To grow your business, you’ll need to reach out to more prospects by sending email campaigns to them. But as your email sending quota increases, your sender reputation changes and so do your deliverability rates. Sad to say that these changes do not work to your advantage.
Sending automated transactional emails is one of the effective strategies to keep a good deliverability rate despite a growing mailing list. Not only that, but transactional emails also foster customer trust and loyalty which are all essential for your business’s growth.
So what exactly are transactional emails? Do they come in different forms? If so, what are they? And how can you, as an email marketer, optimize your usage of these emails? Read on to find out the answers.
What Are Transactional Emails?
Transactional emails are messages that are automatically generated by websites and domains after a certain condition is triggered. The contents of these emails vary but they mostly have the same purpose: Providing a subscriber with proof of transaction after an agreement is made with the brand, business, or services the website represents.
No matter what type of transaction email a user receives, it is very important because the message always contains information the receiver wants or needs. And because of this, transaction emails have very high open rates – a factor that can help increase your campaign deliverability for email marketing success.
The Types of Transactional Emails You Should Know About
There are different transaction email types. Some of them are written like notifications for an active account. Others contain information regarding a password reset request by a user. But here, we’re going to discuss transactional emails for account creation, customer experience, and online shopping. Here are some examples:
1. Registration or Confirmation Email
This type of transactional email is sent to a new user after they have submitted their personal data on a registration page and clicked the signup button. A confirmation email is very important because it serves as a binding contract between a business and a customer.
Registration emails also contain a link to the business’s technical support and the user’s account configuration page. Not only that, but a confirmation email helps you validate a new subscriber’s email address to avoid having fake or mistyped addresses in your mailing list.
2. Feedback Email
Good businesses always listen to their customers’ concerns. It’s because feedback helps brands gain valuable insights on how to improve their services and build customer loyalty. Feedback emails are either made personally or automatically.
They are often sent after a customer has completed a transaction, is about to close a tab, or decided to unsubscribe from a mailing list. Think of a feedback email as a pop-up notification of a mobile phone app that asks you if you enjoyed using the application.
The only difference is that instead of asking users to rate the application through a star-scoring system, the feedback email asks customers to express their user experience in words.
3. Shopping Cart Abandonment Email
When a customer has shown interest in a particular product, it’s best that a marketer follows up on that interest, especially if the product has been added to a user’s shopping cart. This is where the first shopping cart abandonment email was born.
A shopping cart email is a type of transactional email that sometimes contains discount vouchers, promo codes, deals, or purchase coupons. Other times, transactional emails like this promote similar products with varying price ranges.
Yet, they all have one purpose: Entice a user to make a purchase. Cart abandonment emails are very important because they help boost your sales by a huge margin. However, it’s not always necessary to send your customers discounts through cart abandonment emails right away.
Some of them may have abandoned their purchase because they got distracted for a second and forgot to complete the transaction. You can set your email automation tool to send a shopping cart abandonment message that reminds them of their unfinished perusing first.
Sending discount coupons right away would cause plenty of profit losses in your store. You would want to avoid that from happening.
4. Back-in-Stock Email
Back-in-stock emails are similar to shopping cart abandonment emails. They both follow up on a user’s search interest. The thing that makes a back-in-stock email different is that it reminds a user that the out-of-stock product they searched for or added to their shopping cart has now been resupplied.
Because back-in-stock emails promote products that are in high demand, they usually have those discount elements in them to quickly influence buying decisions of customers. The most common deal presented in this type of transactional email is the: “Buy now while supplies last and get XX% off!”
5. Order Confirmation Email
Order confirmation emails are like receipts. This type of transactional email is the best in fostering customer trust because users can guarantee that faulty products will be replaced if they present the confirmation email in case of a problem. As a result, your business will receive an increase in sales.
6 Tips to Optimize Your Transactional Emails (and Get the Best Results)
Just because you know the different transactional email types doesn’t mean that you can just create one, send it, and wait until good things happen. There are still a few factors you need to consider to make your transactional emails perform at its maximum effect. Here are a few points to keep in mind.
1. Get clear on your message in the subject line
Be honest from the get-go. The subject line is the first thing your customers will read and it’s the deciding point whether they should open or ignore your email. If you’ve sent them a discount for a product they like, mention it right away in the subject line as short as possible.
Don’t mislead them by delivering fake promises. You’ll only get reported for spam and that can seriously hurt your sender’s reputation.
2. Keep it short and simple. Don’t beat around the bush
If your subject line should be clear and brief, so should your transactional email’s content be. Remember, transactional emails only contain information or data your customers need or want. If the transactional email is a registration/confirmation type, write a welcome only.
Make sure that the word “welcome” is read right away after the greetings. Don’t include other distracting elements such as product promotions. It’s highly inappropriate and pushy. Customers hate that.
The only acceptable add-ons to transactional emails are links to a tech support representative, an option to unsubscribe, and a review of the terms and conditions of your business.
3. Experiment to get the best results – do split testing
Not every composed transactional email garners high rates of engagement. Some choices of words don’t influence as much action as others. You must adopt a strategy of creating two different transaction emails of the same type and find out which performs better through A/B testing.
Once the results are ready, pick the best approach that would drive more subscriber engagement and business growth.
4. Be mindful of your sending times
Timing is important when sending campaigns – this is a universal truth in marketing no matter what form it is. You must analyze the engagement patterns of your customers and find out which time of the day or days of the week they open their inboxes, take a break, or loiter.
Segment your customers into lists based on the data you’ve collected. Then send your transactional emails in their free time based on their list segmentations.
5. Use email template designs that spark emotions
While customers love it when you use a few words to get straight to the point, their buying decisions are also influenced by email background visuals. For example, using Christmas Hollies as your email campaigns’ background template during winter increases your sales during the season.
Why? Because the image of Christmas gets your users excited into buying your products for presents. There are plenty of template designs you can use. You must pick those that are good at setting a buying mood. And remember not to use backgrounds that make it hard for your subscribers to read your email’s content.
6. Put extra emphasis on personalization
Customers want to feel special and not a one-size-fits-all experience. To start personalizing your transactional emails, you can set your email automation tool to read your customers’ personal data in your mailing list.
The result would be that your transactional emails will directly address your customers in the greetings by mentioning their names. On your customers’ side, they’ll feel as if you’re writing the email directly to them.
And depending on the purpose of the transactional email, it will have an increased rate of engagement received. For example, if you send a back-in-stock email and it says, “Good Day Jane Doe, the item you’re looking for is now available! Here’s a discount coupon for you”, your customer will have a higher chance of making the purchase.
Not because of the discount alone but because they’ll feel that they’re the only one that received such a great deal.
Final Thoughts
Enabling transactional emails in your email marketing efforts may be an arduous task. But doing so is truly worth your time because it improves customer experience and increases your influence over your customers’ buying decisions. Consequently, you’ll have better sales rates and your business will grow.
All you have to focus on is how you can make good transactional emails. Start by experimenting with your use of words and background templates. Write short yet clear subject lines. Then, get to know your customers more so you can send your transactional emails at the right time with the right content.