Posted by Gareth Cutter on 1st October 2009 to
Best Practice Email marketing and e-commerce, birds of a feather. It doesn’t quite rhyme, but stand these two channels next to each other and you realise how well they work together.
Historically, transactional emails have a higher open-rate than promotional messages. It’s not surprising since the customer has already had some heavy-duty engagement with your business. You’ll probably have set their expectations by telling them an email will be sent to their inbox (whether it’s a receipt, confirmation email, discount code etc). These are usually sent as auto-responders: emails sent automatically when a trigger response is noted.
There are many things you could do with the heightened attention these auto-responder emails command. Have you considered monetising them by including links to related items / special offers? With an increased likelihood of transactional emails being opened, here is a space where you can drive extra revenue back into your e-commerce site.
Links to related items with special offers could be an especially lucrative tactic: suddenly, an enhanced consumer experience is available to the shopper for a lower price. If you back the offer up with persuasive, enthusiastic marketing copy, you could encourage even those sitting on the fence to at least take a look at your site again.
You might also want to try getting upset customers in side when their orders have been delayed or cancelled by sending them an apology email with a complimentary offer. Leaving the shopper holding an empty bag on this occasion is likely to cost you more than just an individual transaction, but a life-long customer instead.
In short, these low maintenance, triggered transactional auto-responders can improve the customer experience in so many ways, including those demonstrated above, without consuming your marketing team’s time that you’d be cuckoo not to use them.
