6 Steps to More Effective Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are all too important for your business if you want to build long-lasting customer relationships, trust, and loyalty. According to the 2020 Benchmark Report by SparkPost, almost two-thirds (65.7%) of the 300+ professionals surveyed found transactional emails critical for their business engagement, while 59.9% of the respondents felt that transactional emails are extremely important for customer retention.

That is why sending transactional emails that are recognizable, interactive, and speaks to your brand is as important as delivering the correct information at the right time. Not paying enough attention to any one of these can inevitably work against your business or brand.

However, you can prevent any potential mistake in your transactional emails by following some proven practices. Here, we have compiled 6 of such best practices for sending transactional emails, by adopting which you can deliver optimal customer experience.

Design your transactional emails around your brand

If you plan to build a long-lasting impression, then branding is important, even for your transactional emails. Your customers are used to perceiving and interacting with your brand more than with your business. From colors & designs to conversations & presentation styles, your customers are acquainted with your business's unique look & feel.

Excluding this brand identity from your transactional emails might leave your customers in an almost foreign environment. So, design your transactional emails around your brand, just like you do with your marketing emails, and ensure a consistent customer experience.

Use separate addresses for transactional emails & promotional emails

Marketing and other promotional emails may land in the spam or junk folder. And sending a transactional email from the same email address may do the same. But, in this case, it will mean that your customers won't be able to interact with your transactional emails in time.

Hence, the key to ensuring that your customers have successfully interacted with your transactional emails is that you land them in the inbox. To do that, separating the email addresses for transactional and promotional emails is the most effective.

A recognizable email address is the key.

Using an unrecognizable email address that doesn't match your business at all is a one-way ticket to being deleted or marked as spam by your customers. Why? Because they are waiting for an email from your brand and not from some questionable & unreliable address. So, make sure that you are using an email address that represents your brand.

“No-reply” addresses do NOT help

The whole point of sending transactional emails to your customers is to improve engagement and interaction. But when you send an email from a "no-reply" email address, you shut off that option and discourage your customers from reaching out to you. Naturally, they can feel frustrated with your brand. Using a real address that allows replies, on the other hand, can drive engagement and improve customer satisfaction.

Make it concise and readable

Your transactional emails are important and often time-critical. By keeping your email's subject line, pre-header text and body, concise, relevant, and to-the-point, you can make your emails more readable and reduce your recipients' action time.

Use responsive email templates

The key to sending successful transactional emails is to make them convenient for everyone. So, even when you personalize your transactional emails, using a responsive template will enable you to maximize engagement. You can make sure that your email fits a mobile screen or add accessible CTA buttons and important hyperlinks.

Wrapping Up

Transactional emails are equally important as your marketing emails to deliver a consistent and powerful customer experience. By following these practices, you will be able to incorporate your brand identity within your transactional emails and retain your brand's uniqueness without compromising the quality of information or delivery.

To implement these practices to the fullest, you can choose a secure & reliable transactional email provider who will provide you with robust & powerful tools and responsive templates to create interactive emails and allow you to track them in real-time.