Amazon uses transactional emails for marketing. They promote their VISA card, and their mobile app.
Transaction emails are the emails you automatically send customers, subscribers and users whenever they complete a transaction. That might include things like:
- Purchases
- Shipping
- Returns
- Signup
- Lost Password
- And More
Transactional emails typically get very high engagement with users as you know. Open rates can exceed 100% (study) meaning people are opening the messages more than once. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for you.
The challenge is making sure your transaction emails accomplish their intended goal while leaving the recipient satisfied with the content and not in need of additional customer support. You also want the recipient to trust your brand and transactional emails can be a way to build trust when used correctly.
Transactional emails are also an opportunity for you to get recipients to take additional action.
In this post we’ll cover ways to make your transactional emails friendlier, more trustworthy and more effective.
Building Trust
Transactional emails usually begin with someone giving you some kind of personal information. It could have been a purchase or it could have been a simple username and password. Either way, these people want to know that their information is secure and being used for its intended purpose.
The first tip for building trust is to use a proper “from” email address. People generally don’t want to see a donotreply@ email address in their inbox. They want to see something more appropriate and something that has your brand name as the main name.
You also want your transactional emails to be instant or as fast as possible. It might not matter as much for shipping notices, but for other transactions your users are going to want to know that everything worked as it should.
Finally, include all information necessary for users to know that their action went through exactly as they wanted. Or, the information can let them know if there was a mistake so they can make a change right away. However, don’t include certain information like full credit card numbers. Many companies today hide information like this because email accounts can get hacked and these items can be exposed.
Opportunities
When someone purchases from you and they get the confirmation email they’re probably not in the mood to immediately purchase something again. However, it makes perfect sense to ask for social media engagement. The person already showed you the ultimate endorsement by purchasing; ask them to follow you on social media and ask them to share an update that they just purchased one of your products.
If you have a mobile app, a transactional email can be a good way to promote it.
You can promote blog posts or other content on your website.
Chances are good that people will stay online after looking at your transactional email so you might as well send them somewhere that benefits you. However, you’ll have to make it worth their while to win over their attention.
Conclusion
Transactional emails are incredibly important for just about every website. These emails often contain important information so it’s very important for you to build trust with your transactional messages.
But these emails can also be an opportunity. Think about what action would make sense for your customer or subscriber to take next and keep them engaged with your brand.
These tips should help make your transactional emails even more effective in terms of happier customers and more engaged customers.
