Without a doubt, email marketing provides various opportunities for every marketing team. However, newsletters and other promotional emails are usually the only email types to use within this marketing strategy.
Few marketing teams pay serious attention to transactional emails. For the majority of others, these are even out of their jurisdiction. But, these emails serve a marketing purpose, though their opportunities are often overlooked.
In this article, we’ll give you plenty of reasons why it shouldn’t happen.
What are transactional emails?
Transactional emails are automated messages that are triggered by certain actions of your customers. They can be sent after account creation (or deletion), after order placement (or abandonment), after loading a certain page, or clicking a link. The most common types are:
Welcome emails greet a new customer right after they created an account or signed up for a newsletter.
Confirmation emails confirm the completion of a certain process (e.g., an order confirmation, password resetting, or an issued invoice confirmation). Usually, they don’t require any further action from a user.
Notification emails inform users about a certain action(s) happening on the platform / in an app. These can happen when a password reset process is initiated, payment or a user verification is underway, an unrecognized login is detected, etc.
Reminder emails give a gentle reminder to a user about, usually, a certain action they should undertake (e.g., abandoned cart emails, overdue payments, incomplete setups, etc.).
Why should transactional emails be important for effective email marketing?
You might be wondering by now about how am I supposed to market my product in a password reset email? And you would be right - you shouldn’t. Transactional emails don’t give you a possibility of direct promotion. However, there’s still a lot of value you can get out of such a message anyway.
Let’s think!
What if, instead of sending a dull email, you'll design it according to your brand specificities.
Theoretically, the result of their action will be just the same - a person will reset their password and will, hopefully, continue being your customer. But adding a bit more touch to such an email can go a long way.
Here are some of the main reasons why transactional emails should be an important part of your marketing efforts.
People wait for transactional message
Since transactional emails are triggered by users’ actions, people want to see them. Many will launch their inbox specifically for this purpose.
A study from Experian showed that welcome emails, for example, enjoy 4-5 times higher open and click-through rates than promotional messages. It’s safe to assume that similar numbers can be observed for any order confirmation or various notifications you surely send to your clients. That’s a huge opportunity to grab their attention and give them something to think about.
Transactional emails help to build brand awareness
You struggle to establish a connection with a customer. If they recognize and trust your brand, they’re more likely to buy from you or recommend you to friends. They’re also less likely to shift to a competitor.
You’re going to send a lot of transactional emails to each of your customers. Your welcome email will be one of the first touchpoints with the brand they will have. If you’re to build great relationships with your customers, this will be one of your most important channels. That’s why always consider how you’re presented via transactional emails as a brand.
The value to your customers is already defined
It’s sometimes a struggle to bring value to a customer in a purely promotional email. And you know well that they’re unlikely to open the newsletter if it doesn’t offer them anything in return.
Transactional emails by default carry a lot of value. They give the customer peace of mind that a payment was processed. They inform them about the next steps they need to take. They include files or secret codes that a user needs elsewhere. All of this ensures that they’ll be eager to open these emails and interact with them, possibly generating some additional revenue for you.
They’re an excellent way of engaging your leads
If you have to gather customers’ feedback or learn of the problem they’re trying to solve, transactional emails prove invaluable too. They enjoy high interaction rates and are perfectly timed to arrive right when a process is finished or an issue emerges.
If reaching you is as effortless as just hitting on the ‘Reply’ button or tapping on a button, you’ll hear from many and you’ll gather a lot of data you can use for user management or simply Improving the product.
Oh, and this hasn’t convinced you to invest in transactional emails yet, the infographic demonstrating the ROI of transactional emails will.
Common mistakes marketers make in transactional emails and how to avoid them
By now, you probably realize the size of the opportunity in transactional emails and you’re eager to take action. But, don’t be in hurry. Spontaneous and unsustainable messages can lead to problems, though these emails are expected.
Here you have the most common mistakes in transactional emails sending and how not to do them.
Sending emails that never arrive
What good is in a perfectly written email if it lands in a spam folder, right? This question is more crucial in the transactional department than it is for marketing emails.
Probably, most of your customers can live without your last newsletter if it never arrives. However, when purchase or financial operation confirmation lands in the spam or a password reset email is discarded by the customer’s ISP, it’s definitely an issue. This automatically creates more work for your support team and disturbs the peace of mind of your customers. No one wins in this situation.
How to improve:
- Use separate IP or even domain for transactional emails. Marketing emails always have much lower numbers than transactional emails, that’s understandable. At the same time, transactional emails just need to be delivered, always. Since email reputation and deliverability are heavily dependent on the past performance of IP/domain, it’s worth separating both streams. This way, the poor results of marketing campaigns won’t have any impact on the transactional emails we put so much faith in.
- Choose the right ESP. Some sending providers specialize in marketing emails while others are great in transactional emails. A few platforms are good in either and you should carefully analyze what each platform is capable of before you select the perfect ESP for you.
- Test your emails before they’re sent. Use some of these email testing tools to improve your emails before they’re even sent. Whether it’s broken HTML, poor rendering of visuals, or simple grammar issues, you want to eliminate them before your emails are added to the queue.
- Track deliveries. Needless to say, to detect any issues and act on them quickly, you need to actively track how your emails perform. Make sure you have the proper trackers in place and look at transactional emails separately, rather than focusing on the overall performance of your emails.
Neglecting personalization
Sometimes companies send transactional emails that are just pure instructions on what happened or is about to happen.
“We’ve received your request. We’ll be in touch within 10 business days”
“Password reset. Regards”
“Subscription confirmed. Click below to unsubscribe”
These emails are forgotten as soon as they’re closed. And if the whole message fits in a preview, it may be archived without even opening. By sending such emails, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities - to engage a reader, to point them in the desired direction, to stay in their memory.
How to improve:
- Personalize a message with the data you already have. Replace “Dear Customer” with the name. Refer to their activity and provide the information relevant to them and no one else. Read more on how to personalize emails.
Make the ‘From’ field more personal. 68% of Americans said that the display name visible in their inbox impacts their decision on whether they should open an email or not. Show your customers that there’s a person behind each email, even if they’re automated by nature. Replace “Sales” or, worse, “No reply” with “Tom from XYZ”. - Use the language your audience speaks. Ensure you have the translation software, which can provide you with qualitative text in different languages or use the help of professional philologists and interpreters.
- Make the content more casual. Unless you’re running a bank or are a debt collector, you don’t want to hide behind a super-formal tone. Make your language more casual and show a reader that you’re a human just like them. Caveat: Not every industry and every customer base will appreciate being casual with them. It’s for you to decide how far you can go. However, everyone will enjoy qualitative content.
The article is initially published on Smart Insights