As an internet marketer, you should always be on the lookout for the best possible ways to expand your success and conversions across all possible channels.
One of the key methods by which you’re probably doing this involves promotional email marketing via the usual process of collecting email address via opt-in forms and relationships with existing customers.
While this is an effective strategy that does drive sales, there is another often overlooked and potentially even more powerful route to extremely high email conversions that you might still be missing out on.
It involves the use of transactional emails and it’s capable of delivering some truly astonishing results. And we have the infographic to back up this claim, courtesy of Easy SMTP.
As you’ll see if you click the infographic link above, transactional emails are all those one at a time mailings that your existing users receive when they transact in some specific way with your website or online application. These don’t have to be financial transactions and in fact they will frequently include email notices such as sales e-receipts, shipping confirmations, comment notifications, welcome messages and password or account resets.
Unlike bulk promotional emails, they are specific to individual customer activity and aren’t mass mailed on a regular schedule.
The interesting factors about transactional emails are their extremely high open and click rates! On average, they are opened at a rate of more than 100% and see unique click rates of 15% or more. Compare this to the 13% open and 3% click rates that normally go with bulk mailing campaigns.
Why Transactional Messages Are So Effective
In a digital world where the average inbox is flooded daily with at least 48 emails of the 191 billion sent each day, the transactional email margins above represent an enormous marketing advantage.
Before we get down to making them work for your email campaigns, we need to briefly cover why they convert so well. The simple reason for these high conversion figures lies in their highly direct relevance to their recipient. Your site users click on transactional messages because they tie directly into some recent activity of theirs and contain some sort of valuable information as a result.
This is the essential nature of your transactional messages and while you can use them to promote your site, you have to keep them essentially transactional; not only because you want them to continue converting highly but also because you want to make sure you comply with the CAN SPAM act against spam mail, as explained in more detail in the SMTP infographic.
Now let’s see how you can do just this; take advantage of your transactional mail-outs without ruining the characteristics that make them convert so well.
How To Make Transactional Emails Work For You
The trick with successfully promoting through transactional messages is to keep them essentially transactional while also using promotion strategies within them. Here’s how you can do this:
Serialize Your Messages
The more genuinely relevant individual transactional messages you send out, the wider your exposure to your clients eyeballs. By serializing single large notifications into 2 or more smaller messages sent in parts, you can promote your business in each one and increase your revenues by as much as 13%.
Make Your Transactional Messages Social
Adding social media share buttons that link to your wider online presence in each transactional message can increase unique clicks by as much as a hefty 55%. You can even offer bonuses and discounts to users who click your social buttons after receiving their order or shipping confirmation.
Personalize Your Emails And Cross Sell
Adding a personal touch to each transactional message you send and making specific recommendations based on your users previous purchasing and activity history can give you access to conversion increases of 41% for unique clicks and 20% for increased sales!
By also adding a simple “thank you” notice to each one of your shipping and purchase related transactional messages, you can increase clicks by as much as a further 35%.
Finally, Experiment And Test Everything
Don’t just send out one kind of transactional message format; try multiple versions for each kind of message and use email analytics to see which ones improve your conversions even more.
Check out the full infographic from Easy SMTP below!
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