If you think emails are outdated, think again: a report by DMA states that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you will receive $32 in return.
Emails do great in terms of business promotion, customer retention, reduction of cart abandonment rates. In addition to the well-known promotional newsletters and mailouts, there is another way to leverage your sales: transaction emails. Do not underestimate the power of welcome emails and order confirmation – they can actually benefit your business more than promotional ones.
Why your transactional emails work magic
Numbers don’t lie: transactional emails have 8 times higher open and click-through rates and can generate 6 times more revenue than an average promotional mail. What’s so special about them?
A transactional email is an email between one sender and one receiver. While marketing emails are sent in a bulk, transactional ones are sent in response to a certain action: website registration, payment for an order, notification, etc. Such emails are usually awaited by the user, which adds to their value and makes them a strong marketing tool.
Some types of transactional emails work especially well for the brand’s promotion. To help you take your marketing strategy to the next level, we have collected the best practices of using Magento transactional emails for the marketing purpose.
Welcome emails
Welcome emails are the first ones you receive after registering on the website. They are also one of the best ways to engage the customer right away and do some selling.
The best way to engage the user right away is to offer an incentive in a welcome email. It can be a small gift, a discount or whatever you are willing to give away. At this stage, you don’t need to upsell or cross-sell: an offered discount on the first purchase is convincing enough for the user.
Cart abandonment
One of the most critical pain points for any e-commerce business is the abandoned cart rate. Barilliance states that 3 out of 4 shoppers leave the cart without completing a purchase and the overall cart abandonment rate was almost 79% in 2017.
Cart abandonment emails work as friendly reminders and prove to be efficient in getting the traffic back to your store. When sending such emails, you can emphasize the limited amount of time left to complete the order or that the item is running out of stock.
Order confirmation
The order confirmation emails offer you a great chance to cross-sell. The emails that include other products score 20% higher on transactions than the ones with no recommendations.
A good example is an email that lists all the products the user has in the cart and then suggests to add some additional items to the cart before you ship the order. Or you can copycat the AliExpress strategy: upon receiving an email about the order confirmation, the user will see a list of recommended products at the bottom of the letter.
Feedback gathering
To learn about your customers’ preferences, store performance, and possible improvements, you will need to conduct surveys and communicate with the customers. To encourage the users to share their opinion, offer them an incentive in exchange for a favor.
In the feedback gathering emails, you can ask for the product review, feedback on your service, overall store rating, etc. In addition, this will contribute to personalization and increase customer loyalty by showing that their opinion matters.
Reminders
If the user has not visited your store for a long period of time, you can reactivate them with a follow-up email. In such an email you can ask how the user is doing, whether they like the products they’ve bought from you, and include some news that they can catch up with.
It’s important not to pressure the user with information, though. If they have not visited your store for some time, they definitely would not want to be overwhelmed with heavy promotions. So play it safe, offer an incentive upon their return and don’t push too hard.
How to implement transactional emails for your Magento
Magento is known for its extended functionality so one of the options is to use the built-in features and deploy the available email templates. But if you want more customized and individual emails, it would be a better idea to use the external email service. Magento allows seamless customization with a great number of third-party services, so you can easily integrate the biggest email services within your Magento store.
Our top choices of the external email services for Magento are:
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Oracle Responsys
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Dotmailer
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MailChimp
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Remarkety
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iContact
Out of them, we consider Oracle Responsys and iContact to be the best options.
Oracle Responsys is a scalable and flexible platform that is known for its customization options and variety of features. The service is perfect for big corporate clients but has one flaw: it does not offer an extension for Magento. It’s not crucial though since such an extension can be easily developed by a skilled Magento development team.
The iContact service has not gained popularity yet but seems great in terms of features and performance. It is very user-friendly, has easy intuitive functional and offers advanced analytics. iContact also helps with the creation of content and design for your campaigns and has a ready Magento module.
Transactional emails supply you with valuable information about the customers and their actions (i.e. cart abandonment, sign-up for the newsletter, etc.). The data then goes to your CRM system and can be used for the development and improvement of your marketing efforts. To transform the whole process of email sending and data processing in one single flow, it would be a good idea to integrate a CRM system with Magento as well.
Post written by Irina Linnik, an e-commerce observer at Onilab.com
