Transactional Email Tips for Ecommerce Stores [Infographic]

by Matt Zajechowski

As a small business ecommerce store owner, you need to make every dollar of your money and every minute of your time spent on marketing and promotion count for as much as possible.

This means constantly keeping an eye open for new opportunities at improving conversions. This is where transactional emails come into the picture. These are an often overlooked part of email marketing that can really boost conversion rates at all levels, including sales, click, open rate and transaction conversions.

We’re going to cover exactly how you can use your transactional emails do all of the above.

Just What Are Transactional Emails?

In case you aren’t entirely sure, transactional emails are essentially all of those one at a time messages you send to specific users of your site or application in response to activities they’ve done to trigger the messages. Thus, sales receipts, shopping cart notifications, shipping confirmations, welcome emails and information request responses are all considered transactional messages.

This is what also makes transactionals so unique and powerful. Unlike mass bulk mail, which is impersonal in nature, transactional messages are client and activity specific, meaning that they’re much more likely to capture reader attention. This is where their conversion power also lies.

Let’s get down to some strategies for taking maximal advantage of several main kinds of transactionals.

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are some of the most important of all transactional messages, they are normally sent out when a new subscriber or customer interacts with your site or joins up as a client.

When optimized well, welcome emails can perform admirably in terms of revenue per message sent. In some cases, they can generate as much as $5.83 per message. This is a major difference from the average 53 cent return of bulk mail messages.

Sending welcome emails that contain special offers in the subject line along with your brands name in their subject line can increase your transaction rates to as much as 4.01% and can help you even double your revenues per welcome email.

Furthermore, breaking your welcome emails down into a series of different emails and sending them in pieces can increase transaction rates by as much as 40%.

Sales Receipts

Sales receipts enjoy open rates that can go as high as 114%. Yes, you read that correctly. The reason for the enormously high open rate is that these types of transactional messages often get opened by the same recipient more than once.

Optimizing them is a process of simple things such as adding a “thank you” to the subject line, which can boost open rates by as much as 35%, or by also adding social media link buttons to the emails. These social media buttons to your business profiles can boost clicks by as much as 55%.

Abandoned Cart Emails

Roughly 67% of your ecommerce customers who add items to their shopping cart on your site will later abandon the cart before actually buying anything. One of the best ways to offset this loss is by sending them a notification that they’ve abandoned the cart!

Doing this alone, and reminding your customers of the products they’ve abandoned by mentioning them in the subject line can boost clicks by 10%. Adding additional related product recommendations inside the emails themselves can also boost click-throughs by as much as 50%.

On average, abandoned cart notifications are opened 40% of the time the first time they’re received and only 27% of the time once they’ve been received a second or third time, so take maximum advantage of them the first time around.

Shipping Confirmations

When it comes to shipping confirmations, they too are often opened more than once by recipients and enjoy overall open rates of about 107%.

You can optimize them by using each of these messages to a customer to cross-sell additional products that the customer might be interested in. This has been shown to increase transactions by 20%.

Additionally, save money and time on customer service costs by including all relevant shipping details in each specific message. This means adding in shipping times, package tracking links, estimated delivery time information and any relevant tracking or shipping numbers that your customer might need.

Product Reviews

Nothing will gain more trust in your products or services than several real product reviews from real previous customers.

Thus, after waiting several days or weeks for previous buyers to use a product you’ve shipped to them, send a follow-up email in which you ask them to submit a product review for you. You can then post links to these reviews on your site and even in other transactional emails that mention specific products.

Asking for real reviews by including the word “review” in your email subject line can boost the open rates by as much as 28%.

Experiment with your transactional emails and use the above strategies as a basic guideline for the transactionals your specific business is sending out. Also, if you want a more visually oriented infographic that covers the above strategies in even more detail, you can also check out the infographic below by the email marketing professionals at Easy SMTP.