Transactional Emails in Email Marketing

One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses when it comes to email marketing is getting customers or leads to actually open and read the emails sent to them. Customers are often busy, distracted and aggravated with spam. This has been reflected through research which has shown that the mean open rate for emails is a measly 35.5%. What then is the solution for increasing the open rate of the emails you send? The answer is in creating more relevant and timely messages and the best way to achieve this is through transactional email. A transactional email is an electronic message that is sent once a website visitor has carried out a business transaction on a website. The email that is sent to verify a purchase of a product or service is a transactional email. In the same way, an email that alerts a client of the shipment of a particular product is a transaction email.

Why Send Transactional Email?

A transactional email is the most important and relevant electronic message you can sent to your customers since it is prompted or triggered by their actual behavior. Recipients of transactional email highly value these messages, too. This is why a transaction email has typically two to three times more click, open and conversion rates than a traditional opt-in or broadcast email. For businesses, this means that including an offer or promotion in a transaction email is two times to three more likely to be successfully read than sending the same information through a traditional email. A transaction message is automatically generated. Once you have created a template for your message and set your data integrations and business rules, all you will be left to do is to occasionally test and modify or optimize the messages.

Benefits of Transactional Email

Businesses can use transactional emails to invite their customers to buy from them again or take certain steps to build stronger relationships with the company such as signing up for email alerts. However, most marketers fail to make use of this good opportunity to successfully reach through to their customers and promote their products, which would in turn generate more revenue. Below are some benefits and capabilities that you may be missing out on by failing to take advantage of a transactional email service:

1. Personalization/ dynamic content: Personalize the message based not only on the customer’s present transaction info, but other additional information as well like the customer’s profile, cross-sell products and previous purchases.

2. Deliverability rates: Transactional email deliverability is much higher than that of traditional emails. This is because of better or faster authentication (DKIM, SPF) and a dedicated domain and IP address among others.

3. Design/branding: Change plaintext messages from traditional systems into more attractive HTML emails that are appealing to recipients and are brand-nurturing.

4. Reporting: Legacy systems hardly offer any form of reporting, which leaves marketers oblivious to click, open and bounce rates of their email messages. A dedicated transactional email service can provide detailed reports that give insight on the performance of transaction emails and opportunities or areas for improvement.

5. Real time content: Obtain real time information from third party sources such as recommendation engines and product reviews with a transactional email service.

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Jonathon Blocker is knowledgeable about information regarding transactional emails. Jon searches online for transactional email to find companies that offer services.