The customer journey is not over when the purchase is completed!

The purchase button is clicked, the order completed – for most retailers, the best possible end to the customer journey. But anyone who sits back in satisfaction at this point will miss half of the story. On closer inspection, the customer journey is far from over when the purchase is completed: Usually, this is followed by order and shipping confirmations, invoicing, delivery information, and other transactional emails. 70 percent of recipients actually open these.

TRANSACTION MAILS ARE THE VEHICLE IN E-MAIL MARKETING

which enjoys the greatest attention on the part of recipients. This is why it is all the more surprising how many retailers still treat it as a secondary issue: Plain system emails sent from the backend of the online store make transactional emails seem like a tiresome must-have. It is not uncommon for them to be displayed incorrectly in the recipient’s inbox.

There is no doubt that service and transaction communication is squandering a lot of potential. According to a study conducted by Artegic AG in 2020, around 65 percent of the companies surveyed are well aware of this. Nevertheless, a certain helplessness is apparently rampant as to what possibilities the transactional mail offers as a marketing instrument. Above all, data protection and other legal issues cause many of those responsible a feeling of unease. These concerns are not unjustified. However, there is a great deal of information available and the company’s data protection officer is usually just a phone call away. Once they have been properly checked and set up, transactional e-mails can be an efficient means of customer retention in just a few simple steps:

HIGH QUALITY DESIGN

In terms of aesthetics, many transaction emails rank on the same level as the shipping labels they contain. Flexible HTML templates, which merchants can adapt to their own needs, make a better impression than the standard templates of the store backend. Responsive design is a must. Since more than half of all customers check their e-mails on the move, optimal display on smartphones is particularly important.

ADDITIONAL OFFERS

What could be more obvious than adding cross-sells and coupons to a purchase confirmation? Additional offers are still rare in transactional emails, yet they are absolutely recommended here: the right shirt to go with the new jacket, the right headphones to go with the smartphone, or the right hotel to go with the vacation destination make their grand entrance here. If customers have looked around in various product categories in the course of the customer journey, they should also be presented with offers from these categories. The only precondition for this is an opt-in for the advertising communication. For more information, see the checklist from Artegic.

Marketing Opt-Ins

Sending e-mails to transmit necessary information regarding a purchase is permissible, even necessary, without the recipient’s consent. Merchants should take advantage of this: A transactional email can be a low-threshold touchpoint for gaining or adding marketing opt-ins. Such consent to promotional communications is digital gold. Not only can it be used to add promotional offers to subsequent transactional emails, but it can also be used to drive more in-depth marketing campaigns. And it’s a fact: customers who have agreed to email marketing buy more often and more than those who have not given an opt-in.

Marketing Automation

Communication about a transaction doesn’t have to end after the purchase process is complete. On the contrary, transactions are the ideal trigger for automated follow-up campaigns such as satisfaction surveys, repurchase or service reminders, birthday emails, and more. This is the perfect way to quickly and easily develop advanced marketing automation processes.

Conclusion: Personalization is key

As with all online marketing measures, personalization and individualization are the key to transactional emails. Based on the available customer data (e.g. place of residence, age, customer status) as well as the context data (e.g. current location, end device), customized content can be easily compiled for all customers and played out individually.

With its AI-based personalization software, Acceleraid offers the possibility of smartly processing the required data and making it usable. It is even possible to include transaction data in real time and analyze shopping carts. These are features that are unparalleled on the market. The advantage is that this data can be used to configure highly effective and fully automated marketing campaigns and to set the right triggers at the right time along the customer life cycle. Hence, data-driven personalization is not only directly reflected in online sales, but also indirectly promotes sales: Closer customer loyalty through more satisfied customers, deeper insights into customer behavior and reactions, and precisely fitting customer segmentation as a basis for future decisions are just a few examples.