Creating Best-Practice Transactional Emails

In this post, Loren McDonald makes the point that even though transactional messages are a golden opportunity to engage with customers (to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services), many marketers don't take advantage of this easy and obvious benefit.

He offers some best practices for your transactional emails:

1. Move responsibility for transactional emails into the marketing department.
2. Set up your transactional message stream on a separate IP address.
3. Redesign the inbox presence.
4. Position the transactional message content front and center in the message body. Use HTML design elements to create an attractive and organized message.
5. Add personality that supports your brand or company image, expresses your thanks for that they're customers and invites them to engage further.
6. Use the transactional message to initiate or expand the customer relationship.

Read more here.

Comments

[John Caldwell]

All good points, Tamara, but what's left out is that the reason that many "transactional" emails are outside control of "marketing" is that they are "system" sent.

Several reasons that system-sent messages are a bad idea may be found in a recent post here --> http://redpillemail.com/blog/2009/why-system-transactional-emails-are-a-bad-idea.html

It's also good to identify the different types of "transactional" messages - those transactional message where money changes hands v. those that include, say, Welcome messages, and have each type on their own IP address.

A Welcome stream can deploy from the same IPs as other promotional messages, while those where money changes hands should be on their own IP address, or share an address with post-transactional messaging - commonly refered to as "service" messages for paid services/subscriptions. Not being able to deliver reciepts for purchase opens a company up to increased charge-backs as does not being able to deliver paid services/subscriptions.

This is just scratching the surface and the details are enough to warrant their own chapter.