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.

The importance of WooCommerce delay emails

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 “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 were in the same situation as you. That’s why we’ve created our answer for WooCommerce delay email – Delayed Actions add-on.

Delayed Actions is part of ShopMagic PRO. And it does exactly what it says – when using it, you can delay your emails for a specified amount of time: minutes, hours, days or even weeks!

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 own marketing scenarios.

Create a set of emails for order pending WooCommerce status

ShopMagic is a marketing automation plugin, which lets you create an email for almost all cases, in which notifying your customer is desirable.

Before we will go to our guide and create one for WooCommerce delay email, check some of the different articles, covering other scenarios:

• New Order
• Pending Order (this guide)
• Processing Order
• Cancelled Order
• Completed Order
• Failed Order
• On-Hold Order
• Refunded Order

In our case we will create an automation for pending payment. 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 a WooCommerce delay emails, to remind customers about their unpaid order.

Quick reminder – Order pending status is triggered when there’s unpaid order with an automatic payment method, like PayPal.

Step 1: Install and activate ShopMagic plugin

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

Step 2: Install and activate Delayed Actions add-on

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

Here are complete instructions how to install and activate premium add-ons →

shopmagic.app

Step 3: Add an automation to send WooCommerce delay email to your customer

Technical stuff done, we can move to creating our first automation. Choose ShopMagic → Add New. You will see a clean interface, where we will set three core components of every automation – Event, Filter and Action. It’s worth to note, that this UI is the same for every type of automation, so when you decide that you need another e.g. for sending WooCommerce 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 an 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 ordered products, without the reminder.

Optional step and useful hint

In our example we are skipping the filters and not assigning any. It’s because we want that our automation will trigger for every order with the order pending status. However, setting up a filter can be useful in many other cases. If you want to find out more about filters, check out our other add-on Advanced Filters.

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. Yours should be similar, when you set up your automation. You will see a detailed explanation of all of the fields below this screenshot.

For an Action, we will choose Send Email. 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 pending order.

Under the description, you will see an option to delay your action. It is the core feature of the WooCommerce delay email automation. I’m delaying my email for one hour.

Next one is 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 order right from the start.

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.

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 the ShopMagic.

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 time period, like 12 hours. Just in case, if the first email wasn’t noticed by your customer.

Are you ready to send WooCommerce delay emails?

In this guide we’ve created a solution for unpaid orders. I’m curious how it will work in your store? Do not forget to let us know – we’d love to hear your stories.