Shopify Expert Insights

Transactional emails— those emails that your Shopify store sends out on your behalf to your customers— are important and often overlooked part of your store's customer service experience. Most store owners leave them untouched, and while they default Shopify templates work well enough, they can certainly be improved.

Those transactional emails are a great way to build repertoire with your customers... and without an effort on your part. Think about it. For every order in your store, a customer is going to get at least two emails. One when they place they order, and one when their order ships. If you have cart recovery enabled (and I hope you do) that's potentially three emails a customer will get from you. That's three opportunities to build your brand.

Rewriting the emails in your voice- so they sound conversational- is a great place to start. Even just so they sound human, it'll boost confidence. There's also You can also gain value from them by asking your customers about their experience, asking for referrals, asking to connect on social media, including survey links, or advising them of new products.

We've written a few templates for our Shopify clients that are a great place to start.

"Abandoned Checkout Notification" Email Template

Subject: do you need any help with your order?

Hi {{ billing_address.name }},
Joe here from Acme Corp.
I saw you put together a shopping cart on our site but didn’t finish your order. Do you need any help? Or did you have any questions about the order I can answer before you submit it?
If there’s anything I can do, just hit the reply button and drop me a line with any product or order questions.
Your shopping cart:
I’ve included a list of your shopping cart contents below. You can click this link - {{ url }} - to load up the shopping cart again.
{% for line in line_items %}{{ line.quantity }}x {{ line.title }}
{% endfor %}
If you need to discuss your order in more detail, feel free to call me.
Cheers!
Joe from Acme Corp

"Order Confirmation" Email Template

Hi {{ billing_address.name }},
We're sure you can remember what you ordered, but below is a confirmation and all the details you could possibly need.
If you have any questions at all, just reply to this email or give us a call.
All the best,
Joe from Acme Corp
PS: Would you mind taking a 47 second survey? It'll help us improve the site? Here's the link: http://yoursite.com/pages/survey/
Date {{ date | date: "%m/%d/%Y" }}{% if requires_shipping %}
Shipping address
{{ shipping_address.name }}
{{ shipping_address.street }}
{{ shipping_address.city }}, {{ shipping_address.province }}  {{ shipping_address.zip }}
{{ shipping_address.country }}{% endif %}
Billing address
{{ billing_address.name }}
{{ billing_address.street }}
{{ billing_address.city }}, {{ billing_address.province }}  {{ billing_address.zip }}
{{ billing_address.country }}
{% for line in line_items %}{{ line.quantity }}x {{line.title }} for {{ line.price | money }} each
{% endfor %}
{% if discounts %}Discounts : {{ discounts_savings | money_with_currency }}{% endif %}
Subtotal : {{ subtotal_price | money_with_currency }}{% for tax_line in tax_lines %}
{{ tax_line.title }} : {{ tax_line.price | money_with_currency }}{% endfor %}{% if requires_shipping %}
Shipping : {{ shipping_price | money_with_currency }}{% endif %}
Total : {{ total_price | money_with_currency }}

"Shipping confirmation" Email Template

Hi {{ billing_address.name }},
Just a quick update... your order is now on its way to you. It'll be with you soon, but if you want to keep an eye on it, you can follow its journey here: {{ fulfillment.tracking_url }}
If there is anything else we can do, just reply and let us know.
Joe from Acme Corp.
PS: In the meantime, check out what's new on the site: http://www.yoursite.com/collections/whats-new - Go on. We won't tell.

You'll find them order Admin > Settings > Notifications

While the tags in these emails make them a copy & paste affair for Shopify, they'll work for any ecommerce platform. I like them because they sound friendlier than the standard "shipping robot" emails that most companies send out to their customers. Give them a try. You'll find by inviting the conversation with your customers, you'll be top-of-mind when it comes time for recurring purchases.

Let's say you've invested a boatload of cash in to a marketing campaign, redesigned your site, and suddenly discovered that your conversion rate collapsed. You're panicked because you're wasting money on advertising that's going nowhere.

We recently had a client in that position. During a successful Kickstarter campaign and accompanying redesign, they were losing sales. Oh snap. We can fix that.

Analyzing their sales funnel, it became clear that customers were adding items to cart but never reaching checkout. What could be the problem? After all, this cart doesn't look so bad:

In a situation like this, there isn't time for split testing. You need to act fast and gain quick wins. Look for problems, apply best practices, and make educated fixes.

It's important to work with a theory and let that guide decisions. In this client's case, I suspected that since 65% of this client's customers weren't in the US, English may not be their first language. For those people (and their Google translator) the best course of action is to simplify for quick wins.

After several simple changes, we ended up with 133% boost in conversions.

Here are the changes we made (and you should consider trying.)

1. Hide extraneous inputs We removed the "special instructions" field. What could that possibly include anyway?
2. Remove unnecessary text. This site had a note about currencies but didn't actually support multiple currencies. Removed!
3. Remove extra buttons. Having multiple buttons creates confusion. In this case, the update button came before checkout. Awful.
4. Simpler layout This site had a customer guarantee near the checkout button. Well we like that, we don't necessarily want it so close to the checkout button. We instead moved it to the left of the button area, where should actually be read more according to eye-tracking studies.
5. Accurate button labels The checkout button label previously was "CHECKOUT"– seems simple, but it's high-pressure. We replaced it with "Proceed to checkout," which is lower pressure and a more accurate description of what the button does.

As we've often see before, it is always small changes that better enable people to buy from you. To maximize sales, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. No one is going to learn how to use your website. They're just going to move on to someone with an easier-to-use site.

A reader asked, "How’d you get your site to locate me and use that location in the title? I’ve never seen that before."

They're talking about the geolocation trick we use on WebsiteRescues:

Personalization is a great way to grab people's attention, and stand out from the competition. Most people who see their city or metro area echoed to them will read on. I've watched the look of surprise on reader's faces when I show them a site using it.

It pays divides too. We've seen personalization boost conversions up to 20%.

It's easy to do, and free for the first 1,000 daily visitors to your site. (I don't have that many.)

This lives in the header:

And this is the headline echoing the city:

Turn your website into a revenue generating machine for your city; ?> business.

Here's how it works. When a visitor lands on your site, on page load, their IP address is sent to IPinfo for geolocation. IPinfo then returns their city which we store in a variable to echo throughout our copy.

You could extend this further. In addition to city, IPinfo will also return state, and country. Using that info, a clever use of geolocation could be to auto-populate forms for your visitors' convenience, improving conversions.