Transactional emails are an often underestimated tool within a personalization strategy; in reality they play a key role in maintaining a relationship with your customers, as well as representing very important opportunities to try to entice them toward a new purchase. In this article we will investigate how personalizing them, with targeted product or content recommendations, can make a huge difference on your sales results and the level of engagement of your consumers
What are transactional emails
First, let’s quickly define what transactional emails are. They are that entire set of communications, not sent in bulk, that are triggered by a user action. Thus, emails, to give a few examples, confirming a subscription, a welcome or even an email that conveys a recurring invoice (yes, we can derive value from these too!) are considered transactional. Specifically, however, we will focus on emails that are most typically related to an ecommerce business. In this context, transactional emails are considered, for example:
- Confirmation of registration
- Abandoned Trolley
- Purchase receipt
- Shipment Tracking
- Invitation to conduct a review on the purchased product
Some of these emails, one above all the shipment tracking email, have extremely high open rates and consumer attention. It is therefore important to be able to implement and personalize them as well as possible.
Why customize them
On the benefits brought by personalization of the user experience we have already spoken; if you are interested in learning more about this topic we recommend reading this article: Marketing Personalization, an essential element of your strategy. More specifically, about the importance of email personalization, it is interesting to cite research done by Experian that reports how brands that personalize their emails achieve an 11 percent higher open rate and a 27 percent higher Click Rate than those who do not personalize.
How artificial intelligence can make a difference
In this context, email personalization that merely includes our name in the header certainly cannot be sufficient. It is at this level that artificial intelligence once again can help us radically improve our results by automating and improving the process. Let’s see how in a few simple steps it can be done:
- User recognition: The A.I. engine is able to distinguish our users, the segments they belong to, knows their likes and dislikes, and understands whether, for example, they are our new or repeat users. This information is crucial to be able to automatically personalize our email effectively.
- Enter product or content recommendations within the email. Advanced systems of marketing automation allow, through a special widget, to include within these emails elements of recommendations, product or marketing content, which can be chosen automatically from the engine of A.I. using the most effective algorithms for each individual user. Some examples of algorithms that can be used are:
- Trending Recommendation: Most popular content or products by number of Views and Clicks
- Personalized Recommendation: content or products based on the user’s recent history
- Personalized Trending Recommendation: A mix of the previous two but giving greater emphasis to the most popular ones
- Not only products but also content: in order to best personalize these emails, it is important to not only use product recommendations but also make the most of the content that you have available. We could, for example, include within a shipment tracking email links to videos or blog articles that help the customer make the most of the product they have purchased and whose delivery they are awaiting. A similar personalization strategy could also be leveraged for an email that preempts the sending of a review request.
Personalized transactional emails: conclusions
Accomplishing all this is extremely simple today, provided you have the right tools at your disposal. In Blendee, thanks to an extremely intuitive editor, you can insert these elements into whatever email is sent to your users.
