Episode 106 - Shopify Email Branding: Elevating Customer Experience

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• Sign-up with Klaviyo - https://www.klaviyo.com/partners/signup?utm_source=0010V00002PzS9BQAV&amp%3Butm_medium=partner - affiliate link
• Shopify Notification Variables - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/notifications/email-variables 

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Transcript 

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:

1. Brand consistency: Maintaining a consistent brand image across all customer touchpoints, including emails, helps reinforce your brand identity. This consistency makes it easier for customers to remember your store and build a relationship with your brand over time.
2. Trust and credibility: A professionally designed email template with custom branding can make your store appear more legitimate and trustworthy. 
3. Competitive advantage: strong branding in your emails sets you apart from competitors who use the boiler-plate email templates.

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:

1. Order confirmation - Sent to the customer after they place their order.
2. Order edited - Sent to the customer after their order is edited.
3. Order invoice - Sent to the customer when the order has an outstanding balance.  This can occur if you add a manual payment type for net terms.
4. Order cancelled - Sent to the customer if their order is cancelled.
5. Order refund - Sent to the customer if their order is refunded.
6. Draft order invoice - Sent to the customer when a draft order invoice is created. You can edit the copy before you send it.
7. Abandoned POS checkout - Sent to the customer when you email their cart from POS and includes a link to buy online.
8. Abandoned checkout - Sent to the customer if they leave checkout before they buy the items in their cart.
9. POS and mobile receipt - Sent to the customer after they complete an in person order and want to be emailed a receipt.
10. POS exchange receipt - Sent to the customer after they complete an exchange in person and want to be emailed a receipt.
11. Payment error - Sent to the customer if their payment can’t be processed during checkout.
12. Pending payment error - Sent to the customer if their pending payment can't be processed after they have checked out.
13. Pending payment success - Sent to the customer when their pending payment is successfully processed after they have checked out.
14. Payment reminder - Sent to the customer on or after the due date for unpaid orders.

And these notifications are for the shipping of orders:

1. Fulfillment request - Sent to a third-party fulfillment service provider when order items are fulfilled.
2. Shipping confirmation - Sent to the customer when their order is fulfilled.
3. Shipping update - Sent to the customer if their order’s tracking number is updated.
4. Out for delivery - Sent to the customer after orders with tracking information are out for delivery.
5. Delivered - Sent to the customer after orders with tracking information are delivered.

These notifications are for local delivery:

1. Local order out for delivery - Sent to the customer when their local order is out for delivery.
2. Local order delivered - Sent to the customer when their local order is delivered.
3. Local order missed delivery - Sent to the customer when they miss a local delivery.

These notifications are for local pickup:

1. Ready for pickup - Sent to the customer manually through Point of Sale or admin. Lets the customer know their order is ready to be picked up.
2. Picked up - Sent to the customer when the order is marked as picked up.

These notifications are sent about customers and accounts:

1. Customer account invite - Sent to the customer with account activation instructions. You can edit the copy before you send it.
2. Customer account welcome - Sent to the customer when they complete their account activation.
3. Customer account password reset - Sent to the customer when they ask to reset their accounts password.
4. Customer payment method update request - Sent to the customer when they ask to update their stored payment method.
5. Customer payment method restore request - Sent to the customer when they ask to restore their inactive payment method.
6. B2B access email - Sent to a customer when they are added to a company.
7. Contact customer - Sent to the customer when you contact them from the orders or customers page. You can edit the copy of this email before you send it.

These notifications are related to gift cards:

1. Gift card issued - Sent to the customer or recipient when a gift card is issued or fulfilled.
2. Gift card confirmation - Sent to the customer if they add a recipient to their gift card.

This notification is for email marketing:

1. Customer marketing confirmation - Sent to the customer when they sign up for email marketing if email double opt-in is enabled in your store's settings.

And these notifications are for returns:

1. Return label/tracking for a return - Sent when you create a return with a return label or tracking information, or when you update this information on a return.
2. Return label for an order - Sent when you create a return label for an order.
3. Return request confirmation - Sent to the customer after they have requested a return using self-serve returns.
4. Return request approved - Sent to the customer when you approve a return request. Return shipping information is included.
5. Return request declined - Sent to the customer with a message indicating why a return request was declined. You can edit the message to the customer before you send it.

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:

1. The logo used in the notification emails.
2. The accent color, which is used as the background color on buttons and the color of hyperlinks.

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:

1. Your marketing emails from Klaviyo or whatever CRM you are using.
2. Emails sent by your review platform to solicit product and store reviews.
3. Emails sent by your loyalty app.
4. Emails sent from your subscription app.
5. And emails from other apps and services that your store uses.

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:

1. The ability to export the code for the email template.  That way we can replace the the code in the Shopify notification templates.
2. Klaviyo provides Shopify Notification Templates that mimic the content of Shopify Notifications.  These give you a good start for each notification using the code understood by Shopify that you can edit as desired.

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. 

• The Klaviyo variable for your store's URL is {{ organization.url }}
• While the Shopify variable for your store's URL is {{ shop.url }}

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:

1. Create the Universal Content for your Shopify templates.  This is done in Klaviyo under the templates section.  Universal Content are content blocks that you can re-use across any template and speeds up the template creation process.
2. Create the template for a specific Shopify notification in the Klaviyo editor.
3. Export the template to Shopify.
4. Test the new template.

Now, let's go into each step in more detail.

1. Create the Universal Content for your Shopify templates.

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.

2. Create the template for a Shopify notification.

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.

3. Export the template to Shopify.

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:

1. In Klaviyo, click the Content dropdown and select the Templates tab.
2. Find your template and click the three dots, then choose Export. An Export Template HTML window will appear.
3. Copy the HTML code in the window.
4. Go to your Shopify Admin.  I ussually keep a seperate tab open with it.
5. In your Shopify Admin, click Settings > Notifications.
6. Find the notification template you would like to update and click on it.
7. Click the Edit code button.  You will immediately see a large section labeled Email body (HTML). Replace the existing code you see in this window with the code you copied from Klaviyo by selecting all the code and pasting over it.
8. Click Save.

4. Test the new template.

I recommend that you test your template a couple of ways. 

• The first way is by Previewing the template.  You can preview it on the same screen where you pasted the Klaviyo code in.
• The second way is by sending a test from within the Shopify Admin.  You can do that on the first screen for that notification.
• And the last way is by acting as a customer in your store.  For example, let's say you want to test the refund notification.  Go to the customer facing side of the store and place an order.  Then go into the Shopify Admin and do a refund for that order.  You should then see the refund notification email in your inbox.  Make sure it looks the way you want.  And click every single link in the email to ensure they all work properly.

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.

Summary

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.