Transactional emails are the bread and butter of eCommerce.
They are the most important type of email messages you’d ever send -- the endless one-shot automated emails (and sometimes multiple emails) that keep your customers and subscribers in the loop about various aspects of their transactions that matter to them (and your business).
Transactional emails are taken for granted by several eCommerce businesses, unfortunately. Most eCommerce businesses are guilty of “not” using transactional emails given the sheer advantage they have over all other types of email marketing messages you deploy.
TL;DR
- Transactional emails are common, used on default mode, and almost always forgotten. Love them more. Use them right.
- Double up on each transactional email’s purpose. Squeeze more out of every email.
- Stay on brand: Your logo, your colors, your copy, your style.
- Show some personality. Add some context.
- Keep Emails Relevant & Use Personalization
- Benchmark emails, learn from the best, test, learn, repeat.
Since most transactional emails are used by default, eCommerce brands are guilty of slapping a logo and adding “nothing” more of value inside the transactional emails.
Wrong.
You could do more than “default”. Give these emails some love.
Consider some transactional email statistics: transactional emails alone can boost your eCommerce store revenue by a whopping 33%.
However, more than 70% of eCommerce brands fail to personalize transactionals or even use transactional emails beyond the boring “Your order is processed” or “Your Shipment is on the way”.
Transactional emails get at least 4X to 8X more opens and clicks. In a nutshell, here’s a bucket of advantages that transactional emails enjoy:
Take the simple “welcome email alone”: Welcome emails (sent when you get a new customer, among other use cases) see more than 3X the usual orders and revenue per email over regular email marketing promotions.
Welcome emails see more than 10X transaction rates and revenue per email over “non-personalized”, and “send this to everyone” type of emails.
The “Thank you email” is another kind of transactional email that’s often ignored. Did you know that thank you emails (sent after your customer places an order) can achieve upto 13X increase in revenue compared to any other emails?
Even a simple automated email that sends in product recommendations (based on consumer behavior on eCommerce stores) is preferred by more than 42% of customers.
An OmniSend 2020 eCommerce Statistics reveals that other simple transactional emails such as “order confirmation” and “Shipping Information” emails are unmistakably opened more than 50% of the time.
Types of transactional emails you should create
Transactional emails are certainly automated, but are almost always triggered due to some action taken by your customers. Some of the most common types of transactional emails are as follows:
- Order confirmations
- Welcome emails and thank you emails
- Order failure intimations
- Shipping information, Shipping follow ups, and Order delivery notifications
- Customer feedback requests
- Password input attempt failure messages, password reset messages, and account information messages.
- Product order cancellation notifications.
The types of transactional emails are fairly intuitive to understand. However, it’s almost an art (and a soft skill) as to how you use transactional emails -- the style, content, the personalization, and more.
Transactional email examples We Love (& Why)
Let’s take a quick look at some transactional email examples we picked from Panoramata -- these emails could be any type of transactional emails (from the usual ones such as order confirmations to remarketing emails and shopping cart abandonment emails.
Stryx
Stryx is a brand that’s making a difference in the Skincare Industry (Note: they recently bagged a deal on Shark tank). Of particular interest to us, in this case, is their “thank you email” -- a transactional email that the brand uses rather well.
What we Love:
- Emails are on Brand
- Emails are structured sensibly with a primary product in focus with plenty of suggestions of other products throughout the email. There’s another product (or bundle) positioned at the end of the email
- Discount coupon used as a Button.
What Can be Done Better:
- Adding testimonials inside the email could add some social proof.
- Prompt potential customers to use their special Coupon again inside the email.
- Adding extra links (such as tutorials and blog) inside email could lead to distraction. It’s best to keep emails simple, and to the point.
Did you notice just how well they use the single “thank you email”? In this case, Stryx uses a thank you email for email subscribers (or those who drop into their mailing list after signing up for a free coupon or something similar).
Apart from the email totally reflecting Stryx’s brand, There’s a primary product right at the top, with a few more product recommendations, and also a complete product kit that you could choose from.
Want to see all of Stryx’s emails? Sign up for free and see what the brand is upto on Panoramata
Dyson
Love simplicity with automation powering up the email marketing game? Take a look at some of these email messages -- a part of their email marketing journeys -- from Dyson.
These emails are a part of their strategy to recover potential shoppers who abandoned their respective shopping carts. Dyson immediately sends them a simple email letting them know that they still have a product in the shopping cart, urging them to complete their purchase.
The email is automated, which means that this sequence is triggered automatically when visitors add items to their cart but don’t complete the purchase.
What we love:
- The automated journey itself (that most eCommerce stores still don’t use)
- The simplicity of the email -- no nonsense and it means business.
What can be done better:
- The email lacks some personality (in how it communicates)
- If Dyson had a way to personalize the emails, these email journeys would be even more effective.
Want to see all of Dyson’s emails? Sign up for free and see what the brand is upto on Panoramata
Haleys Beauty
Even if you were using email marketing workflows, the secret is in personalization. Personalization would also mean that it’d help if you have a face for your customers (existing and potential) to remember.
See this automated welcome email from the founder of Haleysbeauty.
The entire email is written as a “letter” to “you”, from Ashley (founder of Haleysbeauty) -- the email in a “letter” style immediately makes it almost as the same as getting up from your seat, move ahead from across the table, and shake hands with you as a customer.
What We Love:
- The personalized, letter format as a welcome email (which is still an automated transactional email)
- Using the founders’ photo and name clearly and visibly. That’s called putting your skin in the game.
- The email still has a “Shop now” button at the end (still means business).
What we’d like:
- The email journey (with these transactional emails) ends too soon (at just about 2 emails within the automated workflow. There’s nothing stopping the Haleys brand from using more emails to nurture email subscribers, existing customers, shopping cart abandoners, and so on.
- The email real estate (below the letter) could still be used for promoting products (with product images) or to recommend best sellers.
Tips to Create Transactional Emails: Boost eCommerce conversions & Revenue
Your transactional emails can be relevant, personalized, purposeful, and even “money-making”.
To get there, you’d need to follow some undeniably effective rules for transactional emails (apart from technical aspects such as deliverability, landing in customer inboxes, on-brand and domain-specific email sends), mobile compatibility, and more.
Here are some tips to remember:
Double up Each Email’s Purpose
An order notification email doesn’t only have to do what it set out to do -- which is to notify a customer that an “order has been placed”. There’s nothing stopping you from “doubling up on the purpose” and also use the real estate of the email well.
If a customer just placed an order, chances are that they are primed enough to make another purchase (and not everyone knows exactly what else is available in your store).
Use product recommendations within the order notification email, the shipping confirmation email, the welcome email, and so on.
Stay on Brand
We, at Panoramata, believe that a brand isn’t just about logos, colors, and branding elements. Brand also extends into a variety of things such as to use a distinct voice (in all your communications), project the brand in a playful (or serious -- if that’s how you want to play it) way, and so on.
You can keep your emails purposeful and mean all business, but no one says you’d have to be sound (or be) boring.
Use some Personality [From a Friend, to a Friend]
The easiest way to infuse some personality into your emails is to pretend as if you were talking one-on-one to a close friend. How would you sound? What would you use? How will you come across? What would the email recipient take away from the email? Will you use all images and some text or just text?
It’s up to you.
Just don’t forget to sound like a human.
Keep Emails Relevant & Use Personalization
Whatever you do, don’t send out a single email with some form of personalization. The best way to never miss the prospect of personalization with your emails is to use the “first name” of your customers.
Sometimes, you’d have to approach the whole “email personalization” as a strategy. Hence, you’d need to think backwards (from what you want to do to how you should go about it).
For instance, to ensure that you use “first name” as a snippet (for using email marketing software features), you’d need to “ask” for the first name while signing email subscribers or customers up.
Benchmark, test & Iterate
You’d never know if the tips, tricks, strategies, and anything else you plan to implement with your email marketing strategy -- transactional emails included are working or not.
That’s why it's critical to benchmark your campaigns against other brands in the same industry or even grab some inspiration from what other brands in other industries do with their transactional email campaigns.
This is how it flows: Get ideas and stay inspired > launch campaigns > Benchmark your campaigns against the best > Test your campaign creatives (images, copy, and offers) > Make changes > relaunch > Repeat.
Panoramata.co helps you improve your email campaigns, transactional emails, email workflows, email journeys, and more by letting you gain inspiration from the email campaigns or other brands. Panoramata also gives you a simple, dashboard type layout using which you can create inspiration lists, idea boards, and more.
Sign up for Panoramata now. See what your inspiration allows you to do.
