E-mail Marketing: Three Ways to Boost Revenue on Transactional E-mails

Transactional e-mails, those key customer touchpoints that marketers typically use for purchase confirmations and shipping notifications, among others, offer the opportunity to reach customers with additional cross-sell and upsell opportunities. But not many online merchants use them for such promotional purposes. A recent study by e-mail marketing solutions provider Silverpop found that just 21 percent of online merchants use any kind of promotional content in transactional e-mails.

Given that properly targeted offers in transactional e-mails can generate as much as $500,000 in additional annual revenue, according to JupiterResearch, this channel seems rife with potential. And in its recent report, Silverpop revealed the following best practices that can be used by merchants sending transactional e-mails to enhance the customer experience and boost revenue:

1. Keep your name in the subject line. Eighty-six percent of marketers analyzed in Silverpop’s study included their company name in the subject lines of transactional e-mails. This is important not only for brand identity, but what’s more, e-mails with a company or brand name in the subject line have open rates about 7 percent higher than those that don’t, according to Silverpop. And because online shoppers often are making purchases from several different retailers, it’s helpful for them to be able to quickly spot your company’s receipt.

2. Use the customer’s name in the body of the message. Simple personalization, such as including customers’ first and last names, can triple conversion on e-mails with offers. But 44 percent of marketers aren’t using any kind of personalization in transactional e-mails, Silverpop’s study notes.

3. Sell, sell, sell. The biggest advantage that transactional e-mails have is that customers trigger the messages themselves, so they’re expecting to receive these e-mails and are likely to open them. “The timeliness of promotional offers that transactional messages [contain],” Silverpop notes “can generate significant revenue at little additional cost.”

For a copy of Silverpop’s study “How Top Retailers Use Transactional E-mail,” visit http://www.silverpop.com/landing/pressreleases/21.html