A recent survey to consumers found that they consider receipts and shipping details as highly essential viewing in their inbox. Forrester Research reported that transactional emails have an open rate of up to 90% and a click through of over 25%, however they are often over looked. They shouldn’t be seen as just a notification and can be used as extremely powerful marketing tools.
A report by Jupiter Research “The Transactional Messaging Imperative” , showed that marketing content in transactional messages significantly increased revenue by over 60% and increased brand recognition by over 50%. Other major benefits also included increased customer satisfaction, lower call centre volumes and a decreased burden on support.
Your transactional emails may fall into some of the following areas:-
- Thank you messages
- Order shipment
- Satisfaction surveys
- Purchase information
- Product changes or new releases
- Account information – statements, membership etc
- Changes to Privacy Policy
- Reminders
- Opt-in confirmations
There are many best practices that can be used to improve the impact of your transactional messages and thus your ROI.
- Personalise – Testing will prove that personalised transactional messages have a direct impact on increasing clicks and conversions. Keep it familiar, let the customer know that you are grateful for their order. Personalisation also draws the customer in to read further.
- Marketing – Ensure that the marketing team is involved in transactional messaging strategy.
- Subject line – Keep the promotional messaging out of the subject line. Remember that the primary function of these emails are for transactional purposes.
- Timing – Try not to leave it too long to send your message – usually up to 5/10 minutes is acceptable. However the quicker you deliver this message the more impact it will have.
- Personality – This is a great time for you to represent the personality of your brand.
- HTML – By sending your transactional emails by HTML will mean that they can be measured. HTML emails will also follow your branding, creating a warm brand feeling that is also essential when it comes to loyalty and perception. (However remember that some of your consumers choose not to receive any HTML emails from you).
- Concise – Keep the copy easy to read and easy to skim. Bullet points are a good way to represent the information you need to relay.
- Branding – Many companies send their emails without any branding. To get the best out of your messaging we recommend using logos and the ability to send HTML emails
- Cross-sell – Return Paths recent transactional survey found that only 33% of retailers included a promotional message in their transaction confirmation emails, whilst more than 73% did not target this offer. If you have the ability to serve content based on what they have purchased with recommendations on what others have bought, or products closely linked. However the promotional content must remain secondary to the notification of the transaction.
- Dynamic Content – For those who really have got to grips with the essentials of transactional email marketing the next step to increasing results would be to insert data driven offers into the messages. This is easily done with many marketing solutions.
- Reply to – Having a “please do not respond to this message” transactional email can result in loss of future orders and increase pressure on customer service call centres.
- Landing Page – Make sure that the links used in the marketing part refer directly to the products and not just the home page.
- Measure – Track and measure the click throughs and opens in these emails – report on them, continue to optimise them to deliver the best results.
- Deliverability – It is essential that you understand the deliverability rates of your transactional emails.
If as a marketing head your department does not deal directly with transactional emails, a great action would be to get involved now as this can have a massive impact on your ROI. Take this check list with you!
