An Easy Guide on How to Upgrade Your Shopify Email Templates

Did you know your generic Shopify notification emails can be upgraded to make an easy 14% extra in sales?

Many Shopify store owners aren’t aware that their transactional emails are a powerful hidden sales channel.

Unlike promotional emails, which largely go unopened, transactional emails receive a 6 times higher open rate — mostly because customers are seeking confirmation on their order’s progress.

In addition to increasing revenue, optimized Shopify email templates also improve customer retention, increase average order values (AOV), and create a smooth customer experience.

In this article, we’ll offer an easy guide on how you can begin upgrading and optimizing your Shopify email templates for more repeat purchases, upselling, and cross-selling opportunities. 

Where are transactional emails in Shopify?

Transactional emails are automated notifications sent from the store merchant to their customers. 

These email notifications are sent automatically after the customer has triggered a predetermined action on the website, such as placing an order, requesting a password change, or abandoning their checkout cart.

Using UpOrder, merchants can upgrade their Shopify store’s email templates to include their store’s logo, branding, discount codes, and product recommendations for more upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Sending optimized transactional emails should be part of your Shopify store’s email marketing strategy because these emails are opened at a higher rate compared to standard promotional emails.

How to start upgrading your Shopify email templates — best practices for more engagement and sales

Shopify’s admin page offers over 30+ transactional email templates for merchants to send out to their customers throughout their customer journey — from transactional emails to post-purchase email flows.

The majority of these email templates are sent automatically following a customer’s action on the website, usually related to purchasing their online order.

In the beginning, don’t worry about optimizing all 30+ email templates, but instead, start by optimizing these most important transactional email types:

• Order confirmation
• Abandoned checkout
• POS and mobile receipt
• Shipping confirmation
• Shipment delivered
• Customer account welcome

Don’t send another boring Shopify email notification again — send optimized transactional emails and see a 14% increase in your total sales.

In the next steps, we’ll break down how you can get started optimizing your Shopify email templates using UpOrder’s email template builder.

Upload your store’s logo and branded colors

To create a new template set, open up your onboarding module.

Here you will be able to upload your store’s logo and choose your branding colors selecting a color wheel.

Once these elements have been uploaded, you can rename your template set, save it, and publish it.

Now your template sets will be fully branded with your colors and logos.

Set your email’s styling

Using UpOrder, you can edit all of your email templates at once by editing the email set styles.

To do this, go to “Template Settings” on the left side of the page, and select from the dropdown menus in the customization editor on the right side of the page to edit the following parameters:

• Email styles
• Button styles
• Discount styles
• Recommendation styles
• Divider styles
• Font styles

Here, you will be able to adjust your button colors, font types, spacing, padding, and other styling parameters that will be applied to all of your email templates.

Start creating discounts and promo codes

UpOrder’s email template features powerful built-in discount styles and promo code generators to create unique, one-time use discount codes.

Discount codes can be personalized to automatically include your customer’s name, making them more likely to make another purchase after opening your email.

Unlike set styles, which apply changes to all email templates, you will need to manually adjust your discount codes for each template.

To edit your discount codes, click on “Discounts” on the page’s left-side menu, and then start editing your discount parameters on the right side of the page using the customization editor.

In the customization editor, you’ll be able to adjust these discount parameters:

• Discount amount by percentage off
• Expiration date
• Which products are redeemable with the discount
• Whether the discount is applied to only new customers
• A message underneath the discount code
• And more

Set up your product recommendations 

Including product recommendations at the bottom of your order and shipping confirmation emails are a great way to make an extra sale automatically.

UpOrder automatically comes included with its recommended products collection, which updates every four hours to analyze your best-selling products and includes them as product recommendations.

All of the UpOrder recommended products are populated automatically, and never recommend products your customer has already purchased.

To edit, click on “Product Recommendations” on the left-side menu to begin editing its components.

In the customization editor, merchants can make these changes to their product recommendations:

• Changing the maximum amount of recommended products (from 2 products to 4 products)
• Choosing the default product collection to pull product recommendations from
• The option to show product title names or not
• Conditional recommendations, which trigger recommendations from other product collections after a purchase has been made

Publish your final Shopify email templates and start sending emails

After you’ve edited your email templates, you’ll need to save and publish them to go live.

This step will involve you deleting your current Shopify email template’s HTML code, and copying and pasting your new UpOrder HTML code.

Let’s break down the process for doing this final step:

1. After you’re done editing your email template, click on the “Save” button in the top right corner of the email builder. Then select “Publish” from the pop-up after saving.
2. Next, you will be redirected to the Publish to Shopify page. This page will display all of your email templates on the left side of the page.
3. Select the template you want to overwrite on the left side of the page.
4. Click on the “Copy to Clipboard” button in the top right corner to copy the new HTML template code. Then press “Click here” to edit your Shopify email notification settings page.
5. Delete the original HTML code in the email body and paste in your new HTML template code
6. Press “Save” at the top right corner of the page.

Note: You’ll need to follow these steps for each template you want to update.

Can I customize the messaging for specific clients?

Yes! Using UpOrder’s Shopify notifications template builder, you’ll be able to send custom messages to your customers by upgrading your “Contact Customer” email template.

Now you can send special messages to your customers while still retaining your store’s branding and styling.

Why should I include a newsletter?

If you ever wished you could put more information in your transactional emails, consider adding a newsletter to create more engagement and website traffic. 

Adding a newsletter at the bottom of your transactional emails will keep your customers updated about new sales announcements, new product categories, and bring them back to your website to read blogs.

Download UpOrder and start upgrading your Shopify email templates

UpOrder is a Shopify app that increases repeat sales through upgraded transactional email designs.

Download your free trial of UpOrder today to see a 14% increase in sales and an 11% increase in repeat purchase rates.

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