In this article, we'll take a look at how to edit Shopify's Account Invitation email to let your customers know about your Loyalty & Rewards Program. This involves some very minor edits to the Liquid/HTML code for the email template but it is super quick and easy to do.
💡 Pro Tip: Visit our documentation about Points Program Participation to change how guests and members earn points.
Understanding Guests and Members
Before customizing the invitation email, it's important to understand how Shopify customer accounts work with your Loyalty program:
In the classic customer account version, customers tagged as Members are those who created an account on your site. Guests are those who browsed through your shop and purchased items without creating an account.
In the new customer account version (using one-time verification codes), all customers are tagged as Guests unless they previously had a legacy account.
📝 Important Note: If you're using the new customer account version, you'll need to adjust the program participants to make all your customers eligible to join the Loyalty programs.
Inviting guests to create accounts can help them fully participate in your Loyalty program. In the classic account version, guests can earn points for purchases but need to become members to redeem rewards.
Editing the Account Invitation email for Classic Accounts
📝 Note: Editing this template will affect all Account Invitation emails, though you may still add a custom message each time you send one.
You can send an account invitation email to anyone who has a customer profile, but no account, in your Shopify admin (These appear as 'Guests' in the Loyalty app). This email can be customized each time you send it but the template itself can also be changed. This is what we're going to do in this guide, so that when you want to invite guests to your Loyalty & Rewards program, you can with just a few clicks!
💡 Pro Tip: If you have a dedicated page for your program, you can add it here too! Remember to add it between the shop URL and the deep link: ##{{ shop.url }}/pages/rewards#ba-loyalty-home
To find the email template:
From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Notifications.
Scroll down to the Customer section.
Click the Customer account invite link.
Change the subject line
The first thing to change is the subject of the email. Use a Call-to-Action to draw the reader in and make it clear what the email is about.
The subject line is located above the Email body (HTML) section:
Change the email title and body
The title and body text that the customer will see are located at the very top of the Email body (HTML) section. The content is contained within `{% capture %}` tags but no code needs to be changed. Any text that is not inside a bracket or brace can be customized here. Even with slight editing, we can change the message to something that's more focused on our Loyalty & Rewards Program.
Here is the original, with the customer-facing content highlighted:
And here it is after some very light editing:
Add a link to your program
The next thing we can do is add a link directly to our Loyalty & Rewards Program in the email. To find this section, we need to scroll about three quarters of the way down the Email body (HTML) section. This is the part of the email that reads 'Visit our Store' and contains a link to your shop's Home page. Here we're just going to edit the copy slightly and add a Loyalty deep link to the URL. If you have trouble finding this section, search the page (Ctrl+F on Windows, ⌘+F on Mac) for the word visit.
This is how the original looks, with the section we'll be editing highlighted:
To add a link to the app widget insert the deep link e.g. #ba-loyalty-home after ##{{ shop.url }} inside the double quotation marks. Then edit the text to your preference. In the example below we changed it to Visit our store's Rewards Program and added to find out more outside of the anchor </a> element, meaning that it won't be part of the link text.
💡 Pro Tip: If you have a dedicated page for your program, you can add it here too! Remember to add it between the shop URL and the deep link: ##{{ shop.url }}/pages/rewards#ba-loyalty-home
Here is the same section after our edits:
And that's all there is to it! Now, when we send our customers an invitation to create an account on our store, they will know about our Rewards Program right away and will be brought directly to the Loyalty widget 🙂
Going back to the original template
If you want to revert to the original template at any time, simply undo the changes you've made. You can also view and download a text file of the original template here and copy & paste it into the Email body (HTML) section. Click on the link to open the text file in a new tab or right-click and select 'Save link as' to download it.
Common questions
Can't I use your app to invite Guests?
Unfortunately, this is not possible just yet, due to Shopify's limitations. We are currently looking at solutions to build this feature out. In the meantime, you can add your vote for the feature on our product roadmap here.
I'm using the new customer account version. Do I need to invite guests?
In the new customer account version, all customers are already considered "logged in" when they verify with a one-time code. You don't need to send invitation emails, but you'll need to adjust your program participants to ensure all customers can participate in your Loyalty program.
Will guests be able to redeem rewards after creating an account?
Yes! Once a guest creates an account, they become a Member and can redeem rewards, access their points history, and enjoy all the benefits of your Loyalty program. Any points they've earned as a guest will be available in their member account.
How can I encourage more guests to create accounts?
Besides customizing the invitation email, you can use our checkout extensions which show loyalty features in a logged-out state to incentivize account creation. Learn more about our Refer Friends, Redeem Points, and Redeemed Rewards checkout extensions.