Transactional Emails. Are you overlooking their importance?
Are you using transactional emails all the time with your existing customer base and completely failing to take advantage of their incredible promotional potential? A lot of online business make this mistake and don’t even realize just how much they’re missing out on with each email they send out.
Even if you have an existing email campaign of regularly scheduled bulk messages going out to your email subscribers, you really should take a look at your transactional messages and see if you can spruce them up as promotional tools as well.
Strategies for doing just this are what I’m going to cover here and I’ll also show you just why your transactional email messages can be such powerful marketing tools.
Just What Are Transactional Emails?
Quite simply, transactional emails are all those messages that get sent to your users’ inboxes any time they interact with your website or application in a transaction related way. These are one at a time messages that aren’t part of a regularly scheduled promotional mail-out and they include things such as e-receipts, comment notifications, shipping or order confirmations, welcome emails and renewal notifications amongst other transactional message types.
This characteristic of their nature is what’s so crucial to their effectiveness. As this information packed infographic from the email management company Easy SMTP explains, the essentially transaction related nature of transactional messages not only makes them compliant with the CAN SPAM act even when they’re also being used for promotion, it’s also what causes them to convert at extremely high rates.
How Powerful are Transactional Emails?
As the infographic explains based on analytics run on actual transactional emails that had been sent out, the open rates for transactional emails average out at more than 100%, this being because they’re often opened multiple times by the same recipient. Furthermore, their click through rates hover at around 17%. These are incredible figures, especially when compared to the 15% open and 3% click rates that are common for most bulk promotional email.
These are remarkable open and unique click rates when you consider that the average inbox gets flooded daily by 48 different business and personal emails out of the 191 billion that are sent out worldwide (most of which consist of spam mail).
The key to transactional messages success lies in the fact that they have a much more direct relevance to their recipients. They provide information about a transaction their recipient just performed and their subject lines stick out in the inbox because of this. These findings have been reaffirmed by others as well.
Here’s how you can take advantage of your transactional email messages.
How to Turn Transactional Emails into Highly Converting Sales Tools
There are several effective and easy to implement strategies you can add to all of your transactional emails right now and increase your across the board revenues and unique clicks back to your content. None of these violate the CAN SPAM Act as long as the core of your transactional messages is preserved in their subject line and body text. This augmentation of your transactional emails should be part of an overall general strategy for keeping your business from getting behind the competition.
Say “Thank You”
By simply saying thank you to your customers whenever you send them an email about a recent purchase or renewal of some service, you can increase your unique click rates by 35% or more. It doesn’t get any easier than this.
Be Social Media Integrated
Does your website have a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook or another major network? If it does, add the share buttons for your profiles into all of your transactional emails. Easy SMTP found that this often increased unique clicks by a whopping 55%. Best of all, it’s really easy to do.
Cross Sell and Personalize
Personalize your transactional messages with the name of their intended recipient and references to previous purchases or interactions with your site they participated in. Use both of these to also cross sell relevant new products and services to them. These two tactics can increase your click rates by 41% and revenues by 20% or more respectively.
A/B Test and Track with Email Analytics
Don’t just settle for one type of transactional email template. Get your marketing and design teams involved by creating multiple message formats and testing them across your different kinds of transactional emails. Use email analytics to see which ones perform best and reinforce that performance by expanding their application.