Last Updated on Feb 22, 2022 by James W
Transactional emails are among the top-performing email types, and every business must ace at it even beyond marketing messages. Surprised? Yes, transactional emails are prioritized by subscribers over most other emails. The reason is simple: They expect to get transactional emails as the receipt of their purchase/action. Not getting a transactional email can even make your subscriber anxious, so you need to ensure that they get these messages in due time with all relevant details. In fact, the open rates for transactional emails sit at around 40-50%, while their click rates are observed to be in the range of 10-20%. To help our readers create the best order transactional emails through PSD to email conversion or build from scratch, here’s a list of seven tips to nail transactional emails in 2022.
#1 Keep It Simple, Upfront, Easy To Scan
The most important tip here is to keep your order transactional email design simple and upfront to make it easy to scan. Remember, the recipient will be scanning through the message to ‘confirm’ and not to ‘consume.’ This makes it incredibly important to use the white space smartly alongside the visual hierarchy to make it simple for the reader to find what they want. This can be further ensured by highlighting the crucial data and providing the information in the upper first fold. In the below example, you can see how this piece of advice is reflected in this beautiful order confirmation transactional email by Wildist:
#2 Use Conversational Tone Despite Informative Content
One thing I recommend to every email marketer when discussing transactional emails is not to lose the human voice. It is taken for granted that the customer is not going to spend a lot of time reading your message and neither do they expect you to sound very enthusiastic. However, being nice and engaging will prove to be a differentiating factor for your brand, and it will also help build great relationships with your subscribers. However, don’t overdo it in terms of being informal or email copy length. You just need to keep your transactional email copy crisp, catchy, and brief while extending the needful information.
#3 Upsell, Cross-Sell, But Most Importantly, Don’t Hurt The Current Sale
One important aspect of transactional emails is their ability to act as subtle marketing emails. Most email marketers know that order transaction emails can be used to upsell and cross-sell other products. While there is nothing wrong with it, it is important that you don’t go a bit too far. The products you market in your order transaction emails shouldn’t be direct alternatives or be in close proximity in terms of utility and prices. This can turn out to be a setback, so I advise email developers against doing so because upselling and cross-selling isn’t something that needs to be taught, but this is a pitfall you should know about. In the below example, you can see that no direct competitors to the sold products are placed:
#4 Reassure And Educate With Your Order Transaction Emails
With reassurance, I am not talking about flattery- it is the use of customer reviews and testimonials. This makes your customer feel good about their purchase as you reinforce their decision with good experiences of other customers. In case you find that your customers need some education to use your products, these emails are an excellent avenue to help them with relevant materials. You can simply embed links to your informative blogs so when your customer receives your product, they are able to make the most out of it. This keeps your customers happy and saves you from the turmoil of dealing with an angry or confused customer just because they didn’t have enough product knowledge.
#5 Use Dynamic Content Blocks To Personalize Your Order Transaction Emails
Another great way to nail your order transaction emails is to use dynamic content blocks for personalization. If you are going for PSD to email template conversion, this can be really helpful as personalizing your messages requires you to make relatively lesser changes. Having predefined blocks in the design for serving personalization is a great way to use CRM data without disturbing the overall template design process. Also, this is quite natural to do since you would, anyway, need to use APIs to connect software data with your email messages.
#6 Maintain Your Branding Consistency WRT Marketing Emails
With all the other tips laid down, I would emphasize maintaining branding consistency in terms of your marketing emails. Remember, if you play your cards well in terms of email design, striking a subtle relevance with your marketing emails can boost their open rates and engagement. You may say this is easier said than done, however, the best way to do so is by ensuring the placement of brand elements at a fixed place in both templates. Such small yet meaningful parallels will help improve your email metrics for non-transactional emails over time.
#7 Include Relevant Hyperlinks In Your Order Transaction Emails
Lastly, I would like to advise our fellow readers that you need to place relevant outbound hyperlinks apart from product educational materials. This can be shipment tracking pages, social media links, and product detail pages that can provide additional value. The reason is simple: whichever web property adds value to the product’s purchase or helps you connect with your customer beyond the current sale should be included in the form of an outbound hyperlink.
Wrap Up
While most of the important tips are covered, I would recommend our readers to be punctual when sending order confirmation emails. In my opinion, they should be sent instantly, and even if additional data is required, the total time should not exceed 30 minutes. If you keep these tips in mind, I bet you will nail your order transaction emails in 2022 and beyond.
Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
