cart, and they can also be used in email notifications to isolate individual properties of a product. Thus, you’re creating a product-specific content within emails, so that you save customers from saying “What product are you talking about?” or “I don’t get why I’m receiving this email!” Instead, you’ll entice them with great content and excellent reasons why to buy something.
Test Emails
So, now that you have a design and a goal for your emails, what do you do next? Send them? Not quite.
First and foremost, you must do some testing. Regardless of design, test each email to ensure the output looks right from a customer’s perspective. In other words, step into your customers’ shoes and see what they will and won’t like. As a developer, you have to always think about how the end product will look, as well as be empathetic to your clients’ customers.
The good news is, there are two options for testing that you can find and enable on the notification settings page:
- Preview the notification, OR
- Send a test email.
Just keep in mind:
While the preview function can be very helpful if you want to make some quick edits, sending a test email is highly recommended once you’re finished working on a template.
Overall, you have to have a sufficient process for testing your emails, so that you can spot any possible errors that need to be fixed right away before launch, and ensure that everything will run smoothly.
Conclusion
Once you have your Shopify theme up and running, you may want to take the time to extend the professional look of your shop by sending effective notification emails, regardless if you do so after key events or after customers shop.
However, as we’ve discussed in this article, it’s not enough to just send your emails without checking them or send them without effort. In fact, sending a generic confirmation email is no longer good enough. Plus, you don’t want to just say, “Your order is on the way.”
Instead, it’s important to customize your emails; personalize notifications so that your customers feel appreciated for their decision to shop from you. Therefore, as you follow these five simple tips, and let your Shopify store shine through your emails!
Molly Crockett is a writer and editor at Ukwritings.com. As a tech enthusiast, she blogs about the latest trends in technology.