Hello Again: Building Customer Loyalty with Transactional Emails

The Customer Journey Doesn't End at Checkout!

The buy button is clicked, the order is placed — for most merchants, that's the best possible ending to the customer journey. But anyone who leans back satisfied at this point is missing out on half the story. Looking closer, the customer journey is far from over once the purchase is complete: order and shipping confirmations, invoices, delivery updates, and other transactional emails typically follow. And 70 percent of recipients actually open them.

Transactional Emails Are the Vehicle of Email Marketing

… that enjoys the greatest attention from recipients. It's all the more surprising, then, how neglectfully many merchants still treat them: bland system emails sent straight from the online shop's backend make transactional emails feel like a tedious necessity. All too often, they don't even display correctly in the recipient's inbox.

Service and transaction communication is, without question, leaving a lot of potential on the table. According to a 2020 study by Artegic AG, around 65 percent of surveyed companies are well aware of this. And yet a certain uncertainty persists over what transactional emails can actually offer as a marketing tool. Data protection and other legal questions in particular give many decision-makers pause. These concerns aren't unfounded. But there's plenty of information available, and a company's data protection officer is usually just a phone call away. Once properly reviewed and set up, transactional emails become, with just a few adjustments, an efficient tool for customer loyalty:

High-Quality Design

Many transactional emails rank about as aesthetically pleasing as the shipping labels they reference. Flexible HTML templates that merchants can customize to their needs create a far more polished impression than the shop backend's standard templates. Responsive design is a must here: since more than half of all customers check their email primarily on mobile, optimal display on smartphones is especially important.

Add-On Offers

What could be more natural than including cross-sells and coupons alongside a purchase confirmation? Add-on offers are still rare in transactional emails, yet they're absolutely worth considering: the right shirt to go with a new jacket, matching headphones for a new smartphone, or the right hotel for a vacation destination all have their moment here. If customers have browsed different product categories throughout their journey, they should also be offered deals from those categories. The only requirement is an opt-in for promotional communication. Artegic's checklist, for example, offers more detail on this.

Marketing Opt-Ins

Sending emails to convey information necessary for a purchase is permitted — indeed required — without the recipient's consent. Merchants should take advantage of this: a transactional email can be a low-friction touchpoint for gaining or expanding marketing opt-ins. Such consent for promotional communication is digital gold. It allows not only future transactional emails to include promotional offers, but also enables broader marketing campaigns. And the facts speak for themselves: customers who have opted in to email marketing buy more often, and buy more, than those who haven't.

Marketing Automation

Communication about a transaction doesn't have to end once the purchase process is complete. On the contrary: transactions are the ideal trigger for automated follow-up campaigns such as satisfaction surveys, repurchase or service reminders, birthday emails, and much more. It's the perfect opportunity to build sophisticated marketing automation processes quickly and easily.

Conclusion: Personalization Is Everything

As with all online marketing initiatives, personalization and individualization are everything when it comes to transactional emails too. Based on available customer data (e.g., location, age, customer status) and contextual data (e.g., current location, device), tailored content can easily be assembled and delivered individually to every customer.

With its AI-based personalization software, Acceleraid makes it possible to smartly prepare and put the required data to use. This even includes incorporating transaction data in real time and analyzing shopping carts — features that are hard to find elsewhere on the market. The advantage: this data makes it possible to configure highly effective, fully automated marketing campaigns and set the right triggers at exactly the right moment throughout the customer lifecycle. Data-driven personalization thus shows up not only directly in online revenue, but also drives sales indirectly: stronger customer loyalty through greater satisfaction, deeper insights into customer behavior and reactions, and precise customer segmentation as a basis for future decisions are just a few examples.