Best Practices For Transactional Emails For Ecommerce Businesses

by Matthew Zajechowski

If your ecommerce business sends out ‘Welcome’ transactional emails to attract new customers, what do you include in the subject line? How about in the body of the email? (Go ahead and look it up if you can’t remember the exact wording. We’ll wait.) Does the subject line contain your brand name? Is the email concise? Do you include links to your social media channels? If you answered ‘no’ to any of those last three questions, you may be losing out on conversions.

Transactional emails can help you increase conversions and get the most out of every interaction with customers and potential customers, but only if those emails are carefully optimized. And it’s not just those initial ‘Welcome to our store’ emails that you need to be thinking about. Abandoned cart notifications, purchase confirmations, and shipping confirmations are all valuable types of transactional emails to send to consumers who have recently made a purchase or are moving through the sales funnel.

The people at the email delivery service Easy SMTP spend a lot of time thinking about best practices for transactional emails, and they’ve created an infographic to help ecommerce businesses improve their email communications. Here are just a few of the key takeaways that Easy SMTP found:

It pays to be clear. Your transactional emails aren’t the right place to be cultivating an air of mystery; research shows that vague subject lines reduce open rates by as much as 80%. Do yourself a favor and make sure that your brand or company name is included in your transactional email subject lines.
It pays to be persistent. Just because a shopper has abandoned their cart doesn’t mean that you should abandon hope. While 67.45% of online shopping carts are abandoned, sending transactional emails reminding shoppers about their abandoned items can reduce abandonment by up to 40%.
It pays to ask for feedback. When you send emails asking for product reviews, only an average of 1 in 10 customers respond, but those reviews are valuable. 63% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase on a site that includes customer reviews.

To learn more about best practices for transactional emails, check out the original infographic from Easy SMTP below.