Have you ever received a confirmation email, you know when you bought that new pencil sharpener online, or when you signed up for the newsletter on gerbil rearing? That was a transactional email, and they’re sweeping the land.
I’ve been asked several times about transactional emails in my travels. It’s obvious to anyone who has tracked open rates that these emails can have the highest rates out there, because honestly, this is one of the few cases where the customer truly wants to hear from you. Whether you’re telling your customer that their item has shipped, or notifying them that a monetary transaction has been completed, customers tend to open these emails. So this is the perfect email to put it in the hands of your marketing department — but many companies don’t see it that way.
“There’s no way, whether due to business or technical reasons, that marketing will own our transactional emails.”
This was a response I recently heard from a leading financial transaction company whom I was talking to about email marketing. For better or worse, they had very tightly integrated these emails into their operational software, and they weren’t going to change that. For those companies out there who can make the switch, I can only urge them harder and harder to do so now while you can. There is no reason that transactional emails need be plain text! You can use text and graphics here; you can do more than just tell them what they are expecting. And by doing more, you will entice them to do more, and that’s just what you want.
Here’s a good article from clickz that expounds upon this same topic.
