Magento – Sales Emails

One of the (many) things that often gets overlooked when a company puts a Magento website live are the Sales emails. These are the emails that get sent to customers after they have ordered – the New Order email, etc. You can tell if these have been overlooked by studying the opening hours – if it says, “Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm PST” , then it’s probably using the stock template that comes with Magento (presumably PST refers to Pacific Standard Time, which is pretty meaningless to a European customer).

Sales Email templates
8 Magento Sales Email templates

Within Magento there are 8 email templates that you should modify before going live. This is because these all contain the standard PST opening hours. These templates are New Order, New Invoice, New Shipment, New Credit Memo. I usually rename them with the store name (“Quirk” in this example) so that its easier to manage in a multi store setup. This means you can add different templates for different stores or websites.

Magento Sales Emails template selection
Sales Emails template selection

Changing the default email templates is pretty simple. Within Magento backend, navigate to  System/Transactional Emails.  Click “Add New Template” and then from the Template dropdown, select one of the 8 templates you should modify (see above). For example, the first template I modify is the New Order template. By default I just change the opening hours and then wait until the client has done some test orders before broaching the subject of deciding what content and style would best suit their shop.

Assigning the Magento Sales Email templates
Assigning the Magento Sales Email templates

When you’ve modified the templates, you then have to assign them. Go to Configuration/Sales Emails and then select the appropriate email for each section. For example, here I’ve set the New Order emails to be the “Quirk New Order” for a registered customer and the “Quirk New Order for Guest” for guest checkout customers.

Setting the transactional email templates is not difficult or particularly time consuming. However, it’s an important part of presenting a professional and consistent image to your customers. Paying particular attention to the details here will pay dividends later on.