Order confirmation emails have an exceptional open rate, and the probability of selling to an existing customer is about 60-70% (compared to the 5-20% probability of selling to a new customer). With that knowledge, it makes a lot of sense that you would want to make the most of this opportunity to engage with your customers while they’re in a receptive state-of-mind.

First and most importantly, the purpose of a confirmation email is to (surprise) confirm the receipt of an order from a customer, and to inform them that the fulfilment process is underway. If you’re failing to do this, it can break trust with your customer and raise concerns that something has gone wrong. At the very least, the order confirmation should include:

· a brief message of thanks

· the order date

· the order number

· order information (items and quantities, shipping costs, tax, and total order value)

· shipping information (address, method, delivery estimate, tracking information)

· payment information (a discreet reference to the card used)

· a link for the customer to log into their account (if available)

· your business contact information

Whether you send the saddest text-only email that ever happened, or the jazziest html email that ever sparkled, you need to have the above information for the email to be useful to your customer. Once you’ve nailed this portion, you can get to making this email more useful for you. The main ways to beef up your email are by upselling, encouraging engagement, and anticipating/answering customer questions.

Upselling

One way to approach upselling is to offer the customer a discount towards their next purchase—particularly if they complete an action, like filling in a survey. This will give you both something you want: the customer gets a discount, and you get another potential sale alongside information on how to improve. If you’ve just given the customer a good shopping experience, they should be fairly receptive to this idea. The risk with this is that you don’t want to create a discount culture, where customers will only shop with you when there is a discount available.

You may want to suggest some bestselling products to the customer. I’m less in favour of this option, as it could end up being a random list of things from your site that aren’t enticing for the customer. If you have a limited range or have the technology to suggest related products within the email, then this is a great option. Did the customer purchase a lamp with no light bulbs? Suggest some bulbs! Did they buy you most basic service? Suggest some add-ons. What you don’t want to do is essentially spam the customer with things they don’t care about.

Encouraging Engagement

It’s common sense that you should have clear links to your social media channels on these emails. Don’t make your customer work too hard to keep up with you! Place visible icons on your emails and, if space allows, include an incentive. Which are you more likely to click?

“Want to keep up with our latest product developments? Follow us on Facebook”

“Follow us on Facebook”

I’m more likely to click the first set of text because I know what I’d be in for. It’s just an example, but worth thinking about a way to achieve this effect succinctly.

I recently ordered a custom picture frame online. After a few days passed, I consulted my confirmation email to see when I should be expecting delivery. Upon scrolling to the bottom, I noticed that they encourage you to send in any photos of your new frame for them to feature on their blog. This was almost a brilliant thing to do. Unfortunately, this was buried deep in a sea of text, and there was no real incentive to do it. I’ll do it because it could be a nice backlink for my interiors blog and I’m quite house-proud, but what’s in it for the majority of people? Thinks about these things as you come up with content for your emails.

I touched on this briefly earlier, but the confirmation email is also a prime opportunity to seek customer feedback. Websites like Trust Pilot are about reviewing customer service, so having completed an order, the customer is equipped enough to make a review without needing to receive their goods. Asking customers how you’re doing also shows that you care, and that doesn’t go unnoticed. In addition to helping you track the quality of your service, these reviews are very helpful for increasing the performance of Google PPC ads through star ratings. Get on that!

Anticipating and Answering Questions

If you have a talk with your customer service team, you may find that customers often call with similar questions after placing an order. Help save everyone time/stress by answering some of these questions in your email— cite common questions, and link to your FAQ page with helpful answers. Common questions might be: How do I track my order? How can I cancel my order? Can I add something to my order? How do I do a return?

Putting it All Together

Now you need to think about what action you would most like a customer to take from these emails and prioritise that in your layout. ASOS do a good job of bringing content high up in a side bar, so it takes almost-equal precedence with the main body of the email. If you want to give your content a chance, make it easily viewable. Also, be sure to inject your company’s branding and tone-of-voice throughout the email. There’s no reason that an informative email has to be a boring one (unless you have a boring brand—then, go for it!).

In this quick-and-dirty mockup I’ve done, you can see that I’ve taken a page out of ASOS’ book with the colour-blocked sidebar, but I’ve made the order information more of a priority. The ASOS email is a little wordy for me, and I find it more effective to have clear sections in the body of the email so users can find key information quickly. Don’t forget what I said at the start of the article—the customer is principally reading this email to see order information.

There are many ways to design these emails, but the question to bear in mind is whether or not your email is working hard enough for you. If it’s not attempting to incentivise your customers buy again or engage with you, then the answer to that question is probably that it’s not.