Transactional Emails: To Promo or Not to Promo?
Remember the confirmation email you received after every time you ordered something online or the email that notified you that your package had just been shipped? Of course, you do! We’ve all refreshed our inbox about a million times because we can’t wait to be one step closer to our latest purchase.
But these aren’t the only emails we pay attention to. There are also emails related to our various accounts where we need to open them to confirm our email or reset our password (thankfully there is no cap on that one).
These are all examples of transactional emails, which are designed, orchestrated, and delivered through your ESP’s real-time transactional message delivery gateway.
Why do transactional emails have higher engagement?
Transactional emails are comparable to user notifications on your phone in that they are purely informative and typically have no promotional content. According to Mailgun, transactional emails tend to have open rates between 80-85% while marketing emails have an average open rate between 20-25%. This is likely because transactional emails require some action on the recipient’s part. Another reason for their higher open rate is because they were more recently active on the related website.
Marketing emails’ main purpose is to deliver promotional content to the right recipient. Effective marketing emails contain personalized content and promotional offers based on various recipient attributes. These emails are shaped by each recipient’s profile characteristics, order history, and behavior. Marketing emails are meant to provide customers with the right offer depending on where they are in the buying cycle. As stated previously, marketing emails are shaped by various factors including order history. This enables marketers to send customers promotional content with offers for products that can complement their prior purchases. Transactional emails could support this goal of post-sale conversion by including promotional content in order confirmation emails.
Due to varying levels of activity and multiple subscriptions to marketing emails, customers sometimes feel overwhelmed by the volume of marketing emails and miss offers that could have been mutually beneficial to marketers and customers. Including promotional content in transactional emails could alleviate the burden to customers to find the right offers in the sea of marketing emails by sending relevant offers to active consumers.
What and how to promo?
There is a variety of possibilities for promotional content that could be included in transactional emails. For example:
Now, let’s say that you’ve been shopping for a laptop because your old one is too slow. So, you browse the internet (slowly) and find a laptop at a price that appeals to you, but you forgot to get a new carrying case and the new laptop doesn’t fit in your old one.
If a product recommendation had come with the order confirmation email, you could have seen a carrying case that your laptop would fit in. In this case, you wouldn’t have had to deal with the frustration of trying to wedge the new laptop in the old case and consequently waiting another week for the proper case to arrive. Imagine if you had a vacation or business venture rapidly approaching. It’s all about convenience.
Including promotional content in transactional emails increases the likelihood that promotional offers are seen because transactional emails are considered important by most customers. Therefore, this could be a remedy to customers not seeing pertinent marketing content.
Staying compliant, not over promoting
It is important to stay compliant, so if a recipient has opted out of marketing emails, then they need to be removed from the list of recipients who subscribe to marketing emails. However, this does not restrict them from receiving relevant transactional emails with promotional content.
It is essential to differentiate between transactional messaging and marketing. For example, transactional emails should only be sent out to customers who were active within the past 6 months. It is also important to not overwhelm customers with transactional messages, so there should be set conditions for emails that are triggered by a specific action, or event. For example, cart abandonment emails should have set conditions for how often and how long they should be sent.
Another key component to not over-promoting is not including the same promotional content in each transactional email template. For instance, if you included a free promo code in a transactional email to reset a customer’s password, you might see an increase in reset passwords. Therefore, it would be prudent to add some variation not only to the promotional content but also to the promotional offers included in transactional emails.
