Email is a great way to keep in touch with your site’s users. Customizing existing email notifications and adding more of your own can make your site more useful and informative for your users. There are many ways to improve, upgrade, or add-to your site’s email notifications.
By default, the WordPress user account email address is used when a user registers for an account or requests a password reset or similar administrative account changes.
A more complex site will use the user’s email address to send them other notifications and updates as well. For instance if the site is ecommerce, users might receive purchase confirmations, receipts, order status updates, etc. And many other plugins will add other user email notifications related to their functionality, such as contact forms, forum posts, and more.
If you’re going to be sending a lot of email notifications, or you just want a more robust and flexible setup for the email system, be sure to take a look at our recent post: Manage Email Sending in WordPress using SMTP
Customize Your Existing Notifications
Default WordPress Notifications
If you want to take control of the email notifications built into WordPress, a plugin like Better Notifications for WP will let you customize the default emails, as well as configure some additional ones provided by the plugin. It also lets you “choose to send notifications to individual users, multiple users, all users in a user role, multiple roles – you name it.”
WooCommerce
If you are running an ecommerce site using the fantastic WooCommerce plugin, then WooCommerce will let you customize your email content by default. But if you want even more control, they provide the premium plugin WooCommerce Email Customizer to do just that.
If you want the option to add new automated email notifications based on specific site events and conditions, and targeting customers who meet specific criteria, then AutomateWoo is a fantastic plugin. It isn’t difficult to use, but gives you very granular control over who will get your custom notifications and when. And if you use WooCommerce Subscriptions, AutomateWoo can also schedule email notifications based subscription status, expiration, and much more.
Newsletter Subscriptions
These won’t be tied to a user’s actions on the site, like the integrated notifications are, but newsletters are still a great addition to keep your users (or a sub-set of users) informed of important news. MailChimp and Constant Contact are two popular newsletter services that can easily be integrated into a WordPress site as a simple “newsletter sign-up” form.
It is also possible—usually through custom development—to keep the subscriber lists on these services up-to-date with users fitting specific criteria on your site, rather than the usual list of people who subscribed to receive a certain newsletter from you.
Send Bulk User Emails Directly from WordPress
In addition to the automated email notifications, if you want to be able to email your users (or a group of them) whenever you like, right from WordPress, then WP Email Users might be just the ticket. It lets you compose your email in a WYSIWYG editor and then send it to the users you select.
If you’d like help improving the email notifications on your site or you have any questions about these suggestions, be sure to contact us. We’d be happy to help.