I'm not the biggest fan of shopping but sometimes I do open up my wallet when I find a WooCommerce store. I know they're most likely some small mom and pop shop that setup their own e-commerce store and I like to give something back to them.

Just after Thanksgiving I was doing a bit of shopping and stumbled onto one of those stores and bought a small gift for a friend. The weird thing was that I never received any sort of email receipt. I thought maybe something was broken and I wasn't going to get my order. 🙁

It wasn't until days later when I took a look through my spam folder that I found those receipts. It was unusual that they were in there. I've ordered from plenty of WooCommerce stores before and never had any of these problems. So what was doing it?

Spamming Email Receipts

When I opened up the email receipt I found the culprit. At the bottom of the receipt they added some product pictures, talked about new products, and mentioned a giveaway.

And guess what? That's what all those bullshit Viagra emails do. Do you want to win free viagra? Just signup here. Gmail does an amazing job with spam but this was too similar and they put it in the spam folder.

My email receipt from Laser Pegs including pictures of products, some text about products, and details for their giveaway.

Upgrading Email Receipts

There's been a few new services & products that allow you to maximize your email receipts. Use these services if you like but I caution you against handing off your email receipts to the marketing team. They could accidentally add just enough marketing mumbo jumbo to trip someone's spam filters. If that happens your customers wont receive any future communications from you and that's a disaster.

When you do make changes to your email receipts make sure to do some tests and then watch the bounce rates. If you use a 3rd party SMTP provider you can see how many emails are marked as spam.

Customize your email receipts but do it cautiously. Happy customizing!

Image credit: Giphy