Customizing Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals Emails

How to customize Yotpo emails

An important component of setting up a successful reward and/or referral program is to enable event-triggered emails that let your customers know where they stand in your program. 

If you're using an email service provider (ESP) that integrates with Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals, you can set up and send these messages from your email platform. To see the full list of ESP integrations, see the Loyalty & Referrals Emails section.

If you wish to use Yotpo's native email notification system, go to Communications. From there you can enable and edit the event-triggered Loyalty emails and Referrals emails you'd like to use.

Email settings

Before enabling different emails through Loyalty & Referrals, you can make a few basic changes to your emails that do not require any HTML.

Settings overview

To fill out your email settings, follow these steps:

1. From the main menu, go to Communication > Settings.
2. Enter the Sender's name and Sender's email address that your messages will be sent from
   Please note:

   The Sender's email address is not a reply-to address.  Replies to these automated messages will not be delivered to that email address.
3. You can also change the header image of all emails without code - simply select Upload Header Image and upload your store’s logo in place of our friendly Loyalty & Referrals man
4. Use the Set a trigger for the Points Reminder and Redemption Reminder email and SMS fields to set the trigger schedule for the Points Reminder and Redemption Reminder emails. Note: Inactivity refers to any point earning or redeeming
5. Use the Set a trigger for a Referral Share Email Reminder field to set the trigger schedule for the referral emails. The Referral share email reminder is sent to your customer’s friend reminding them to make a purchase using their reward. In addition to making these basic changes, we highly recommend customizing the actual templates or formats of your messages to match any of your current marketing messages or newsletters.

You can customize your email templates or formats in two ways with Loyalty & Referrals: 

• On a global level where HTML applies to all messages in Loyalty & Referrals
• Per email where HTML formatting applies to the message(s) you save it on

HTML formatting

To apply HTML formatting to your emails on a global level:

1. In the Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals main menu, go to Communications Settings.
2. Click the dropdown menu under Use our default email template or customize one according to your brand’s needs, and select Custom Template.
3. Insert the HTML that you would like to apply to all your email notifications in the HTML field below:
   
4. Click the Save button to save your changes.

Email-specific changes

If you’d prefer to customize your emails or adjust formatting on an email-specific level, you can do so.

To customize your email templates:

1. From the main menu, go to Communications.
2. Then go to Loyalty emails or Referrals emails.
3. On the top right of the email card, click Customize Email.

This will take you to the individual email’s editor where you can customize the subject and body of the email:

To change the HTML of this individual message:

1. Click the Layout dropdown menu and choose Use Custom Layout.
2. Add in HTML and CSS that will be applied to this specific message.
   •  If your HTML and CSS do not include body text for your email, be sure to include the *|BODY|* tag instead to support the body content you create in the text editor
     
3. Click the Save button to save your changes.

Preview email

You can use the Send Preview Email option to see exactly how the email will appear to your customers.

When you click on this option, a preview email will be sent to the "Contact email" address that you specified in the General Settings section of Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals.

Adding placeholders to emails

Your Yotpo triggered emails come equipped with pre-populated text and values that can be used as guidelines when editing the content of an email. These dynamic texts are called placeholders.

In order to adjust your emails to each individual shopper, we recommend using placeholders to tailor the text of each message.

You can add the following placeholders to make your email more personal:

While you get creative with your content, please keep in mind that there are certain placeholders that must remain in the body of your email to fully engage your customers. 

Click on the relevant email below to learn which placeholders should be added to it:

Referral emails

Personalizing referral emails

If you have the  ‘Marketing email’ configured as one of your available share options in the Refer Friend module, you can use special placeholders to give your referral emails a more personal touch by including details such as the names of the shoppers.

You can use the following placeholders in the email subject line and in the email body: 

Fallback action

The fallback mechanism will be triggered if a customer did not provide their name. Simply add your chosen fallback term after the default: section of the first name placeholder.

For example, If you’d like this placeholder to populate with the referring customer’s first name and fallback to “your friend” in case the name isn’t available, use the placeholder in the following way: *|referrer_first_name, default:your friend|*

Admin view

It's always a good idea to provide a link back to your store and a call-to-action that asks customers to check out your new items, log in to view their balance, or simply re-visit your store.