As customers make purchases in your store, Magento sends — based on your configurations — a number of e-mails to notify customers about their purchases. There are also e-mails for recovering passwords, creating accounts and more.

Magento installs some basic templates for all these transactional e-mails. You can create new e-mail templates to use for your stores that reflect your branding and messaging. In Magento 2, this is quite easy to do.

When you first go to Marketing | Email Templates, you'll see an empty list. That's normal. The base templates installed with Magento will not appear in this list — but they are there, nonetheless. E-mail templates can also be included in Magento themes added to your installation. These will also not show in the list, but will be available for customization.

The process of customizing e-mail templates is:

Once you create your new e-mail template, you can assign it for use as sales e-mails, customer account e-mails, and so on.

You can create new e-mail templates for the following purposes:

As you can see, Magento has quite a number of e-mails. The items in this list with an asterisk (*) are e-mails that are not sent to your customers, but, rather, sent to you or someone you designate. These e-mails are for alerting your team when something doesn't quite go right.

There are also two additional templates that are used to create the headers and footers for your e-mails. In other words, you can manage the top and bottom of your e-mails without having to modify every single e-mail if, for example, you want to change your logo or phone number.

To illustrate how to do this, let's create a new e-mail template for our sportswear store. We will begin by modifying the header and footer for our sportswear store, then create a new New Order e-mail template.

Create a new header template

On the Email Templates panel, click on Add New Template. At the top of the New Template panel, you'll see an area titled Load default template. Here, you can select the base template — or a template provided by a theme — and load it into the New Template panel for modification.

Tip

You could, of course, create a template from scratch, but it can be a real time-saver to modify an existing template.

For our new header, select Header and click on Load Template. This will load the base header template into our New Template form.

Let's first review the fields shown on this screen:

• Currently Used For: Not actually an editable field, this shows where this e-mail is assigned for use. In this case, we can see that the header template we loaded is being used in the Stores | Configuration | Design | Emails | Header Template configuration at the Default configuration scope. That means that the header template is used as the default header for all e-mails in your installation. Once we build our sportswear header (and footer) templates, we will assign them at the sportswear website configuration scope so that they will be used for all sportswear e-mails.
• Template Name: Use a name that is useful when shown in the list of e-mail templates. In our example here, we might use Header (Sportswear).
• Template Subject: For e-mails, this is the subject that would appear in the e-mail sent. For the header and footer, leave as shown so they are properly included in generated e-mails.
• Template Content: It is into this field that you will make any changes to layout and content.

Once we have modified the header to our liking, we can save it by clicking Save Template. If we look at our list of e-mail templates, we now have the one template listed.

Assign e-mail header and footer

If we click on the template and view its detail, we can see that it has no Currently Used For field, as it has not been assigned to a particular website or store. Once we have created our sportswear footer (it is not necessarily required to create both to be able to create and assign only a header or footer), we can now assign these to our sportswear website so that they appear for each store view.

Note

This capability gives you the ability to create multiple language e-mails, as well as translating your website for your international customers.

1. Go to Stores | Configuration | General | Design in your backend.
2. Change your Store View setting to Sportswear Website.
   
3. Expand the Emails panel.
4. Beside Header Template and Footer Template, uncheck the Use Default checkbox.
5. For Header Template, select Header (Sportswear) in the drop-down menu.
6. For Footer Template, select Footer (Sportswear).
7. Click Save Config.

We have now assigned our new e-mail header and footer to all outgoing e-mails related to the sportswear stores. If you view the detail for your header and footer e-mail templates, they will now display a Currently Used For value.