When you start an email marketing campaign, think that any email has a certain value. It can be a welcome message, a confirmation of subscription, an anniversary message or simply an operational/transactional email.

Do you know how many emails are sent every month? Do you know which is the percentage of the transactional emails? You should know that the number of the transacted emails is much higher than the those having a sales/promotional purpose.

You should make the most of your email at any time and turn it into an efficient sales instrument. We actually talked about that when we spoke of how you can optimize your holiday message.

Transactional emails are used to facilitate any interaction between your company and the consumer, whenever financial documents are involved, etc. It represents a way of keeping a constant contact with your clients. Follow-up messages are used for the following purposes:

• Confirm orders further to a purchase
• confirmation of a reservation
• Confirm the download of certain documents
• Confirm the signup for a certain event
• Delivery confirmation
• Payment confirmation
• Dispatch note
• Invoices / receipts
Usually, they are accompanied by notifications regarding the warranty and security of the purchased products or any kind of change that is associated to the payment status.

Probably, everyone of us gets such notification messages after we make an action that involves a purchase or reservation. But very few marketers know to make the most of the transactional messages. You can make a difference, using these messages in another way, that can generate a profit. In brief, you can use a very simple message in order to promote other offers too.

Most often than not, transactional messages look quite banal, in the form of a simple confirmation/thank-you note, that are written in just a couple of lines and accompanied by the actual invoice/receipt.

At first sight, the benefits of these messages that are so simple is that these will surely be opened by the recipient, because the subscriber knows that the message is strictly personal and material.

According to the most recent studies, transactional emails are read much more frequently than emails that promote services and products of a company. A study of MarketingSherpa points out that transactional emails of various types (delivery confirmation, payment confirmation or other financial documents) have a click rate in the 32% to 69% range. On top of that, their deliverability is even higher.

What can you do to optimize your transactional messages?

Personalize the message. Forget about “Thank you for…” If you are retailer, for instance, and someone has just ordered a product from your site, then you can write a personalised address: “Radu, you have just ordered the X product on the x website…”

Additional information. Apart from the order notification, that should be mentioned in the first part of the email, you should provide the details of the product: instructions for use, warranty, transportation/delivery conditions, a rating given by other purchasers that bought and used the same product.

Customer support. It includes a name, an email address and a telephone number of a representative of your company, whom the client can contact directly in order to get additional information about the status of the purchase. You can develop a little bit more, by telling then that “our representatives will always be at your disposal in order to provide the details in which you can be interested in”.

Cross-selling. Don’t forget that, if you establish such a relationship with the person who is interested in whatever you promote, then you can make the most of it. Whenever a product is purchased, a TV set, let’s say, once you have sent out the invoice with the payment information, you can also present an offer for a DVD player or a special TV base in that body of that email. The offer which you promote can be established based on the buyer’s past purchasing behavior too.

Discount. Transactional emails are a useful tool even for loyalisation. Not only the duty to communicate it in a certain way – promptly, correctly, efficiently, completely. In order to thank to all of your purchasers, you can give them a discount for a certain accessory, for instance.

Links. Because at first I said that you can make the most of every kind of email, don’t forget that you can use the Recommend button in this transactional email too that purchaser can use in order to recommend the product or service to other who may be interested in it too. You can also include a subscription link to your newsletter and perhaps a discount to another product for those who have not yet made up their minds. You can also use links to the landing page, in order to attract visitors to your site. If an order is confirmed for a certain product, you can customize your landing page that contains details information about the purchase, but also other offers for other products and visitors may be interested in.

Design. Although they are mere transactional emails, just imagine that they are some of the most useful sales tools. Use the identity elements of the company, in order to be easily recognized by the subscriber and in order to create attractive graphics. Sell yourself in any circumstance!
The confidentiality policy. It is essential that any transactional email should include an assurance of the fact that the data in the invoices will not disclosed to anyone else. You can offer them a link to the confidentiality Policy on your website.

The Subject. In order to make it different, you should personalise the subject. In any case, the subject should be as clear as possible in terms of the origin of the transactional message. As I was saying, all of the transactional messages enjoy a reading frequency which is much higher than the regular ones. Therefore the best option is that the subject should reflect the character of this kind of message: “You’ve just sign up for the X event” or “The xyz tv set that you’ve ordered is on its way to your home”. The certification rules of transaction emails involve that in order to insure the deliverability rates that you want.

Surveys. You can optimize the transactional messages, by asking the opinions of the buyers: How promptly did they get the answer? How useful it was? How polite it was? Etc.

Why optimize them?

If you follow the advice above, you will have more benefits, whenever you use transactional emails:
• The Client will feel like they are at the centre of your attention. They will feel that you respect them and that you provide them with a good quality thing.
• Your company/brand will have an enhanced brand awareness and, above all, a positive image in front of the client.
• He will be under the impression that the two of you have a private conversation, just like old friends have. He will feel that the email comes from a friends that wishes the best for him.
• Considerable reduction of the communication costs

What you should take into account

1. Whenever you send out transactional emails, you should take account of the fact that, in accordance with CAN-Spam, these emails should not contain an unsubscription link because, anyway, these are expected by a certain person, although that person accepted or not to get commercial emails. In any case, you should mind the fact that the transactional emails have to be as transparent as possible in what concerns their type. Therefore, it is not advisable to promote other offers aggressively.
2. It is absolutely mandatory that the transactional email sending process should be as properly performed as possible, therefore these emails should be sent in an optimum time, right after someone purchased something or booked something, etc. Any delay can have negative effects on your company in the future. People usually look for trustful sources, that should answer properly and professionally. You should be the one!
3. The content of the transactional messages must necessarily refer, in its first part, to the acquisition that the recipient made and then the other marketing messages should be included too. Specialists say that 80% of the content in this message have to be transactional, and 20% commercial.
Taking our recommendations into account, you should take advantage of the attention that you get from clients in circumstances and you should optimize your email marketing programs.