The Uses and Benefits of Transactional Emails

Transactional email is a vital pillar of any brand’s business email strategy. Even today, the most commonly used form of communication between brands and their customers is email. This doesn’t look like it will change any time in the near future either, so if you are involved in coordinating the delivery of your essential customer communications, marketing and outreach strategy of a brand, you need to look long and hard at how your customers are engaging with your emails. Transactional emails are just one part of this strategy but are possibly the most crucial part. Here’s why.

What exactly are transactional emails?

Transactional emails are often the most valuable emails your business will send. These are sent by your brand to specific customers in response to some kind of action they have taken, which is why transactional email is also often called essential email. These emails contain personalised, unique and useful information or services that your customers need.

It’s important to note that these are not marketing emails – they aren’t sent en masse to a mailing list. Because of this, they have much higher open rates than mass marketing emails. The way you implement them is important, and the benefits of using them to their fullest potential are unrivaled.

The different kinds of transactional emails

Often, the first transactional email a customer will receive from your brand is an account creation email. This confirms their action to them and is an opportunity to provide useful information about your brand or service. It also helps to confirm the legitimacy of their email address to make sure future emails reach their destination.

Here are some other common examples of valuable transactional emails:

• Order requests and confirmations
• Password reset
• Statements
• Digital tickets
• Log in confirmations
• Usage overviews as used by utility companies
• Invoices

Using transactional emails to make invoicing a whole lot easier

When you’re a business with a huge number of clients to bill, transactional emails should be your constant companion. By using purpose-built software tools, you can automatically generate invoices to all your clients via technology that pulls information from your database, and formats it automatically into a pre-designed template. The time you can save by doing this is astronomical in the long run, making it an effective way to cut costs. Depending on your high volume transactional email service provider there are other cost savings features available such as deliverability tools, spam filters, and payment buttons to help improve your cash flow.

What do good transactional emails look like?

Small differences in transactional email services can make a huge difference to the user experience, which in turn affects your customer satisfaction and return on investment. First of all, business emails must arrive promptly and avoid being sorted into the spam folder, or customers will be left in the dark as to whether their action has really gone through. Another key aspect is providing an aesthetic and well-formatted email that is consistent with your brand and exhibits professionalism – it’s all a part of improving your customer experience and making them feel good about receiving emails from you.

Keep all these points in mind when sending invoices, since properly created mass invoices will save your accounting department a whole lot of hassle chasing after emails that weren’t received – or weren’t received well.

What do good transactional emails look like?

Customers can form opinions of your brand very quickly if they have a negative experience, so don’t take the risk – get your transactional email strategy sorted from the get-go. At Cumulo9, we can provide you with the very best service available. We offer detailed insight into your customer and client engagement, professional design and email generation tools and more – talk to us now to find out more.