How To Create Better Order And Shipping Confirmation Emails

Ah, the humble order confirmation email. Since the dawn of time, well, since the dawn of email, there wasn’t much to these. They were usually pretty simple, with no images, easy copy like “your order is confirmed,” and that was it. 

Today, it’s a different story. 

Let’s face it; your customers get a lot of emails every day. Look at your own inbox; it’s probably bursting at the seams. Now follow that up with asking how many of those emails do you actually open?

Usually, beyond important work emails or those from friends and family, the emails you do open is pretty small. One exception stands out, transactional emails. 

These are the emails that let you know about simple transactions. These include shipping and order confirmation emails, tracking emails, account sign up emails, among others.

Because these get opened at a higher rate, often upwards of 50% compared to newsletters and other emails, you have a lot of opportunities to engage your customers.

Here’s how to do it.

Give them real-time information

The standard procedure in any sort of order or shipping confirmation is to make sure you include the three w’s. That’s where the product is going, when you should expect it, and what you ordered. 

It’s pretty simple. 

Now, where you can make things a lot more interesting is including real-time moment-of-open shipping information in the email. This way, every time your customer is wondering where their order is, all they have to do is open that email. 

As you might expect, that’s something customers love, they don’t have to go back and forth between your email and website copying order numbers and wondering where their stuff is. It’s easy to get information anytime, anywhere, with a click.

Product recommendations

One of the best ways to get more customers is to focus on those who have already bought. These are warm customers, and because of that, they are much easier to convince to buy again.

So it makes sense to use your order and shipping confirmation emails to highlight products they might be interested in buying or are related to some of the products they’ve bought in the past.

You can do this by grabbing data from your commerce platform, customer relationship management (CRM) tool, or browser data history. When you pull in data, you can pick and choose the products that you know your customers have either looked at or are directly related to what they’ve already bought. 

It helps to make these emails even more personalized too. If your customer bought a bunch of swimwear from your company, sandals or wraps are logical products to recommend.

Loyalty or VIP perks

Order and shipping confirmation emails are also great for highlighting customer loyalty programs. Loyalty program platforms can provide all sorts of data that can help you find ways to highlight the program and other products too.

In the body of your email, include information for the points or miles your customer gets from the transaction. You can also remind customers of the personalized loyalty perks they get from buying too, for example, free shipping or 3x bonus points on specific products. It’s an easy way to highlight your program and keep it top of mind. 

You can also take it a step further tie in VIP points with recommended products. One example could be to highlight a customer has enough points to buy a specific product or achieve some sort of discount. Featuring the products along with the loyalty points can pique the interest of customers and get them interested in buying again.

Remember to personalize

As with everything, personalizing email today is critical. The more you can do it, the better, and you want to try to include one element of personalization in the emails you send. 

The good news is you have plenty of data at your fingertips to pull data from and include them in your emails. While most brands focus on newsletters or sales letters to personalize for customers, transactional emails are a perfect place to focus on personalization too.

So, the next time you’re looking at your email marketing strategies, don’t ignore order and shipping confirmation emails.