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Hello everyone and welcome to another Digitize Your Firm webinar where we’ll going to be continuing our discussion on transactional emails. For those who don’t know me, my name is Stephen Andrews and I am a junior digital copywriter here at SimplyCast, and I love all things digital.
For anyone joining us who are email experts or for those who are just starting out, I welcome all comments and questions, simply click the green speech bubble at the top of the screen to open the chat and either type out your comment or ask to speak. If you haven’t already, be sure to click the ‘phone’ icon next to it the chat icon to ensure your audio is connected.
As with all Digitize Your Firm webinars, this will be recorded for later playback in case you wanted extra time with a certain section or for listening on the go. If you haven’t already, please visit the Weekly Webinar Schedule on our Digitize Your Firm page to check out our past webinars.
Now, let’s go over today’s agenda.
Our first item will be revealing how you can easily get started with transactional emails yourself, introduce you to campaign ideas you can use and do a summary of what we’ve covered the past two weeks.
As always, we’ll finish with our wrap up and teasing the topic for next week.
Sound good? Let’s get into it.
A transactional email is triggered automatically whenever a client either does something to incite it, or even if they don’t do something.
For example, say a customer or client clicks an opt-in link in an email. By clicking the link, this triggers a transactional email to be sent to them, asking for them to verify their opt-in.
On the other hand, say that same client receives an email containing vital information but doesn’t open it. Depending on your personal settings, this could also trigger a transactional email to be sent out as a follow-up to the email that they did not open to make sure that the client receives the information.
First steps to creating your transactional email
In order to begin sending transactional emails, you first need to make sure your contacts or clients opt in to receive communications from you. There are several different ways that you can do this.
– Landing Page: You can create a landing page on your website in order to facilitate the opt-in process by asking your contacts to provide their contact information to receive emails from you.
– Signup form: On that landing page, include a signup form which will allow you to both gather your contacts’ information and be able to determine what kind of communications that they want to receive from you.
– Survey: You can use a survey to this same effect by asking your contacts to opt in to receive emails from you by providing their contact information and consent.
After the opt-in
As soon as your contacts opt in, you can immediately begin sending your transactional emails, beginning perhaps with a thank you email asking them to confirm their opt-in.
Once they have done that, you can begin an email drip campaign with as many steps as you need. If a customer purchases a product from your online site, you can send them an email with their purchase details, shipping information, as well as suggestions for other products they may enjoy.
The great thing about transactional emails is that they tend to have a higher open rate over bulk emails, such as newsletters or promotional emails, because they are expected by the customers and encourage their interaction with both your company and its products.
Make things easier with automation
It would be hard to expect companies to manually send transactional emails whenever a customer does anything to trigger one. It would take a large team of people to deal with all of these incoming triggers.
This is why it is so much easier to implement a marketing automation strategy so that your transactional emails can be triggered to automatically send whenever they are induced. By using an automation platform, you are able to pre-write all of your emails and have them send whenever they are needed.
With an easy-to-navigate email channel, you can do all of this simply and efficiently, saving your company time and effort that you can spend fulfilling other important tasks and responsibilities while cutting down on the possibility of human error in the process.
Transactional emails are an integral part of any automated marketing campaign, as they are able to be easily triggered after a client completes any action. With transactional emails, there is very little effort and maintenance required, yet you are still able to boost your engagement with your customers and clients. What are some easy ways your business can use these emails to engage clients and boost your marketing campaign strategy?
Confirmation emails
Confirmation emails are a useful way to use transactional emails, in that it is a good idea to send a new contact an email confirming they signed up to receive messages from you. Confirmation emails allow contacts the immediate chance to unsubscribe if they do not want to keep receiving emails, or to check their security settings if they themselves never opted in for the communications.
You can easily automate your confirmation emails to be sent as soon as someone submits an opt-in form from your website. The email can include a link to click to confirm the recipient’s email address as a double opt-in measure.
Thank you emails
Another way to use transactional emails is to automate the sending of a thank you email whenever a client does something, such as completing a survey or form. Thank you emails are a great way to let your customers know that their effort is being appreciated by your company, and it is very easy to personalize these emails with the name of your contact, by simply adding a merge tag, which will pull the pertinent information from the corresponding column in the CRM.
Other product suggestions
Whenever a customer makes a purchase from your site and provided they have opted in to receive communications from you, you may like to follow up a thank you email with another email giving them a few suggestions as to other products they may be interested in.
Make sure that you don’t send both the thank you email and a suggestions email one right after the other, as this may annoy your clients and make them think they are being bombarded with emails. Schedule a delay of at least a couple hours in order to reduce this risk.
Another option, of course, is to amalgamate both the thank you email and the suggestions email and send just the one message to your clients. It all comes down to personal preferences and whatever works best for your business.
Follow-up surveys
One more way your business can take advantage of transactional emails is to use them to send out follow-up surveys to your clients after they have either met with you or participated in an email campaign.
Follow-up surveys allow your business to gain valuable feedback and suggestions on how to improve your interactions with your customers and build strong and lasting relationships with them. Again, you can schedule a follow-up survey to be sent automatically a short while after your meeting with the client or after the email campaign has ended, in order to reach your client while they still have you fresh in their minds.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s final lesson on transactional emails.
Transactional emails have existed for quite a while, but they still are not being used at their full potential. With more and more businesses taking the digital route, either out of environmental concerns or simply because it is easier, transactional emails will only continue to see increased usage.
Thanks to the rise of marketing automation platforms, it is easier than ever to jump onboard the transactional email train and spread brand awareness in a simple and unobtrusive way. In the modern, advertising-heavy age, zero-sell techniques – the simple sharing of relevant information, with no expectations of contact conversion – are gaining in popularity. If there is one communication type that fully embodies this approach to marketing, it would be that of the transactional email.
When it comes to creating and sending transactional emails, marketing automation software is an incredibly useful tool in that it enables you to automatically send personalized communications based on any provided information as the result of certain interactions.
Marketing automation software allows you to dynamically send transactional emails from preexisting templates provided from the inline editor. A workflow can be arranged so that an email can be sent to an individual whenever they interact with a form, survey, or any other type of communication in a certain way.
Transactional emails can also be sent whenever someone updates their contact information or clicks on a certain link – with marketing automation, the possibilities are nearly endless.
Remember to keep the law in mind – an example being product suggestion and how it differs in legality between the United States and Canada.
Don’t forget to make the emails appealing either, just because you may not be aiming for a conversion, it does not mean it should lacking in branding and presentation.
Finally, try taking some time out of your day
Now, let’s review.
1. The best way to start with transactional emails is to have ways for customers to submit information such as through forms, surveys, and landing pages. As soon as they opt-in to communications, the process can begin as you start to send information – though be careful not to overwhelm them.
I know that the idea of responding to several emails a day probably makes you nauseous, so don’t be afraid to employ products that automate the process.
2. We throw a few campaign ideas your way, each with their own benefits. Confirmation emails are great for staying compliant and increasing your conversion rate, while thank you and product suggestion emails are fantastic to use after a sale. If you want to learn more about how customers see your business, you can also send a survey to get feedback – bonus points if you include incentives such as a coupon.
3. Finally – that is transactional emails, and as you’ve probably noticed, they are everywhere and are very much a staple of marketing. Remember to keep on legislative laws depending on where you are sending the emails, and that the emails should still be appealing and engaging, not to mention on brand.
Get your best on-air voice ready, because next week we’ll be talking more deeply about voice broadcast campaigns from the nitty-gritty such as legal compliance and the best practices you should know.
