It's simple—your customers want to know where their packages are.
97% of customers expect to be able to track their orders.
Automated shipping confirmation emails will save you time and build customer loyalty.
Automated Shipping Confirmation Emails With Zapier
Hi, it’s Noni from Printful!
Order tracking has become a big part of the customer experience in ecommerce, and shipping
confirmation emails build trust like nothing else.
Communicating with your customers about their order status will prevent confusion and even
refunds.
Printful does pass on tracking information to most ecommerce platforms and marketplaces
automatically, and that info can be included in your automatic emails to your customers.
However, not all ecommerce platforms support this option.
In this video, we'll go through the process of creating automated shipping confirmation
emails with Zapier, using the information that's sent to Printful, including tracking
numbers.
We'll also give you a free HTML template to fill in and use for your shipping confirmation
emails, so stay tuned!
Before we begin, make sure you subscribe to our channel and tap on the little bell icon.
That way you'll always get notified about our latest videos and never miss out on new
ways to make your store more successful.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is an automation tool that helps you connect between apps without any technical
know-how.
Because Printful integrates with Zapier, you can connect with more than 2,000 apps and
automate your work in different ways.
When an action takes place on Printful, that event will cause something else to happen
in another app.
For example, whenever an order is marked as fulfilled in Printful, you can automatically
send a shipping confirmation email to the customer.
These automated tasks are called Zaps.
You can check out our blog to find out other possible uses for Printful and Zapier.
You can find the link in the description below.
Note that Zapier is free for basic features and comes with a 14-day trial of its premium
tier.
The higher your tier is, the more Zaps you can create, as well as have a higher count
of automated tasks available per month, create multi-step Zaps and more.
Premium plans start as low as $20 per month.
You can create a shipping confirmation Zap while using the free version of Zapier, as
long as you don't exceed 100 tasks—that means emails sent—per month.
How to create a shipping confirmation Zap
1: Sign up
To make use of the Printful and Zapier integration, you’ll need to have both a Printful account
and a Zapier account, as well as an email account like Gmail.
Once you've set them up and connect Printful and Gmail to your Zapier account, you can
start building a custom Zap.
2: Create a Zap
Once that's done, go to your Zapier dashboard and in the side menu here click on Zaps.
Then click “Create Zap”.
Once you're in the editor, select the app that will trigger your workflow.
For this example—Printful.
3: Choose the trigger
Then select the trigger you want for your workflow; in this case, we'll select New Fulfilled
Order.
Then click on Continue.
If you haven’t already connected Printful to your Zapier account, you’ll be asked
to do so here.
Then click on Continue again.
Zapier will test your connection and find some sample data from your account that it'll
use to help populate the rest of your workflow.
Click on Test trigger and select the order that best represents what you get when a customer
orders something from your store.
For example, don’t select an order that you placed manually on Printful, but find
one that was placed through your store.
Then click Continue.
4: Choose the action Now you can select the action that you want
to happen next.
For this example, we’re going to send an email.
Choose Gmail as your action app in the same way you chose Printful as your trigger app.
Then choose your action—in this case, you'll select Send Email, click Continue and choose
your Gmail account here.
5: Customize the email Now you can customize the message you send
through Gmail, using data from the Printful order that triggered the workflow.
You'll need to add the Recipient Email in the “To” section.
Use the search bar to find the data you need.
To be sure that your customers are receiving their shipping confirmation emails, you can
BCC your business email here.
Now you can fill in the rest of the fields here, like where the email is from, the name
you want the customer to see, the subject and finally—the body.
Here you can either build a plain, text-based email that will feel more personal or you
can use HTML to make it look more professional.
The information you might want to include here is External ID or order number, Shipment
Tracking Number, URL, Service and then some order information like Item Name, Recipient
Name, Address, City, Zip, Country Code and Phone, or any other data points.
Just use the search bar to search for any information you want to add and write the
rest of the email around the tags like this.
All of Printful's shipping methods have tracking, so tags like Shipments Tracking Number and
Tracking URL will show that information for all of your outgoing orders.
However, you should note that the tracking quality may differ from carrier to carrier.
It can take up to 48 hours for tracking info to show up in a carrier's tracking system.
International shipment tracking may take up to a few days to display any updates but that
doesn't necessarily mean the shipment is lost.
To minimize confusion, you may want to let your customers know that in your shipping
emails as well.
You can also add support resources, feedback requests, and promote your social media channels
and other services in the email.
As I mentioned before, there's also an option to build an HTML email body with additional
formatting to look more professional.
We've created a free template that you can use if you're aren't familiar with HTML formatting.
You can find the link to this template in the description below.
Just copy and paste the code in the body here, and fill in the necessary information like
this.
Once you're done building your body, click on Continue again.
6: Test and launch Now you can test the Zap by clicking here.
A test email will be sent to your Gmail account.
Be sure to test to see if the links you've set up are working correctly!
If everything is working how you want it to, you can activate the Zap by clicking here.
And that’s that!
Now that you've set up the Zap, you can forget about it and let Zapier do all the work automatically.
To make the customer experience even better, we recommend you also include order fulfillment
estimates on your site and in your order confirmation emails.
You can also add an estimate of when your customers should expect to receive their shipping
confirmation emails.
You can find out more about Printful delivery estimates on our Shipping page.
There is a checklist of all six steps you need to follow to create a Zap and the resources
I mentioned in the description below.
Do you have any automation tips that help you organize your workflow?
What else do you want to automate?
Let us know in the comments below!
Hey!
I hope you enjoyed that video.
If you're interested in automation, you can also check out our marketing automation video,
click on the box below!
And don't forget to subscribe to never miss out on our latest content and check out other
videos on our channel to help your store become more successful.