- Sign-up with Klaviyo - https://www.klaviyo.com/partners/signup?utm_source=0010V00002PzS9BQAV&%3Butm_medium=partner - affiliate link
- Shopify Notification Variables - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/notifications/email-variables
Hey, Scott Austin here.
If you are a regular listener of this podcast, you know that I'm big believer that Shopify stores should be working to grow their businesses into brands. And in this episode, I want to talk about branding in your emails. Here are some of the benefits of implementing your store's brand identity in your emails:
Creating a strong and consistent brand is not easy for a Shopify store as you've got to use a wide variety of tools to reach out to customers including your website, your emails, your ads, your social presences and much more.
And because a Shopify store has to use several, if not dozens, of different tools to create their customer experience, creating consistent branding is not easy. Each tool has different elements that it allows you to customize to your brand standards. But they don't all provide the same controls.
So in this episode, I'm going to cover one tactic that you can use to bring more consistency to your branding. And that is to create rich branding in your Shopify email notifications.
Let's start by explaining what Shopify notifications are. These are emails that get sent by Shopify to your customers. The notifications are considered transactional emails, not marketing emails, so your customers do not need to be opted in for you to send them.
You can find a list of the notifications that Shopify sends in your Shopify Admin under Settings > Notifications. Here's the list of notifications:
These emails get sent when a customer places an order:
And these notifications are for the shipping of orders:
These notifications are for local delivery:
These notifications are for local pickup:
These notifications are sent about customers and accounts:
These notifications are related to gift cards:
This notification is for email marketing:
And these notifications are for returns:
Now that's 39 different notifications, so that's a lot of touch points. It's important to get your branding consistent in all of those emails. But in the Shopify Admin, we don't get much control over the branding of the emails. If you click the Customize email templates button, you'll only have two things to configure:
You can also edit the content of the notifications to match your brand's voice. But that's done in liquid and HTML code and can be quite confusing for people not used to editing code.
And to make this problem even messier, Shopify notifications are just one set of emails that you are probably sending to your customers. Other emails include:
Now we can't unify all these emails to make them look and feel the exact same. But we can modify the Shopify notifications and in the end have complete control over their look and feel. You see, the logo and accent color controls are the only branding elements available in the Shopify Admin. But we can create email templates for the notifications outside of the Shopify Admin and then copy and paste them into Shopify. And that's the way that we get full control over their branding. But the content we are creating and adding to Shopify is Liquid and HTML which beyond the technical skills of most store owners. However, there's good news if you are using Klaviyo, which is my recommendation for marketing emails. You see, Klaviyo comes with a good email editor. Its a graphical editor not a code editor. So you can create emails by dragging and dropping content blocks. And Klaviyo has two additional features in their email editor that allow us to use it for creating our Shopify notifications. Those features are:
One thing to note here is that a template that is created to be used in a Klaviyo flow or campaign cannot be used in a Shopify notification. That's because Klaviyo templates and Shopify templates use different variables for the same thing. Here's an example.
This isn't a show stopper though. It's just something you have to keep in mind. You'll want separate templates in Klaviyo for your Klaviyo and Shopify emails.
I use a four step process for creating Shopify notifications in Klaviyo. The steps are:
Now, let's go into each step in more detail.
These content blocks will save you a lot of time and help you have consistency across emails. I recommend making a header section and a footer section that you can use across your Klaviyo and Shopify emails. To do that, you'll need to not use any variables in these sections. So instead of using a variable for your store's URL, just type out the URL for your store, like https://jadepuma.com. In the header, I recommend having your store's logo and just a few high-level navigation links. You don't need to mimic all of the links in your store's main navigaiton. In the footer section, I recommend blocks for a friendly contact us message, social links and business name and address. Your Klaviyo emails will need an unsubscribe link while your Shopify emails will not. So keep any unsubscribe blocks out of the common footer section.
For other content blocks, like buttons or promoted products, I recommend making blocks that are specific to your Shopify templates as they'll need to use Shopify variables. I've got a link in the show notes to Shopify's list of variables that are supported in notifications.
You'll want to create a unique template for each Shopify notification. That way you can save them and update them as needed.
Klaviyo has many templates that you can use as a starting point. Go to Templates > Create Template > Shopify Notification Templates and select the template that you want to use to start with. Klaviyo provides 11 different templates, so there's not a specific one for each of the 39 Shopify notifications.
With that starting template, you'll want to add the appropriate Universal Content like the header and footer sections. You'll also want to update the Styles for the email to map to the standards for your brand.
And now for the really important part. You should edit the copy or body of the email to map to your brand. So update the generic-sounding copy provided by Klaviyo to match your brand's voice.
Once you are done creating the template in Klaviyo, it is pretty easy to copy the template code to Shopify. You'll need to export the HTML code one email at a time and paste it into Shopify. Here are the steps to use for each Shopify Notification:
I recommend that you test your template a couple of ways.
If you find issues in your testing, go back and edit the template as needed in the Klaviyo editor. Then copy and paste it from Klaviyo to Shopify. And do the testing again.
So that's it for getting rich branding into your Shopify Notifications. It is a bit of work to get it all set-up. But its work like this that will help you build your brand as it will stand-out from all of the other stores that just use the boiler-plate templates.
Thanks for listening.
JadePuma is a certified Shopify Expert. If you need any help with your Shopify store, we can help.