Many companies neglect transactional emails and focus all their efforts on promotional and marketing emails. It's a common mistake that's costing you money.
Although transactional emails may not be the central part of your email marketing strategy, they can give you a competitive advantage, help improve relationships with your customers and even boost sales!
In this article, you'll find some excellent transactional email examples that can inspire you to create your own transactional email templates, with tips on optimizing them and making them work for you.
9 transactional email examples for your business
Here are the most common transactional email examples that every business should have in place, together with transactional email best practices to get you started:
Welcome email
You should send a transactional welcome email whenever a person joins your mailing list, downloads your freebie or becomes your customer. This email expresses your gratitude and appreciation for every new subscriber or customer and sets some expectations.
Let the subscriber know what kind of content they'll receive and how often (and be realistic – only promise what you're sure you can deliver).
You can provide helpful information about your product and service and tips on how to get the most out of it. Include additional resources such as links to your most popular blog posts, guides, tutorials etc.
However, you should also include the one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email for people who have accidentally subscribed. Letting potential new customers go may be hard, but that's the only way to keep your list healthy and engaged.
Pro tip: Include a question to prompt recipients to respond to your first email. This not only helps you build a relationship with them but can also improve your overall email deliverability as responses from your audience reduce your chance of being marked as spam and your transactional emails not being delivered directly to their main inboxes.
Click here for more tips on email campaign management.
Password reset email
Password reset email doesn't have to be boring! It can be a unique chance to show off your copywriting skills and playful side in the place your customers least expect it, just like Moz did in the picture above.
Password resets can be stressful, so make sure to show some empathy and reassurance, as all of us have forgotten our password at least once.
Of course, a password reset email should include practical things such as a password reset link and an explanation of further action that's required.
You can add some security tips, such as best practices for creating a strong password and a suggestion to update their passwords regularly.
Invoice/payment email
Here are the elements to include in your invoice email template:
- Breakdown of products or services
- Price per product/service
- Total amount to pay
- Any additional fees
- Invoice number
- Company information
- Invoice due date
- Payment methods
Remember to add the company's logo to make it look professional. You can also include a button or a link that takes them to the payment screen to make it more convenient and offer multiple payment methods.
If you want to ensure that customers pay before the due date, mention late fees and make it transparent.
Order confirmation email
Order confirmation emails serve to reassure customers that they have placed their order successfully and allow them to double-check key information such as order details, payment amount and shipping address one more time before the order is shipped.
You can also add the contact of your customer support team in case customers have any questions or want to change something about their order.
When it comes to order confirmation emails, timing is everything, so you should automate them instead of sending them manually. It's crucial to provide important information promptly in case customers want to change something before shipping.
This type of email can be an excellent opportunity to express gratitude to your customer but also to subtly introduce complementary products and encourage upsells and cross-sells.
Order cancellation email
No one likes it when a customer cancels their order, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't stay professional and empathetic. You can't do anything to change their mind now, but being polite and helpful in your cancellation email can increase the chances for future purchases.
On the other hand, if you cancel the order, make sure to add an explanation (whether a product is out of stock, logistical challenges, not shipping to that region etc.) and offer alternative products or gift cards and discounts as a way to make it up to your customers.
If a customer has already paid for the product, give them options for a refund, including the timeframe in which they can expect their money back.
Double opt-in email
Double opt-in emails should be automatically sent to new subscribers who join your mailing list to verify their email addresses and confirm that they haven't subscribed by accident.
Some people say that double opt-ins can be a hassle for customers, however, they take only a few seconds and have many benefits, such as:
- Reducing spam complaints
- Improving deliverability
- Ensuring GDPR compliance and data security
- Increasing open rates due to improved quality of subscribers
- Reducing unsubscribe rate
Abandoned cart email
Did you know that the average abandoned cart email has a 2.39% conversion rate, which is more than post-purchase email (1.14%) and cross-sell email (0.53%)? That's why you shouldn't ignore this type of transactional email as a part of your strategy.
Here are a few tips that can help you win those customers back:
- Create compelling subject lines: Create a sense of curiosity to increase open rates. For example: Unlock a surprise, Claim your gift, The mystery sale: open to reveal your special offer.
- Personalize the content: Instead of sending a generic email, add pictures of the particular product and summarize the benefits they can get.
- Offer incentive: You don't have anything to lose, so you can offer special discounts, promotions, guarantees, small gifts or free shipment if they decide to buy a product.
- Inspire a sense of urgency: Of course, those special offers should always have a time limit, ideally no longer than 24-48 hours, because you want customers to act quickly and claim their offer.
Additionally, here are the most common reasons why customers abandon their shopping carts:
- Extra costs (shipping, fees, taxes)
- Account creation requirement
- Long delivery process
- Lack of trust regarding credit card data
- Too long and complicated process
Knowledge is power, and this information can help you optimize your website or e-commerce store and increase your conversion rate.
Shipping confirmation email
A shipping confirmation email should contain all the necessary information, such as:
- Name of the item
- Order number
- Tracking number (if applicable)
- Expected delivery date
If you want to make your shipping confirmation email more appealing, it can be nice to add a visual element, such as a progress graph showing the phase of the shipment.
You can also add a button where they can track their order in real time, as this reduces anxiety related to online purchases.
Shipping confirmation emails are usually followed by delivery confirmation emails, and you should keep them consistent in branding, tone and design.
Customer feedback email
We all know how important and valuable customer feedback is as it helps us improve our products and services. However, it can be difficult to get as customers' attention is scattered more than ever. That's why it's essential to act promptly and request feedback as soon as they get your product, ideally right after the delivery confirmation email, as everything is still fresh.
To increase your open rate, you can experiment with the subject line and try something like:
- Unlock rewards: Tell us what you think about [Product name]
- Love it, hate it or improve it? Your honest opinion on [Product name]
- Feedback fever: Be among the first 10 to review [Product name] and get your prize
Now, what about increasing your feedback response rate?
You've guessed it. If people are not answering, the best way is to offer some extra incentive such as a reward or a special discount.
It doesn't even have to be anything big, you can give them a voucher, gift card, free shipping for their next order or let them earn loyalty points they can later exchange for a product or discount.
Finally, to get more email campaign ideas, check out this article.
How can SEINō help with transactional emails?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXjes7j4PcY
SEINō is an email analytics tool with a special focus on transactional emails and revenue-related metrics. It can increase your productivity by up to 90% as its goal is to eliminate a large part of the manual work and make email analytics accessible and understandable to everyone, even though you may not be an expert.
Here are its key features:
- Transactional metrics: We go beyond standard email marketing KPIs such as open rate and CTR and focus on sales and revenue. Some of the metrics you can track with SEINō include the number of transactions, average order value, revenue per email sent and total revenue.
- Advanced A/B testing: You can test your campaigns in real time by either testing two different versions of the same campaign or sending the same email to two different audience segments to see which market segment reacts better.
- Data enrichment: With our tool, you can easily organize large volumes of customer data through segmentation, grouping and filtering, which leads to discovering patterns and insights you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. There are also plenty of visual dashboards and graphs that will help you get a better understanding of your data.
- Benchmarking: You don’t have to analyze only one campaign at a time as with most email marketing tools – SEINō allows you to compare multiple campaigns in the same email report to see which ones were the most effective and brought you the most revenue.
- Integrations: SEINō integrates with most transactional email services such as Deployteq, Selligent, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and many others, so you can keep using the tools you already have, just enrich them with our in-depth insights. Moreover, SEINō also integrates with other analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and combines data in a single email marketing report for easier understanding.
And finally, the main result we provide is faster campaign testing and optimizing, which can lead to a 2.5% increase in ROI, just like we did for our numerous clients.
Conclusion
Many businesses view transactional emails as a task to be done, but they don't expect too much out of them and that's why they don't put a lot of effort into creating and customizing them.
However, transactional messages can be much more than simple notification emails if you know how to use them properly. Not only do they offer an excellent opportunity for strengthening customer relationships, upselling and cross-selling, but they can also be a source of valuable data about your customers and their behavior.
Book a free demo and learn how to turn transactional emails into your valuable asset with SEINō.
Transactional email examples: FAQ
What is a transactional email? A transactional email is an automated message that gets triggered when a user performs a particular action on your website, such as downloading your lead magnet or purchasing a product. Transactional emails are usually clear and concise and have essential information such as order confirmation numbers or shipping details.
How do I create a transactional email? You should use one of the transactional email services to create email templates. Set triggers for automated email sending based on the user's action on your website. You can additionally personalize every email with customer data, such as their name or the purchased product.
Can I use Gmail for transactional email? It's not recommended to use Gmail for transactional emails (or any other type of high-volume emails, such as promotional emails and informative newsletters), especially now after Google's update of February 2024 that requires you to authenticate your email and domain if you want to send automated messages and email campaigns.
Why do we send transactional emails? Transactional emails are essential for providing users with important information about products they've purchased or their actions on your website. They help you build trust and improve customer experience. Although they usually don't have a lot of promotional content, they can be an excellent occasion for some subtle cross-selling, but make sure not to overdo it.
