As a business owner and marketer, you should always be on the lookout for new methods of improving your promotion tactics, increasing your conversions and boosting your bottom line in terms of sales revenue.
This is where transactional emails come into the picture. Among email marketing tactics, they’re surprisingly often overlooked by many companies despite the enormous conversion boosting power they have.
Thus, in an effort to help you find yet another highly effective new marketing method, I’m going to use this post to explain just what transactional emails are. We’ll cover how amazing they can be at helping your marketing conversions and how you can take advantage of them in the best possible way.
What Are Transactional Messages?
Basically, transactional emails are all the email notifications that get sent to your users’ inboxes because they interacted with your website or app in some specific way. By nature, transactional emails are one at a time mail outs that get triggered by specific customer activity and are sent to individual users. This is in contrast to bulk mailing campaigns which are sent en masse to large numbers of subscribers on a regular schedule.
Some excellent examples of transactional messages include emails sent to your users that revolve around: shipping notices, renewal notifications, comment confirmations, order receipts and welcome emails
I’m guessing you’ve now got a pretty good idea of what transactional messages are and I’m pretty sure you’re already using them in your business (if you have any customers at all).
How Can Transactionals Help My Marketing?
The core reason why transactional emails are such powerful marketing tools lies in the fact that they have direct, immediate activity related relevance to your users. Since a transactional message only gets sent because one of your users recently interacted with your site, that user is much more likely to notice the message and open it despite having an inbox that can be cluttered with as many as 48 emails per day!
Because of this attention grabbing capacity, transactionals can help your marketing enormously if you use them as vehicles for promoting your business, brand and products or services while you also give customers the information that makes them open these messages.
Just what kind of metrics can you expect with transactional emails? Well, according to the Easy SMTP infographic, the open rates for their customers transactional emails is above 100% (some recipients open the same message multiple times) and the unique click rate for content inside transactional emails hovers at around 17%
Compare this to open rates of 15% and unique in-message click rates of just 3% for most promotional email campaigns, and you can see the incredible marketing value of your transactional mailings.
But how do you take maximal advantage of these messages and their metrics?
Massive Conversions and Sales Boosts with Transactional Email
Remember, the very thing that gets your transactional messages opened so frequently is the fact that they are fundamentally relevant to a customer transaction, so if you’re also using them for promotion, you can’t eclipse their original purpose with promotion.
That said, there are several things you can do to make your transactional emails really grab you eyeballs, clicks and revenue:
- Say “Thank You”: the single easiest and most fundamental step you can take is to simply make sure that all of your order, shipping, renewal and welcome related transactional emails clearly thank your users for their participation in your business. Easy SMTP found that this alone boosted click rates by as much as 35%.
- Spread your message through serialization: Increase the number of transactional emails you send and you increase your exposure to interested readers. You can do this by turning single larger transactional messages into a series of 2 or smaller messages. Then use each to promote your brand. Doing this can lead to 13% revenue increases for your brand.
- Be Social Media Friendly: Make sure that you give your readers an opportunity to share and like your email content via social media share buttons. This alone can increase your unique click rates by a whopping 55%.
- Customize and Personalize your Emails: Tailor each type of message to the type of recipient or business transaction it relates to, and then go a step further by personalizing each message and the additional products you offer in it based on its recipient users personal details and previous buying history. Doing this can garner click and revenue increases of 60% or more.