How to customize your Magento Email Templates

Table of contents

Since open rates is higher for transactional email than promotional email, creating a transactional email which fits your brand is an important thing.

In this tutorial, I’m gonna show you how to customize your Transactional Magento Email Templates by using your Magento Admin within only 4 steps.

Step 1: Upload your own logo

Navigate to System > Configuration and open “Design” section on the left menu

Upload your logo under Transactional Emails section

A small tip for the responsive email is that the dimension of image upload is three times as large as the required size in the header.

If you are using Magento 2, do NOT ignore our guide to Magento 2 Logo.

Step 2: Customize your email header/footer

Thanks to Magento, you can create your own email header and footer in a few minutes.

Go to System > Transactional Emails
Click Add new template
Choose Email – Header/Email – Footer on Template drop down menu

Click Load Template
Fill out the Template information

Used as Default For: where your custom template will be located

Template Name: the name of your custom template
Template Content: the content of your header/footer

Save your custom header/footer

Step 3: Customize your email content

The way to customize your email content is the same as creating your email header/footer

In your Magento Admin, navigate to System > Transactional Emails
Click Add new template
Choose a default template from the drop down menu

Set Locale to your store language

Click Load Template
Fill out the template information

Used as Default For: where your custom template will be located

Template Name: the name of your custom template

Template Subject: your email subject

Template Content : the body of your message.
Template Styles: the CSS code block for your email template

Click Preview Template button to check how your email looks. Edit the template until you are happy with it. Then click Save Template.

Preview template

Step 4: Apply your configuration

Clicking Save Template just allow you to add your custom template to the available template list. You have to apply your recent configuration if you would like to use it as default.

Firstly, to apply your custom email header/email footer, follow these steps:

Go to System > Configuration > Design
Choose your custom header/custom footer on drop down menu at Email header/email footer field.

Secondly, to apply your custom email content, just follow the path in the Template Information box in the previous step. For example, we have added the custom template for transactional expired at third step. To apply it we will follow these steps:

Go to System > Configuration
Choose the Reward Point section (for example purpose only) on left menu
At the email configuration box, choose the custom email on drop down list at Template of email sent to Customer before a transaction expires field

Click Save Config

Notice that the place to apply your custom template depends on the type of template that you choose to change. It could be applied in the Sales Email on left menu if you custom “Invoice update” template or in the Customer configuration if you change the “Email for Register” template, etc.

The easiest way to know where to apply your configuration is copying the path at Used as Default For section before saving your custom template.