The Green Light On Transactional Email Marketing!
Piotr KrupaNo, we’re not flip-flopping…it’s consumers that are changing. And that’s great news for those of you who have taken some of our blog advice seriously and created some good-looking promo ads and coupons for your email communications. Excepting transactional emails, right?
Wrong! Our friends at MarketingSherpa, Borrell and a bunch of other reliable sources are showing it’s time to bring your transactional emails into the marketing fold. The revenue potential will astound you! In fact, a newly released Jupiter report, “The Transactional Messaging Imperative,” estimates that transactional email marketing could generate an extra $2.9 million dollars annually for one retailer.
So get ready to take action based on these 2 proven data points:
- Consumers open and read transactional emails far more often than email promotions or even newsletters (more than twice as often)!
- They no longer care about whether you include a promotion, as long as the information regarding their account ($ we mean) is easy to read and accurate. In fact, they’d welcome any improvements to the look and feel.
We hope you’re thinking up-sell/cross-sell because this is HUGE. And it’s relatively easy. Our only word of caution is not to skew the stats back to where they were in 06 by abusing this new tolerance. We’re not saying bury your ad or coupon at the bottom of the page in 8 pt type either, but just keep the account and/or invoice information primary in the message − no clutter, no interruptions. It’s perfectly fine to use a sidebar ad, or colored text, and don’t forget the links!
Just make sure your transactional emails are attractive, easy and tasteful, then starting tracking your opens, CTRs, and Google navigation stats just like you do with promotional emails. We’re pretty sure, if you do it right, you’re going to get some great returns. Kaching anyone?
Tags
autoresponders, email, email marketing, list building, news
September 30th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
But just to nudge Simon, I want them as part of the same tracking and feedback loop with ISPs, same blacklist etc.
Many “transactions” with a website don’t require a potential customer to pull out their credit card, they could just be signing up to receive comment notifications on a blog post.