How to delay and schedule emails in WooCommerce

One of the most popular ShopMagic PRO features is an option to delay an email. You could (still can!) delay your email for a specified number of minutes, hours, days or weeks. However, we felt that our plugin is missing an essential ability – to schedule emails. Well, not anymore. Here’s a brief guide to scheduling emails in WooCommerce.

Table of contents

• ShopMagic Delayed Actions (and other add-ons)
• How delaying email in WooCommerce works
• How to schedule email in WooCommerce
• Delay with a placeholder

ShopMagic Delayed Actions (and other add-ons)

Both, delaying and scheduling emails are available in ShopMagic Delayed Actions add-on. It is part of ShopMagic PRO. If you have it, you not only have access to delaying and scheduling emails but nine other premium add-ons.

You can read more about them at a dedicated add-on webpage.

How delaying emails in WooCommerce works

Before we will move to scheduling emails, I’ll briefly explain how delay works, as it is a similar process. Once ShopMagic Delayed Actions is installed and activated, you’ll see a new field in your automation:

 
Here you can enable delay (1). For a standard delay, select simple time delay from a dropdown list (2). Now you can set a value (3) and time interval (4). Finally, you can set days, when your automation will be active (5). Unselecting a specified day will result in not triggering an automation on it.

Option to delay an email is available for all automations. So, you can add it to an automation which will recover abandoned cart or a subscription kind of email.

Once triggered, your automation will be added to the ShopMagic’s queue:

 
Here you can check when it will be sent to the customer, as there’s a future date added to the logs. You can also manually cancel your email if you have to.

How to schedule emails in WooCommerce?

Scheduling emails in WooCommerce is similar to delaying. However, this time you are specifying a time, when your automation should run.

For example, if you are creating a special promotion, and email should be sent on a future date, use run on a fixed date delay type.

 
That way, you can plan and create your emails, and leave the rest to ShopMagic, as it will start sending emails on a fixed date. There’s also another option, which is a schedule with time only delay:

 

There are moments when you don’t have any specific date in mind, but you’d rather not to email your customer in the middle of the night. With selecting time of delay, you can ensure, that automations are executed no more than once a day, on the selected hour.

In each of the above-mentioned WooCommerce scheduling emails you can use active days settings, and decide which days your automation should run, and which shouldn’t.

Delay with a placeholder

Delaying with placeholders is possibly the most powerful setting for special use cases, thanks to the underlying mechanism of PHP language. Our date related placeholders can be referenced here with specific time modification, basing on PHP documentation for relative date formats:

Advanced usage of placeholders for delay

Besides above placeholders, you can also rely on any meta fields stored with your order, product or subscription, etc. (with correct usage, i.e. no subscription data is stored in order-based event). The only requirement is that the placeholder returns a date parsable by PHP DateTime class constructor, according to PHP supported date and time formats. This enables you a world of possibilities, as your meta field can contain values such as first day of next month or similar complex formats.

That’s it in terms of schedule WooCommerce emails

As you can see, delaying and scheduling emails in WooCommerce may be super easy. ShopMagic covers all the ways in which you can delay or schedule your email communication.

Let us know what do you think about it. Maybe you have a special use-case? We are eager to find out what is it.

PS. In case you are looking for additional information, here’s a link to our extensive documentation about scheduling emails.