How to Craft the Perfect Transactional Email

Once you have engaged with a new lead or returning loyal customer, you want to ensure clear and clean email content that encourages them to stick around a while longer. The more you can smooth out their customer experience with your business, the higher likelihood they will become return buyers and unofficial brand ambassadors to their friends and family.

An essential element in your bag of tools is the transactional email. These are the notices your customers receive anytime they interact with your business. Transactional emails are often overlooked because they seem more cause and effect than primary marketing campaigns with and email designs to elicit a response. Nevertheless, they still provide a wealth of value.

• What is a Transactional Email?
• Maintain Your Brand Story
• One Email to Rule Them All!
• Integrate Social Media
• Always be Clear & Allow Responses
• Security & Preferences
• Where to Get Started

What is a Transactional Email?

Transactional emails typically are automated messages between your business and a recipient based on a trigger event like an order shipping confirmation email, shipping confirmations, replies to addresses, social media, password reset email, and more.

You want to think of a type of transactional email as the line of communication between your company and clients as they experience your brand’s customer journey. Every time they perform an action worth noting, they receive an email to confirm that action. These emails can be customized to fit the individual consumer instead of a bulk marketing email designed to spread a wide net. This presents a unique opportunity to directly influence an engaged client with subtle promotions, secondary purchases, future news, and anything tailored to their profile.

Between all the touchpoints of your business, it is easy to see how clients will receive far more transactional emails than anything else from your brand. The beauty is that these emails have an open rate 4-8 times than other types of promotional emails because they contain content relevant to the buyer.

If you reframe the idea of transactional emails from routine communication to a marketing opportunity, you can increase your potential sales and build stronger customer relationships. Here are some simple tips to improve your transactional emails.

1. Maintain Your Brand Story

You’ve already sold potential leads on engaging with your company. Now you are actively interacting with these clients and want to keep them for return opportunities. That means you need to maintain your brand story with everything they receive to build an emotional attachment to their experience. Having a clear subject line with thought out email templates ensures more brand recognition.

Think about all the times you’ve received confirmation emails after an order. The ones that are easy to understand and highly recognizable are the ones we hang on to for future reference. The ones with confusing layouts we don’t recognize we associate with possible fraud or charges we cannot remember.

This also helps with social media and future marketing. The more exposure clients have to your unique brand identity, the easier it will be to pick your future emails out of a stuffed inbox. Give them a satisfying experience to remember, and they will return again.

2. One Email to Rule Them All!

This next tip for transactional emails goes hand in hand with brand personas. Your clients will receive more transactional emails than anything else. To avoid the dreaded spam or trash folders, you need to use the same contact information with highly identifiable email addresses.

Everything should appear from your domain like @disneyworld or @sephora. You can separate your specific transactional emails into categories like “contact,” “customerservice,” or “returns,” but keep them all in the same format so anyone that receives your communication will recognize your address at a glance.

3. Integrate Social Media

It is important to remember that transactional emails are not promotional emails. They can have promotional elements, but they shouldn’t be designed to sell another product, only suggest a secondary idea. Try to keep these emails 80% about the actual transaction and only 20% about your brand. 

A great example of this is social media integration. You don’t have to buzz your clients with “in your face” videos and photos of your latest unboxing feature, but you can subtly list all of your social media links with recognizable icons.

When a consumer wants to see the latest news and updates about your brand, they are more likely to check out your social media if they have easy access rather than having to search through endless results.

4. Always Be Clear & Allow Responses

A transactional email is directly related to an action your client triggered. They are looking to confirm an order, check its status, view shipping information, reset a password, or do other necessary activities. When they receive an email from you based on a trigger, it should directly relate to the event. For example, a client should not be getting a blog update when all they want is to check the status of their shoe purchase.

The same could be said for allowing “reply to address” responses. When you send transactional emails and indicate they should not be “replied to” by the consumer, you are artificially creating a barrier to smooth communication. People want quick and easy access to the brands they love. Let them respond when they want. Take the time to create filters that move customer emails to the department or staff best suited to the inquiry.

5. Security and Preferences

Every year Google and other major internet platforms change their security settings to prevent spam and unwanted tracking. If you want to improve your email deliverability and online reputation, you need to set up your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. These are a set of email authentication methods that prove your emails are authentically being sent from your business. They make your customers feel safer and allow you to avoid the filters that shift your notification emails to junk folders.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a method on your email for your customers to change their preferences. Even if this is a link at the bottom, it shows your clients that you are comfortable with them controlling the conversation. Anything that gives them the power will make them happy to continue doing business with you in the future. 

Where to Get Started

Do you need a trustworthy and reliable company to help you get started with transactional email service? JetSend is your home for transactional email management that includes sending customized communication as well as tracking their effectiveness with your clients.

Your email sends a clear message of who you are and how you conduct business. Let JetSend help iron those details out. Reach out to our expert team today and experience the high ROI benefits of streamlined transactional emails. A few tweaks here and there to your simple order confirmation email or order updates could potentially transform your business future.