How To Generate Sales With The Power Of Transactional Emails Marketing

One of the most essential aspects of any business is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction determines whether your business is a success or otherwise. Customer satisfaction depends on the quality of products or services you offer to your customers, but most importantly, customer satisfaction depends on how you relate with your customers. Business needs to build a personal and healthy relationship with its customers. One way of doing just that is constant communication between you and your customers. You need to be keeping your customers informed of your new products/services or change in your way of operation. And for businesses running e-commerce, you need to have a communication platform that you can use to notify, confirm, and verify your customers’ activities on your platform. For example, whenever a customer places an order, you need to inform them that they have successfully done so. Because you do not want your customers guessing whether their important actions were successful or not.

SMS has been one of the main communication channels used by businesses to engage their customers, this is due to the stability of the channels, as well as the fact that SMS has the widest coverage, and a high read rate. But recently, communication by email has gathered steam. Today, businesses are adopting email services to communicate everything to do with their services to their customers. One of the essential modes of email communication businesses use is Transactional email.

So, what is a transactional email?

Transactional email is a mode of customer communication by businesses in which automated and real-time email messages are sent to customers after completion of certain actions in the business’ online system. Sometimes referred to as “triggered” emails, Transactional Emails contain personalized information about the action the customer took in the system. Examples of transactional emails are password resets, order placement confirmations, and payment confirmations.

Due to the personalized content of these emails, transactional emails are the most highly engaged emails businesses send to their customers. Studies show that transactional emails have eight times more open rates than the rest of the emails, and can generate more revenues. This makes sense if you think of your flight confirmation email you received; you might have even bookmarked the email so that you could easily refer to it before and during traveling.

Transactional emails can sometimes be confused with Marketing emails since they are both used by businesses to engage their customers. But there is a difference between the two, in terms of their purpose and how they are initiated. Transactional emails are automatically triggered by an action initiated by the customer and automatically sent out; while marketing emails are triggered and manually sent out by the business’ marketing personnel. In terms of purpose, transactional emails are intended to facilitate transactions, while marketing emails are meant to promote a product or service.

What is a transactional email API?

Cloud-based Bulk SMS API technology has advanced a long way for the past decade, both in terms of functionality and integration. An API is what makes you able to integrate different functionalities into your personalized online system. For instance, if you have your customized e-commerce platform and want to engage your customers through transactional emails, you need to integrate email functionality to the platform – that is where transactional email API comes in. It allows you to generate and send transactional emails directly from your e-commerce platform. Additionally, it allows you to seamlessly manage and monitor all the transactional emails in your customer database with the help of email data generated from email analytics.

How does transactional email work?

Transactional email allows businesses to engage their customers with information relevant to them. These emails can provide requested information, or remind them of the need to take a specific action; for instance, if they place orders but forget to make payment.

Transactional emails use transactional SMS API or SMTP integration to send emails to their customers. This typically requires the developers to build a system that sends coded templates to specific customers’ numbers in response to specific actions initiated by the customer.

Transactional emails are commonly informative; the following are ways through which they are commonly used:

2-FA and Password Reset – Two-factor authentication is a system that provides a second layer of user verification to users trying to login to a website implementing the system. When a user feeds in their login credentials to a login page, a 2-FA process is initiated where a code is sent to the user via a transactional email as a means of authenticating the user. Also, a user that has forgotten their login password to a system that implements a transaction email service can request a password reset. A confirmation of the request is communicated to the user via a transactional email.

Order confirmations and updates – For businesses with online stores, it is practically impossible to keep updating each customer who makes an order of their order status, payment, and shipping. Transactional emails provide a solution. The system populates unique data for each transaction.

Welcome emails – For businesses, it is a good practice to welcome customers registering in your e-commerce platform. But it is impossible to keep sending welcoming messages to all of your visitors. With transactional email,

Benefits of a transactional email

The following are benefits for businesses deploying transaction email services:

Develops customer trust – Customers trust and appreciate businesses that keep them apprised of the transactions and other important information, and transactional email services offer them just that. This, in turn, fosters respect and trust customers have with the business.

Increase customer engagement – The personalized nature of transactional email service creates an intimate relationship between business and customers. With this close relationship, the interaction between the business and customer increases; and an increase in interaction results in a strong relationship.

Increase in sales – When customers come across photos and descriptions of products they recently purchased alongside similar products, there will most certainly be a desire to buy similar products. This will ultimately lead to upsell opportunities and an increase in sales.

Brand recognition – Transactional email service provides a great opportunity for businesses to strengthen their brand. The more customers see the business name in their email inbox, the more they memorialize it. For new customers, seeing the business’ name at the time of making an order may not cause them to remember the company in the future. However, when a confirmation message arrives minutes later bearing the company’s brand logo, then days later the order arrives packaged in the company’s branded package, the customer will surely remember all about the company.

Best practices while sending transactional email

While Transactional emails are meant to convey important information to customers, they cannot be too overt or aggressive. The following are the best practices of using Transactional email service:

• Structurally, cite the name of the transaction in the subject line, and the content in the body. The content should be based on the necessary facts about the transaction. Also, create a professional touch by using the company name in the sender field and a company logo in the header. Attaching company details to the emails not only makes the recipient easily notice the sender, but things such as the company logo also help in strengthening the business brand.

• The appearance of email also matters which means things like font style, color, and font size should be reasonable and presentable. Utilize HTML instead of plain text to create a more interesting and engaging message.

• Transactional email service can also be a great avenue for pushing marketing messages. Put a lively promotional content underneath the relevant transactional data or in a sidebar. This can include purchase proposals, a list of products that have already been purchased, and coupons.

• Accompany the transaction emails with links to your other services, products, and any other essential information on your platform

• Express appreciation or gratefulness to your customers.

• Customize your email to show the customer’s buying and purchase rates or patterns

Use software to track the effectiveness of your transactional emails. Play with designs and content if the emails are not inciting enough customer clicks.

Apart from the above best practice, other things should be avoided when deploying transactional emails such as exaggeration on products, services, or price reductions to get sales or prospects. Also, avoid generic promotional content that offers the same product recommendations to multiple customers.