Does your eCommerce business leverage transactional, or event triggered emails to increase sales? If not, you’re not only missing out on the opportunity foster engagement, but to make more money from the customers you currently have.

Studies show that transactional or event triggered emails, like order confirmations and abandoned shopping cart emails, receive 8 times as many opens compared to newsletters tailored for a bulk audience.

At this point, once customers make a purchase they’re programmed to check out their shipping confirmation or order confirmation emails to validate the success of their purchase — it’s like clock work. Order confirmation emails have an open rate of  70.9%, which is 4x more than your average email. So, it’s safe to say that this is a great opportunity to upsell your products and engage with customers

But how do you use these emails to engage with customers and increase sales? How can you use them to entice customers to shop again?

Read on to get transactional email tips you need to know to get more conversions.

Use Product Recommendations to Increase Average Order Value

You can increase average order value by adding product recommendations in your post-purchase email.

In fact, SmartMail reports that product recommendations in emails can increase CTR by 300% or more! This yields an increase in average order value per customer, and a higher customer lifetime value.

It’s important to think about the popularity, shopping patterns, purchase history and browsing behavior of your customers — make it as personalized as possible instead of making recommendations randomly.

This might entice customers to check out some items that they want. They can add new items to wish lists, or quickly buy the products that they might be interested in.

Here’s an example from Huckleberry.

They recommend trending and bestselling items. A simplistic layout, but the product pictures look great and the product names are easily visible.

Maximize Customer Lifetime Value With Discounts and Coupons

The reality is that a lot of customers won’t regularly visit your store. Depending on the product, they might make a purchase every 6 months, or if their a bargain hunter they might only make a purchase during a big sale like Black Friday & Cyber Monday.

This isn’t bad per se, but as a business, you need to make more money from your customers. Not just during sales, but on a regular basis.

That said—how do you get customers to spend more and maximize customer lifetime value? Simply send coupons and discounts.

You don’t need to send 50% discounts every time. You can send coupons for as low as 10 percent. You can also add a deadline like “only for today” to create a sense of urgency, and you can even include it for a replenishment email.

For example, Althea is an ecommerce store that sells Korean beauty products. To increase their sales for the day, they added a promo code in their emails.

The Dollar Shave Club tried a similar approach, but this time they sent a referral code at the bottom of their order confirmation email. It encourages customers to make successful referrals to earn free months.

Cart abandonment emails

How many times have you abandoned items on your shopping cart? Quite a bit if we had to guess.

In fact, Baymard found that the average rate of cart abandonment is a staggering 69.23%, which can seem like a depressing figure, but don’t fret — there’s still hope.

A study found that cart abandonment emails have high open rates. In fact, more than 45% or almost half of them are opened. Out of this number, 21% received click-throughs, and 50% of those who clicked made a purchase, so about 10% to 11% of these customers had converted, which is impressive.

In short, an email can go a long way into turning an intent to purchase into an actual purchase.

As its name suggests, abandoned shopping cart emails remind customers to view the items they abandoned in the cart. Some even add a small discount to make the sale.

Here’s an example of an ideal abandoned shopping cart email from Grove:

This is the perfect abandoned shopping cart email. It expires in 3 days and contains the abandoned items in full view. Plus, there’s a detailed breakdown of the price of each item. If you want to make a purchase, then simply click the “complete checkout” button.

Boost Your Ecommerce Store via Reviews and Surveys

If you buy products online, then you know the importance of online reviews. Since we don’t have your hands on a physical product, we simply rely on the feedback of users who have tried it out themselves.

Interested in a more quantitative overview of a review’s impact? Here’s what you need to know.

• 92% of consumers hesitate purchasing an item with no reviews (Fan and Fuel, 2016)
• 68% of consumers look for a reviewer’s experience, or the problems and issues they found (Fan and Fuel, 2016)
• Product reviews can increase conversion rates by 270% (Spiegel Research Center, 2017)
• Having five reviews increases the likelihood to purchase by almost four times (Spiegel Research Center, 2017)
• Product reviews for higher-priced products can increase conversion rates by 380% (Spiegel Research Center, 2017)

The point is that you need to get customer reviews.

One simple way you can do this is by sending a follow-up email requesting feedback in the form of a review. A good tip is to send this email a few days after a customer received the item, so that they can give quality feedback. Here’s an example from Casper:

It’s a simple trick, but it can get customers to make a purchase.

Ready to create your own?

There are a lot of ways you can use transactional, and event triggered emails to boost sales.

You can add product recommendations to give customers a glimpse of the items that they could own. You could also send abandoned shopping cart emails to turn an interest, into an actual conversion.

And if you want to improve your ecommerce store and significantly increase the likelihood of purchase, then simply ask for reviews.

If you want to create and personalize these emails quickly, then you can use Spently to build emails with simple simple drag and drop functionality. No need to learn coding. They make it easy for you to create customized emails that match your brand’s personality and aesthetic.

How will you utilize transactional, and event-based emails to increase sales? Let us know in the comments below.


Guest Post from Sal Noorani at Spently. 

 

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