Taking Transactional Emails to the Next Level
Transactional emails differ from marketing emails as they are emails triggered by an user’s interaction with an app e.g. an order confirmation email after a purchase is made. As the contexts of these emails are likely to be relevant at the time they are triggered, the open rates are much higher as well compared to newsletters or promotional emails sent on a periodic basis — can be up to 3 times higher according to Sendgrid.
However, many companies neglect transactional emails as opportunities for marketing and communication, perhaps because the tech department generally has ownership of transactional emails while the marketing department is in charge of the promotional emails, and they run on different systems. If this is the case, you are leaving money on the table!
There are a few ways you can take your transactional emails to the next level, but the important thing is to consider the mindset of the user when he/she receives the email in the context of the interaction, and to introduce a complementary message supplementing the main email intent. For example, if you user is resetting a forgotten password, you would probably want to include a way for the user to contact your support team rather than upsell your latest products.
Email Subscription Confirmation
This is usually when your audience is first aware of your brand and is interested in what you have to say, or in marketing speak, when your user is at the top of the funnel. They might have come across your brand a couple of times via social media, and came to your website to find out more, and is presented with an opportunity to subscribe to your email newsletter. Let’s look at the common opt-in email (you will see less of this due to Mailchimp’s change of policy) or confirmation email -
What a missed opportunity! I would imagine that the average open rate for these emails is much more than 50% and all we can muster is a default template! Yes, you can always follow up with your periodic email messages — isn’t that the point of having email lists you say, but now the open rate is now down to 15–25% and chances are that you are now much less aware of your audience’s situation unless you have a good email drip system in place.
Depending on the nature of your business, they may or may not be ready to buy from you at this point in time and the game here is to provide value and establish trust first. For example, if you provide wine storage services which takes a little more time to establish trust, you might want to provide a link to a free ebook talking about the different characteristics of wine made in vineyards across the globe. Or like Intercom which provides a suite of tools for SaaS businesses to engage with their customers -
If you are purely doing e-commerce, chances are that your audience is a little further down the funnel when they hand over their email addresses, so go ahead and offer the time-limited 20% discount coupon code you promised. Or take the opportunity to introduce your referral program -
Account Registration
When your audience cares enough to go through the trouble to register for an account to use your software or to save a shopping cart, it is time to go a step further. As welcome emails typically have open rates from 50% to 60%, now is the time to communicate the most important takeaways so you have a higher chance to turn your users into customers. Below are a few ways —
Reinforce your brand values
If you position yourself as the small artisanal maker trying to do good in an industry dominated by corporate players, it will be effective to include a personal welcome message to thank your user for having the audacity to support you. If you are a bigger player, you can explain why your processes are uniquely positioned to provide the most value to your users. No matter who you are, now may be the time to reinforce how your brand works and remind your users why they signed up in the first place.
Ease the onboarding process
If your product is of a certain complexity, it is crucial to ease your users into using your product at this point. The welcome email will not be able to do it all and your probably need a robust onboarding process coupled with a knowledge base, but it can at least be a starting point. For Webflow, it was an invaluable opportunity to link to an introductory video —
Be there for your users
Sometimes, it might be as simple as providing a readily available helpline, like what Gusto did —
Notifications/Alerts
Your user has been using your website or app for a while now and there are certain events happening which warrants alerting him/her via email. This may not be applicable to every app or website but if it is, it can be a good opportunity to incorporate a supplementary message. And it really depends on what the alert is. You can think about the action which the alert is prompting the user to take, and supplement it with how you can make this action better. For example, Revue is a suite of tools to help people create and send newsletters. In their reminder on send day, they encourage people share their profile page to get more subscribers, something which is of value to the user at that point in time (which of course also benefits Revue as a business) —
Order Confirmation
This is another opportunity which can pay off greatly if you can get into your customer’s mindset and construct a relevant message. The primary focus here should be how you can provide better value to your customer at this point in time knowing that he/she is willing to pay for your product as it currently stands, rather than just being concerned with creating more sales for your business. After all, they just bought from you, isn’t it too early to merely sell them more features or more stuff?
If you are running a SaaS business and they just subscribed to a monthly plan, now might be the chance to introduce them to an annual plan at a 20% discount if they switch. If you run an online store, you might want to encourage your customer to share what he/she bought on social media, together with a referral link —
Abandoned Carts
Dealing with abandoned carts is pretty straightforward right? Just give a one-time discount to encourage people to finish their purchase like this -
If you can afford it every time or if you are able to check that people are not gaming the system repeatedly, this is definitely a viable way to go about it.
More often than not, you do not just want to give a discount to encourage people to purchase. Another way is to think about it is to investigate why people have the intention to buy initially (spending the effort to choose the items to add into cart) and then choose not to when it comes down to it. The objective of the abandoned cart email is then to address their specific concerns. For example, Mack Weldon offers a risk-free first purchase to address sizing/cutting concerns from customers trying the brand for the first time —
Conclusion
The list above is far from exhaustive but it provides a framework for you to think about the potential of transactional emails beyond their main functions.
In short, to take transactional emails to the next level, you should
- Understand the context behind the trigger of each transactional email
- Craft and include a supplementary message which is relevant to the user and his/her actions at that point in time
- Add value from the user’s point of view
That said, the process of building and testing a custom + mobile-ready HTML email template which renders correctly across major email clients can be frustrating and time-consuming. It can also be a challenge to update ever-changing marketing messages within transactional email templates, or to build many variations in order to cater for different situations.
That is why we built Mailworks, a drag-and-drop HTML email builder which caters for complex layouts and custom responsive behaviours, without the need for coding. You can classify, store and update your email templates with us, which you can then export as HTML files and import into any ESP or into your own custom email system.
Hope you find this article useful and do leave us your comments/questions!
