Unleash the Potential of Transactional Email Messages

A lot of companies are still missing out on important opportunities for additional sales and relationship building through transactional email messages. Some are even undermining well-executed email marketing strategies by allowing these highly anticipated and widely read messages to come out of separate corporate IT or e-commerce systems.

So how can you avoid missing out on these key touch points in a budding customer relationship? Find the right partner to integrate transactional messaging into the marketing platform, use the right tools, and focus on applying the following best practices to customize, track, and optimize transactional messages:

Enhance messages with HTML. Enhancing and customize these important communications with graphics, links and formatting techniques to increase the amount of information, interaction, and revenue from a customer.

Focus on relevance by including dynamic content.  Include information pertaining to your customers' preferences, behaviors, or past purchases eg. include an image of the product the customer just purchased in the order confirmation or warranty recall.

Improve deliverability. Include a link at the top of every transactional email to encourage the recipient to whitelist the from address to ensure message delivery.

Track, measure, and gain additional customer insight.Treating transactional messages the same way you treat promotional messages to get a complete view of the customer lifecycle to convert one-way communications into a measurable and profitable dialog.

Increase acquisition opportunities. Add an opt-in field to encourage recipients who have given their email address for transactional purposes to also sign up for promotional mailings. Be sure to state the benefits of why they'd want to do this.

Encourage dialog. Make sure your transactional messages allow customers to respond to the company through email.

Enable consumers to manage their preferences. Let customers choose how, when, and what they want from an email relationship. Every message should contain a clear, free and easy-to-use method to manage the frequency (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly), format (e.g., text or HTML), topics (e.g., sales notifications, newsletters, etc.) or to opt-out altogether.

Source: MultichannelMerchant.com

Comments

[denise.cox]

hi tamara,

i recently conducted an interview with jeanne jennings, a clickZ contributor, about the topic of transactional emails for my newsletter. people who are looking for a primer on transactional emails, to go along with this great article, might be interested in what we cover in the interview:

http://www.businessofemail.com/e_article000693229.cfm

cheers,
denise