(This is a guest post from our friends over at Spently, which allows merchants to leverage Shopify notification emails as a stand-alone sales channel using marketing components, and follow up sequences.)
What are transactional emails? And, how can they help you grow your Shopify store?
Unlike newsletters, transactional emails are a set of post-purchase interactions carried out as a result of an action triggered by the user. These are notifications that include shipping confirmation, order confirmation, welcome emails, etc.
A common example is the order confirmation you receive after purchasing an item. Will the item you ordered arrive today? When can you expect your purchase to arrive?
Often, merely used a status update, without any marketing components. Primarily used to let customers know that their transactions were processed properly but that’s a mistake.
Paired with the fact that it’s considerably harder to sell to a new customer as opposed to an existing customer, which further incentivizes the need to foster your store’s relationship with its customers.
Now the question is, how can you use transactional emails to drive repeat purchases and foster customer engagement?
In this article, we’ll discuss the different types of transactional emails and how they can help you grow your business.
Order Confirmation Email
Statistics show that order confirmation emails have an open rate of 70.9%, which is 4x more than the average marketing email. Once a customer has made an order, they’re bound to check their emails to make sure that the transaction goes through, which means that they provide an opportunity to upsell your products.
Udemy does this well by upselling courses, similar to what the customer purchased:
While recommendations are effective for repeat customers, first-time customers need a bit more push to make another purchase. You could ask first-time customers to download your app, like your social media pages, or check out your website.
Here’s an example from Zulily:
Shipping Confirmation Emails
Like order confirmation emails, shipping confirmation emails provide you with another opportunity to market your products and promote your various marketing channels. After all, customers are excited to receive their products, so they’re bound to open them.
What are some great examples of shipping confirmation emails? Look no further than Sperry:
Here’s what’s great about this email:
Tracking your package: Sperry makes it easy for customers to track their orders. It also includes relevant information such as the shipping method, product to be shipped and shipping address.
Onboarding CTAs: it includes benefits to becoming a member of their site such as free shipping, free $10 e-card, free shoes every month, free gifts and a lot more. It’s pretty simple, but the benefits are hard to ignore.
Recommendations: the email includes product recommendations that are based on the product purchased.
Links to website and social media: links to social media sites and your online store is one way you can get customers to return to your site and make a purchase.
Cart Abandonment Emails
The average rate of shopping cart abandonment is 78%. So, reminding customers about their shopping cart can go a long way in turning an intent into an actual purchase.
A good tip when creating cart abandonment emails is to highlight the product’s value and provide product recommendations. After all, it’s one of the last opportunities you have to win your shoppers back.
Here’s a great example from ZOOSHOO:
The email has the picture and name of the product abandoned product in the shopping cart. There’s a noticeable CTA in the form of the “Check Out Now!” button. Plus, there’s a promotional code for free shipping and contact details.
It’s fairly simple, but it can often encourage wavering customers to make a purchase.
Customer Feedback Email
A type of email that ecommerce businesses seldom send is the feedback or survey email—sent a few days or weeks after the customer received the product.
The ecommerce beauty brand, Althea, asks its users for their rating and review:
What’s great about Althea’s email is that it contains all these elements of a great transactional email:
Provide an incentive. Answering a feedback form is simple, but what’s in it for your customers? Giving a small discount in exchange for their time and effort is one way you can get more reviews.
Reviews are featured on their product pages, and once users provide their feedback and give a star rating, it’s posted on their product pages. Providing social proof.
This is great because a lot of studies have consistently shown that star ratings and reviews are great for ecommerce stores. In fact, Reevo says that reviews can result in an 18% increase in sales and BrightLocal found that 44% prefer products with reviews within the past month. Interestingly, Capterra found that 52% of buyers trust a product more if it has fewer negative reviews.
Ask for user-generated content. Althea’s email also asks reviewers to upload a picture with their review to get featured on their website. This is one way you can gain quality content that can increase your brand awareness and attract new customers.
Ready to leverage transactional emails to their full potential?
There are fifteen different types of transactional emails, or shopify notification emails you can use to increase repeat purchases, and foster customer engagement.
While transactional are effective, creating them is another story, and coding with html can prove to be quite tedious. So that’s why Spently has created an email template builder, which can allow you to drag and drop these marketing components.
We might be biased, but we’d like it if you tried out Spently — a Shopify app, for your ecommerce stores.
Their starter plan provides you with the basic tools you need to customize transactional emails and drive repeat purchases using marketing components.
[…] order to establish this messaging, consider employing a service like Spently that helps you create and customize a set of Shopify notification emails that are triggered based on customer […]