How To Personalize Shipping Confirmation And Package Tracking Emails

Historically, the humble shipping confirmation and package tracking emails haven’t been given all that much thought by email marketers.

After all, these emails aren’t usually very exciting. 

A shipping confirmation email is there to do one job, and it’s a pretty simple one. It lets your customer know their package is on its way to them.

Here’s the thing though, these emails have two major things going for them that actually make them really important and full of potential for your marketing efforts. 

If you embrace both of these benefits, it opens the door to sending out personalized shipping confirmation and package tracking emails that do a lot more than just let your customer know when their order is going to arrive. 

Are you interested in learning more?

The benefits and opportunities of transactional emails

Both shipping confirmation and package tracking emails fall under the transactional email title. These types of emails simply give customers more details about their transactions. 

One of the big benefits of transactional emails they tend to have a much higher open rate compared to traditional email marketing campaigns. 

Why is that?

Because your customers just bought something cool from you and now they can’t wait to get it! 

Your customers want to know where their stuff is. And their excitement about the product means they are far more likely to engage with the email.

Check out the stats from this survey that asked shoppers what the most important messages from retailers were: 

As you can see, order tracking was at the top of the list and ranked as very important by a significant margin.

So there’s opportunity number one: higher open and click rates. Your customers are way more like to open these emails and take action if asked.

As for opportunity number two, it’s all about the potential to generate more revenue. 

Research has shown that once a customer has bought from you, it’s a lot easier to get them to buy again. Plus, the customers that do return and buy again tend to spend more. 

Where personalization comes into play

So you know that shipping confirmation and order tracking emails are both good and represent some opportunities to get your customers to take action.

Now, where does personalization come into things?

Personalized emails are something else customers love, and have come to expect over the years. Yes, that even counts for transactional emails too.

The first way you can personalize your shipping confirmation and package tracking emails is to tap into the data you already have which is their address. 

With geolocation, you can do a ton in your emails. 

Imagine your customer opens an email to see where their package and sees it has real-time moment of open live tracking information.

You can’t get much more personal than that. Instead of having to go chase tracking numbers and remember order numbers and all that, the email updates automatically.

Now add to that even more information that you can pull directly from your customer relationship management (CRM) tools. There is all sorts of data in there you can use to personalize your emails in interesting and creative ways.

Here’s just one example.

Let’s say you’re an outdoor sporting goods retailer. Your customer has just bought some hiking boots during a recent end of season sale and is waiting for them to arrive. 

You know their location is in Boulder, Colorado, and the seasons are changing. The weather forecast is it’s going to be chilly for the next ten days. 

Here’s the information you can use to personalize your package tracking email right away:

• What they’ve purchased: Which means you can segment these customers onto new lists by shopping history
• Where they live: Which means you can tap into the power of geolocation to get hyper-local data, including the weather, and use that in your emails

So you create a package tracking email that also pulls in real-time weather forecasting for their zip code.

You can highlight that in your package tracking email, so just like the location of the package, the weather will update in real-time, and use it to feature one or two products that are related to hiking and help prepare the customer for colder weather. 

For example, maybe they need some snowshoes for winter hikes or ice traction devices that they can slide-on their brand new hiking boots. Showcase those items right in your tracking email. 

An email like this is going to pack a real personalization punch. You’ve got the location of their package, the weather where they live and are featuring complimentary products directly related to what they’ve just bought.

See how it works?

Personalizing these emails is a simple way to grab some low hanging fruit and drive up more sales. Plus, your customer is going to love the fact that they can see exactly where their package is just in their email.

And we all want more happy customers, right?