How to Get the Most Out Of Your Transactional Emails

Guest post by Matt Zajechowski. Matt Zajechowski is an outreach manager for Digital Third Coast.

 

 

Every day and average of 191 billion emails are sent out to inboxes worldwide! This adds up to roughly 47 messages per inbox, of which some 28 are business or promotion related and the rest of a personal nature.

Because of these enormous numbers, getting someone’s attention via email can be a daunting task even for experienced marketers who are very good at creating catchy subject lines and opt-in offers.

This is where transactional emails come into the picture. Unlike bulk mail, which is regularly scheduled and usually sent out based on a single one time opt-in process to large quantities of subscribers, transactional emails are one at a time messages sent to specific users only after they have interacted with your website or application in some way.

These messages can consist of things like shipping notices, renewal notifications, comment updates, e-receipts and order confirmations.

This is where their extraordinary power comes into play: Because they’re custom messages sent as a result of specific action by a user, and thus contain information that’s directly and personally relevant to that user, they get much more attention from recipients than your regular bulk mail is likely to get.

The numbers back this up, as shown in this marketer friendly infographic by the people at Easy SMTP: Because they’re often opened multiple times, the average open rate for transactional messages is higher than 100%, as opposed to normal rates of 15% for conventional bulk promotional mail. Furthermore, the unique click rate for the content of transactional messages is also a whopping 17% in contrast to the 3% normally seen with bulk mail.

Why Transactional Email Engages so Well

As I already briefly referenced above, transactional emails engage so well with their recipients because they are directly relevant to their interests and recent activity: Your customer just made an order on your website and they now want a receipt that confirms everything is in order. When they get the relevant email in their inbox, they’re much more likely to click on it.

This high engagement applies across the board for most kinds of transactional messages and while on the one hand it represents an excellent opportunity for you as a marketer, there is an important caveat to bear in mind with it. Your transactional messages are converting so well because they are essentially transaction related in nature and contain transaction related subject lines and content. This is also how they stay compliant with the CAN SPAM act!

Because of this, you can’t simply turn them into blatant marketing mail-outs since by doing so, you’ll spoil their usefulness and relevance to your users. You have to preserve their transactional characteristics while you take advantage of them for the sake of promotion.

However, as any high quality marketing expert can demonstrate to you, there are strategies you can follow for making your transactional emails stay practical while also giving your business some excellent advertising opportunities.

Let’s take a look at these.

Turning Openings into High Conversions and Revenue Increases

As shown in the infographic referenced above, Easy SMPT did a large study of client transactional mail outs and found that by applying the following essential tactics to your transactional mail, you can turn their high open and click rates to your advantage.

Say “Thank You”

The single easiest way by which you can make your transactional emails improve sales for you is by being polite. This means simply giving a clear and heart felt thank you notice to your customers whenever you send them an order, renewal or shipping confirmation. You can place your “thank you” in both your subject line (where it will be clearly visible) and in your messages body. Doing this has been shown to boost click rates by an additional 35%.

Engage with Social Media

Another simple and unobtrusive method of taking advantage of your transactional messages involves adding social media share buttons to all of them. Placing these buttons clearly and visibly into the upper body of messages was demonstrated to create a 55% increase in unique click rates.

Personalize and Cross Sell

Make each and every transactional email you send to your users as personalized as possible. This means using a recipient’s name in a message addressed to them and, even more powerfully, making cross sell offers to that recipient based on their previous purchases and interests within the context of your website or application.

Use Analytics and A/B Test

Involve your marketing team in the design of your transactional emails by having them set up multiple message specific templates and track their metrics to see which versions work best for each message type.

Below is the full-sized infographic

 

Guest post by Matt Zajechowski of Digital Third Coast. Matt Zajechowski is an outreach manager for Digital Third Coast. Connect with him on Google+ and Twitter.