Smackcoders – Email Template Builder for WooCommerce

Smackcoders – Email Template Builder for WooCommerce replaces the plain default emails your store sends with templates you design yourself. Drag blocks onto a canvas, drop in live order data, style everything to match your brand, and publish. No HTML, no child theme edits, no developer.

It is built for WooCommerce store owners, Easy Digital Downloads store owners, agencies and freelancers who manage client stores, and ecommerce marketers who want order confirmations, processing and shipping notifications, customer notes and download-delivery emails to look like the rest of the brand instead of a default template.

This is a transactional email plugin, not a newsletter tool. It does not manage lists or send campaigns the way Mailchimp or a marketing automation platform does. It controls the design and content of the emails WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads already send at checkout, on status change and on account events, which are the emails customers actually open.

Visual drag-and-drop email builder

The builder is a modern React interface, so blocks move, reorder and update live instead of forcing you to save and reload to see a change.

You work with a block library rather than a code editor:

• Drag blocks into position and reorder them freely
• Edit copy, colours, spacing and typography inline
• Control how individual blocks behave on desktop and on mobile

The result is a visual email editor that a marketer can use directly, with output clean enough that a developer does not have to fix it afterwards.

WooCommerce email templates

Dedicated WooCommerce blocks pull real order data into the template at send time, rather than a static layout you have to update by hand whenever an order looks different, so one design serves every order automatically:

• Order Details and Order Items, including product thumbnail images
• Billing Address and Shipping Address
• Payment Method and Shipping Method
• Order Totals and subtotals
• Refund Details for both full and partial refunds
• Customer Note
• A WooCommerce Hooks block that renders standard action hooks such as woocommerce_email_before_order_table and woocommerce_email_after_order_table, so third-party plugins that inject content into WooCommerce emails keep working inside your custom template

With these you can rebuild a WooCommerce order confirmation as a branded receipt, present order items with thumbnails instead of a bare table, or design a refund notification that clearly explains the amount returned, all without touching a template file or a line of PHP.

Easy Digital Downloads email templates

Easy Digital Downloads support is handled with its own blocks and its own dynamic data, not by reusing WooCommerce fields:

• EDD Order Items
• EDD Order Summary
• EDD Download Links
• EDD Payment Details
• EDD dynamic placeholders for customer, order and download data

For a digital store, the purchase email is the product delivery. These blocks let you present download links inside a designed, branded template rather than the default plain layout, and give payment and order information the visual hierarchy it needs.

Content blocks

Alongside the ecommerce blocks, the library covers what a transactional email normally needs to communicate anything beyond raw order data: Text for copy and instructions, Image for logos or product shots, Button for a clear call to action, Heading and Divider for structure, Table for laying out custom data, Social Icons for driving followers to your channels, and Header and Menu/Navbar for consistent branding at the top of every email.

Every block in the library is supported by the HTML email rendering engine, so anything you can build in the editor is something the plugin can actually send, there is no gap between what the canvas shows you and what a customer’s inbox receives.

Dynamic content and merge tags

A placeholder and merge tag system injects supported customer, order, product, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads data into your templates at send time.

You design one template. Every recipient sees their own name, their own order number, their own items and totals. There is no need to maintain a separate template per scenario just to change the details, and no risk of a hardcoded value going out to the wrong customer.

Responsive HTML email rendering

Email clients are not browsers. Every block you place in the builder is converted into table-based email HTML with inline CSS, which is the structure email clients handle most predictably, and the output is responsive so templates adapt on smaller screens.

Email rendering still varies between clients and versions. The export engine is designed to improve compatibility across common email clients rather than to guarantee identical rendering everywhere, and testing against your own audience’s clients is always worthwhile.

Styling and design controls

Design control is at the individual element level, not just the template level:

• Borders, margin and padding
• Typography hierarchy, colours and line height
• Responsive visibility toggles, so a block can show on desktop and hide on mobile, or the reverse
• Global LTR and RTL text direction across all blocks, for stores selling into Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu-speaking markets

This is enough control to match a brand’s spacing and type scale without touching CSS.

Template management, import and export

Templates behave like the rest of WordPress content, with publish, draft and trash states, plus duplication for building a variant without starting over.

A JSON import and export engine moves templates between sites. That matters if you build on staging and deploy to production, run the same base design across several client stores, or want a file-level backup of a template before a redesign. Templates stay in your own files and your own database.

AI-assisted copy and images

The builder includes optional AI assistance for the parts of email design that stall people: writing the copy and finding an image.

• Generate draft body copy for a template
• Summarise longer text down to email length
• Adjust the tone of existing copy

AI requests run through WordPress connectors using your own API key from a supported provider (OpenAI, Google or Anthropic). Nothing is sent anywhere until you configure a provider and use one of these features. See the External Services section below for details.

AI here is a writing and design assistant inside the editor. It does not send emails, build campaigns or make targeting decisions.

Pro features

Everything above ships free, permanently, with no trial period and no feature that stops working after a set number of days. Email Template Builder for WooCommerce Pro is a separate, optional upgrade for stores that want deeper targeting, tracking, and automation on top of this free foundation:

• Advanced Email Rules, attach conditions such as billing country, product, category, payment method, or order value range to a template, so the plugin automatically sends the right design to the right customer without any manual switching.
• Analytics (Product Click & Order Reports), a dashboard tracking emails sent, open rate, click rate, and the exact orders your Product Recommendation blocks generate, so you know which recommendations are actually earning their place in the email.
• Product Recommendation Block, a dynamic grid pulling from thirteen data sources across WooCommerce and EDD, including upsells, cross-sells, category best sellers, and manual selection, styled to match your brand.
• Coupon Block, display an existing coupon or automatically generate a unique, single-use discount code for every order, complete with expiry, restrictions, and full styling control.
• Post Block, pull a WordPress post’s title, featured image, excerpt, and a “Read More” link directly into a transactional email, turning a routine receipt into a source of blog traffic.
• Global Blocks, build a header, footer, or promotional section once and reuse it across every template, so a brand-wide update only has to be made in one place.
• Attachments, automatically attach a PDF invoice, terms and conditions, or a digital download file to the emails that need them, with no manual sending required.
• Multilingual Templates (WPML & Polylang), design a separate template per language and have the plugin automatically send each customer their order confirmation in the language they actually checked out in.
• WooCommerce Subscriptions support, replace the plain default renewal, cancellation, and invoice emails Subscriptions sends with fully branded templates built in the same visual editor.
• WooCommerce Bookings and Memberships support, design branded booking confirmations, reminders, and cancellation notices, plus membership activation, renewal reminder, and expiration emails, for appointment and membership-based stores.

None of this is required to use the free plugin well, it exists for stores that have outgrown a single static template design.

How it works

1. Install and activate the plugin
2. Create a template or duplicate an existing one
3. Assign it to the email you want to change
4. Build the layout with drag-and-drop blocks
5. Add WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads blocks and merge tags for live data
6. Style spacing, type and colour, and set desktop or mobile visibility
7. Publish

Who it is for

• WooCommerce store owners who want their emails to match their storefront
• Easy Digital Downloads store owners delivering products by email
• Agencies and freelancers managing templates across multiple client sites
• Ecommerce marketers using post-purchase emails as a brand surface
• Developers who want a maintainable template layer instead of overridden email templates in a child theme

Links and support

• Email Template Builder for WooCommerce Documentation
• Email support@smackcoders.com for help or feature requests

External services

The AI features in this plugin connect to a third-party AI provider that you choose and configure yourself, using WordPress connectors and your own API key. The plugin does not include or proxy any AI service of its own.

No data is sent to any external service unless you have configured a provider and actively use AI text or image generation inside the editor. If you never configure a provider, the plugin makes no external requests.

When you use an AI feature, the text prompt you enter, and any text you have selected for summarisation or tone adjustment, is sent to the provider you configured, and the generated text or image is returned to the editor.

WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are WordPress plugins running on your own site. Integration with them is local and sends no data to any external service.