For those who don’t know what transactional email is, it is email sent to your contacts when they do some action that is a part of your goal. Mostly these email comes in play in the following cases:
- Successful signup for newsletter/webinar/course/event
- Successful purchase
- Sign up for forums/platform/website
- subscribe email updates for their comments
- Periodic digest of their activity on your platform
- unsubscribe confirmation
These are just the possible scenarios of transactional emails, it can be more and it depends on what niche you are in. There’s no boundary as to what kind of actions can trigger these transactional emails.
For example, a user signs up for your newsletter, you should welcome them with a lovely and warm thank you/greetings email. That’s how you catch their attention. They, signing up is a transaction, and your welcome email is the transactional email for them. That’s how it works. Basically, you should acknowledge each of their important activities on your website/blog.
Bottom line is to setup real-time, personalized transactional emails triggering immediately after the interactions.
If we go by stats, they’re staggering (depends on which way you take it)
If you consider to improve both the numbers, then here’s something you can do:
Use Meta Information wisely:
Meta information include, sender’s name, subject, body line etc. Since there is very limited space to acquire the user’s attention, It becomes really important to crush all the possibilities to score the goal. This space is to convince user that your email is worth opening. Use all the elements wisely.
These things might seem little at the beginning, but as you keep sending emails regularly, these things begin to magnify the inconvenience to end user.
Give a personal touch in “from” address
You’ve crossed the first hurdle of email marketing. The first thing, a user(including you and me) observes after opening an email is the “from” address. Believe it or not, a “no-reply” “service.x.com” or “admin.x.com” is a disaster. However, it depends on what email you are sending. So figure out a way to give personal touch to every email you send.
Have a classy subject and pre-header
This is a part of meta information which is a tricky part. Meta information is not standard across all the email providers. The number of characters shown in the inbox is different. Keep the subject as short as possible and meaningful. Scratch the surface, just enough to create curiosity
Email authentication and markup
You are a live wire of email marketing. You are active enough to frequently appear in your target audience’s inbox. But you cannot simply keep sending emails just like that. You have keep distance from security issues laid and adapted by email service providers. Standards like SPF, DKIM, DMARCcomes into picture.
The domains you use, are as important as the content you send through email. The email service providers are becoming more and more sophisticated towards the domain and not just the IP of the domain.
Setup Gmail Inbox action buttons
I am not sure if you have noticed this or not. But Gmail has this cool feature reserved only for transactional emails of having action buttons with the email. This feature let’s users reach the destination page without even opening the email. It looks something like this:
Find the help guide here
This feature is user-friendly and help you establish trust among the customers/readers/subscribers. Furthermore, those who use GSuit, this feature will be nothing less than a blessing to their email marketing campaign.
Personalize all the parameters
Starting from using the name, to whatever you can personalize to give a rich user-experience, you are bound to do it. A message starting with “Hi Mrinal” is way better that a message starting with a place and blunt “Hi”.
You have to understand one thing, the more you make your users feel “home”, the more like they are to stick to you and your service. Email the best way to make them feel ‘‘Home’’.
Easy to unsubscribe and/or manage notifications
I know it hurts but, you have to do this too. Keep the unsubscribe and manage notification settings handy and easily reachable. But make sure you make an impactful move in your successful unsubscribe email. A subject line like “What you’re leaving behind” or “We’re sorry to see you go” or “You will be missed” will do wonders. The idea is to touch the emotion of the unsubscriber wrt the niche you are in. Not easy, but it’s quite important.
Apart from this, you can mention the steps to join back just in case they change their mind later. Or you can offer them to join your social media community to stay updated about the activity. You can also offer some stats that convinces them to join back the list or anything creative to make them stay back.
Customize emails based on context of the email
Many a times, there are some transactional emails that are not so important. If you are sending out an purchase receipt, make sure you have a detailed email that answers all the questions a user can have. If you are sending a digest of user’s activity on your platform, or forum on your website/blog, that has comments, and other usual activities. In that case you can lessen the number of links in the email and have information about the comment(or any activity) only.
Surprise them
If you notice a user interacting often, send them a thank you email, with a voucher if possible. This will make them a loyal visitor of yours.
Conclusion
Transactional emails are complex at times, but as much as you know what you are doing, you’ll do good. You should consider laying more importance to these emails that you send and get the users/readers/subscribers glued to your network.
Getting people on your list is super easy, when compared to sustaining them in the list.
I hope I have answered you question the way you expected it to be answered.
All the best for your future.
