4 transactional emails you should optimize for personalization

Chances are pretty good that you know how important it is to personalize your emails. Personalized emails make a difference to your customers, they want to get content that is tailored to them. And when they do, they reward you but engaging more with those emails.

Now, you’ve got the basics, but what about beyond that?

Most brands will personalize marketing emails and maybe even loyalty emails, but all too often transactional emails get forgotten.

That’s the last thing you want to do.

In a world where you’re competing for your customer’s attention and against a very crowded inbox, anything you can do to stand out from the crowd matters.

That’s why you need to start focusing on personalizing your transactional emails. Here are a few places you can start.

The order confirmation email

As soon as your customer buys from you that should trigger an order confirmation email sent directly to their inbox. Don’t take this seemingly simple email for granted.

You can do a couple of things to optimize it for personalization. To start, show them exactly what they ordered, nice images help here. Also, include the total price and how they paid, plus the shipping address. Finally, don’t forget to list how they can get in touch if they need customer service.

To get really personal, use this email to highlight products related to what your customer bought. If you’re using it, check your customer’s browser tracking data and see what pages they’ve explored. Include those in the email.

The shipping email

Does your customer service team feel overwhelmed with where is my order calls? If so, it probably means it’s taking them away from other tasks they could be doing to improve your overall customer experience.

You can come up with something that offers a one-two punch, that reduces the number of calls and gives your customer super personalized tracking info. What is it? Real-time moment-of-open shipping information.

With this sort of package tracking email, your customer will know exactly where their package is every single time they open their email. And, it will show the most updated information.

You can’t get a transactional email more personalized than that.

The abandoned cart email

With abandoned cart emails, you have a real opportunity to optimize for personalization.

There are all sorts of things you can do here to pull in personalized information and attract your potential customers.

One of the most basic things you can do is feature recommended and related products to those that are left in the cart. That can entice your customer to buy more. Also, think about how you can tie in special events such as sales and price changes and even loyalty reward points and programs in with abandoned cart emails.

You can use different combinations of personalized information from shopping history to loyalty points to your advantage.

The customer feedback email

An often forgotten email is the one you send a little while after your customer has made their purchase. It’s the customer feedback email. This email is there to help gauge how your customer felt about their user experience.

Was the buying process simple? Were they able to track their order? Does everything work as expected? These emails are super valuable to your brand because you can get quite a bit of info out of them, and even use good reviews as social proof testimonials.

So, you shouldn’t be surprised that you can personalize these email too. Make sure the email highlights the product they bought, don’t just make it generic. In fact, you can even tailor your feedback forms to specific product lines and segment them out to each customer. You can also use location data with these emails too, so you ensure you’re getting feedback on particular local store experiences not just general information.

Stay in touch

What is really important is you don’t forget about your customers after they make a purchase. Transactional emails can be a great gateway to keeping in touch with your customers even after they buy and showing them you are still invited in their overall customer experience. The more you can do to make these emails personalized, even if it’s just something small, the better.