Guest post by Sal Noorani, Growth Lead at Spently

Transactional emails are usually sent during financial transactions. They include notifications like shipping confirmation emails, order confirmation emails, or POS receipt emails among many others.

These emails update users about their transactions or confirm their purchase. Other types of transactional emails like follow-ups are used to engage and incentivize customers to make another purchase.

Now, how can merchants use transactional emails to cultivate engagement, and foster consumer relationships? Before we start here’s a list of the different types of emails you ought to personalise:

• Order confirmation
• Order cancelled
• Order refund
• Draft order invoice
• Abandoned checkout
• POS receipt
• Gift card created
• Shipping update
• Shipment delivered
• Account welcome
• Password reset
• Contact customer
• Winback emails (follow-up)
• Replenishment emails (follow-up)

Let’s talk about some of our favorites,

1. Order Confirmation Emails

Order confirmation emails are sent to customers after they place their order. They may also be sent after an order is cancelled or refunded.

Sleeknote found that these types of emails have an open rate of 70%, which is the highest average open rate for all email types.

Here’s an example of an order confirmation email from Chewy:

The email includes the summary of the order and a receipt that clearly shows the product’s name and price.

You can also leverage this captive audience (based on it’s impressive open rate) by including product recommendations, referral codes, or a discount code which can be used towards their next purchase.

2. Abandoned checkout emails

SaleCycle found that the average rate of abandoned checkouts is 75.60%. It’s a pretty big number, so you ought to think of ways to reignite a customer’s interest on the products they left behind.

One tip is to send cart abandonment emails that remind a customer about their purchase.

Here’s an example from Birchbox:

Birchbox sends cart abandonment emails that include the star rating, links to product reviews and a CTA to the shopping cart.

If a customer has no plans to buy the product, they are also sent top-rated recommendations from the store.

3. Shipping Confirmation Emails

Shipping confirmation emails are sent once orders are fulfilled.

If a shipment takes several weeks, there are several follow-up emails you can send to update customers about their purchase.

These include a shipping update email which are sent when an orders’ tracking number is updated. Other types include shipment delivered emails which are given after the order’s fulfilled.

Like Barkbox, most shipping confirmation emails include a DHL tracking number which lets customers track their package. There’s also information on the number of days it would take for the product to be delivered.

4. Customer Feedback Emails

Were the customers satisfied with the products? How can you get tips to help you improve your service? A customer feedback email lets you send a survey or feedback a few days after the customer has received the product.

Studies found that online reviews are crucial to making an online purchase. In fact, Fan and Fuel found that 97% of shoppers say reviews influence buying decisions.

Meanwhile, Spiegel Research Center also found that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%. Additionally, having five reviews can increase purchase likelihood by about four times.

So, asking a customer for feedback is only natural if you want to make more sales.

Here’s an example from Tailor brands:

Like Tailor Brands, you can get discount coupons to incentivize customers to make a purchase.

You can also ask for feedback regarding shipping to find out if there are issues on the quality of the items to be delivered, speed of delivery and more!

5. Follow-up Emails

Follow-up emails like win-back emails and replenishment emails can cultivate engagement after post-purchase.

Win back emails

You can send win back emails after 30 days, 60 days or 180 days—to remind an inactive customer to return to your online store. Win back campaigns typically have a 12% read (or open) rate, which is a good number considering that customers may not have engaged with the brand for weeks or months.

Replenishment emails

Replenishment emails are used to remind customers to purchase products again, if the products they’ve previously bought are about to run out.

Ready to Use Personalised Transactional Emails In Your Ecommerce Stores?

These are just some of the personalised transactional, and follow-up emails merchants are sending.

Most marketers will tell you that transactional emails are necessary for your online store, more specifically, emails that match your brand.

There’s no right or wrong way, every business is unique. So we encourage you to experiment and place different marketing components in these emails to see what works for you.

And it’s understood that dealing with HTML can be challenging, so that’s why Spently has an email template builder designed for Shopify merchants to drag, drop and customize different elements of their emails. Merchants can also utilize analytics within the app to see how their emails are performing, month over month — allowing them to iterate based on data.

There's no need to learn how to code, because we have that covered.

Our starter plan includes basic tools that you can use to get started. So you can create on-brand emails that cultivate engagement and drive repeat purchase on your store.

You can always visit our website for inspiration based on what some of our other merchants are doing.

About Spently

Spently allows merchants to leverage Shopify notification emails as a stand-alone sales channel using marketing components, and follow up sequences.