How to delay emails by minutes, hours, days, or weeks in WooCommerce?

 Have you ever thought about delaying an email? I bet that you did. In this article, I’ll show you how to delay email in WooCommerce without any changes to the code. It will be available to you with ShopMagic and one of the add-ons – Delayed Actions.

📧 Are you sending emails manually because WooCommerce doesn’t let you delay its emails?

Today, I will show you how to create, customize, and delay WooCommerce emails to control your communication automatically with ShopMagic!

Table of contents

• Why delay emails in WooCommerce?
• Send customized emails in WooCommerce
• Delay emails in WooCommerce in 5 steps
• Summary & more about ShopMagic

Why delay emails in WooCommerce?

If you are a store owner or managing an e-commerce business, I’m pretty sure that there were some situations where you were thinking that this mail should be sent later or the customer should have time to check the product, etc.🤔

We can imagine hundreds of similar cases, where delaying an email would be a perfect solution. As you probably checked, WooCommerce does not have such a feature, and won’t let you delay emails😡.

Well, we have also been there 🙂. That’s why we’ve created our answer for the WooCommerce delay email – the Delayed Actions add-on.

With a blink of an eye, you can create a fully automated set of emails. Pending payments, abandoned carts, review requests, coupon codes. Choose yourself and create your marketing scenarios.

Create a set of WooCommerce delay emails for pending order status

ShopMagic is a marketing automation plugin, which lets you create an email for almost all cases, in which notifying your customer is desirable. You can start building your email marketing strategy for free💸!

Send customized emails and create WooCommerce delay emails

In our case, we will create an automation for pending payments. It’s a common situation, where a customer bought a product, but did not pay for it. So let’s work on a conversion rate of similar transactions and create WooCommerce delay emails, to remind customers about their unpaid orders.

WooCommerce email delay in 5 steps

Follow the steps below to create, send, and delay personalized emails in WordPress and WooCommerce.

Step 1: Install and activate the ShopMagic plugin

Download the ShopMagic plugin from WordPress.org or install it from the Dashboard → Plugins → Add New.

Step 2: Install and activate the Delayed Actions add-on

If you are a ShopMagic PRO user, you will be able to download the Delayed Actions add-on from your account. Do not forget to copy and paste your API key, to activate this add-on.

Step 3: Add automation and set WooCommerce email delay

The technical stuff is done, and we can move to create our first automation🙂. Choose ShopMagic → Add New. You will see a neat interface🔥 , where we will set three core components of every automation:

1️⃣ Event,

2️⃣ Filter,

3️⃣ Action.

It’s worth noting, that this UI is the same for every type of automation, so when you decide that you need another e.g. for sending WooCommerce to cancel order email, there will be no differences.

I decided to name my automation WooCommerce Email Delay – order pending, but it’s entirely up to you how you name yours.

👉🏼 For the Event, we are choosing Order Pending. It will trigger an action if the order was placed, but there’s no payment from the customer. Under the event, there’s a small checkbox for rechecking the order status. This feature will check the automation right before it will run, to ensure that the order status hasn’t changed. Because, there’s a possibility that in the meantime, the customer paid for the ordered products, without a reminder.

Step 4: Create the action for orders with pending payment statuses

Here’s a little magic from our plugin🪄. We will create not one, but two actions for one automation. Such an option is available for every ShopMagic user. I’ll show you how to create the first one, and the second should be created analogically.

👉🏼  First, take a look at the filled Action metabox. We will choose the Send Email option. Yours should be similar to mine.

The standard email will be the best pick for our automation. The Description field is similar to the automation’s description. Write something that will distinguish this action, my choice is WooCommerce Email Delay for a pending order.

Email Settings for WooCommerce email delay

👉🏼 Under the Description, you will see an option to delay your action. It is the core feature of WooCommerce delay email automation. I’m delaying my email for one hour [see the screenshot above ⬆️ ]

👉🏼 The next one is the To field. The best idea is to use a placeholder {{ customer.email }}. Thanks to it, ShopMagic will automatically assign email details from the order.

👉🏼 It’s a wise idea to use placeholders in the Subject field also. It will personalize your email even more and customers will recognize their orders right from the start.

👉🏼 The Heading is… just a heading. But hey! ShopMagic supports email heading text in the WooCommerce template and it can be written here.

👉🏼 Another field is Template, as you can see, we choose WooCommerce Template.

👉🏼 The Message field is the most important part of an Action. Here is the place for your creativity. You can use all of the placeholders which we implemented in the ShopMagic . Do not forget that, unlike standard WooCommerce messages, you can fully customize emails in ShopMagic .

WooCommerce email delay – example email

👀 The finished email will be similar to this one:

Step 5: Create second action for your WooCommerce delay email

As I mentioned earlier you can create more than one action for your automation🚀. It is especially useful in our example. You can add another Send Email action and delay it for a little longer, like 12 hours. Just in case, if the first email wasn’t noticed by your customer.

Summary & more about ShopMagic

In this guide, we’ve created a solution for unpaid orders and learned how to delay WooCommerce emails.

Are you ready to send WooCommerce delay emails? 🚀

Let’s create customized messages, send newsletters, and delay emails in WooCommerce with our plugins.

I’m curious how it will work in your store. Do not forget to let us know – we’d love to hear your stories🙂.