As an Internet business owner or marketer, you undoubtedly need to be aware of the existence of transactional mailings and how they can impact your promotional efforts in a major way.
In fact, if you have customers with whom you must interact regularly via email (who doesn't?), then, in some way, you are already using transactional mailings.
What is a transactional shipment?
It is a communication that a company sends to its contacts, prospects or customers to allow them to follow up on some action they have performed on the company's website or in some other medium or instance, whether online or offline.
It is the actions taken by these contacts, prospects or customers that trigger a transactional mailing, and the most frequent are messages and notifications such as the following:
- Confirmation of purchase
- Notice of dispatch or delivery of goods
- Download documents, brochures or articles
- Status of returns, exchanges
- Customer service responses
- Collection letters
- Electronic invoices
- Non-payment alerts, delinquencies
- Warranty policies
- Bank, insurance or pension transactions
In some cases, they may ask the recipient to perform some additional action, while in others they simply seek to confirm that the process initiated by the contact has been successfully completed.
The main features common to all transactional shipments are:
- They must be relevant to a specific transaction or interaction that a recipient has performed on a website or application.
- They are not sent regularly or in bulk like promotional messages.
What makes transactional mailings so powerful is that, statistically proven, they have incredibly high open and click-through rates.
It is sufficient to observe the following infographics and note the difference between transactional and bulk or promotional mailings.
What is the reason for this?
First of all, it should be noted that the following are sent daily more than 191 million messages worldwide. This is equivalent to about 48 new messages in each inbox per day. More than half of them come from companies and are intended to promote products or services.
Numbers like these explain why it is so difficult to capture and keep the attention of recipients with an email marketing campaign.
It is in this scenario that transactional shipments are set to take over.
A transactional mailing may not only yield open rates of 100%In addition, of those who open and read the messages, many will open them more than once. They also achieve targeted click-through rates ! 17%! On the contrary, the majority of promotional campaigns and mass mailings only reflect opening rates of 15% and click-through rates of a negligible 3%..
This is because transactional mailings respond to a direct action by the recipient, so they are of interest to them; it is something they expect to receive or, at the very least, are not surprised to receive. Such a message will inevitably catch the recipient's attention when they see it in their inbox and will proceed to open it.
And this is something that you can get great benefits from, if you know how.
Improve click-through rate and revenue with your transactional mailings
Each of these mailings represents an excellent opportunity to promote your business and further engage your customers. The important thing is that the message sent is always within the transactional scope, to maintain the interest of your recipients and to comply with legislation (Can Spam, Exclusion Lists such as Robinson, etc.).
How to achieve this and with what potential improvements?
First, make your messages more interesting communication pieces. Use a variety of templates where your brand image always stands out and is easily recognizable; then do A/B testing of different formats to establish which ones work best in terms of increasing conversions. Make what they see (design) and how they interact with what they see (user experience) memorable.
On the other hand, increase your audience's exposure to your transactional mailings as much as is reasonable, in a larger set of smaller messages. For example, send them two or more welcome messages, in series, between which there is a transactional component. This has been shown to increase revenue by 13% or more.
Personalize your transactional mailings and use them for cross-selling, referencing information specific to each individual customer/user. Include the recipient's name in your messages and, when possible (for example, when sending sales invoices), encourage them to purchase other products or services that complement their previous purchase.
Finally, learn to say thank you in your messages. If you send a customer an invoice, a welcome message or a renewal notice, expressly thank them in the subject line and in the body of the message. Something as simple as this can increase open and click-through rates by more than 35%!
In short, transactional mailings can be powerful tools for business owners and marketers, if used wisely.
More details, suggestions and tips on how to boost the benefits of your transactional mailings, in this eBook.
