Marketing through admin and transactional emails: Amazon lessons and ghosts of the past
Latest posts | By Mark Brownlow | 6 Comments | Licence this content
Administrative messages are the unloved stepchild of email marketing.
The order confirmation, shipping notices, welcome emails etc. are often setup using default designs and text written by a software engineer…and never looked at again.
Which is a lost opportunity when you consider just how much attention these emails get.
We’re all excited about building behavior-based trigger messages, like cart abandonment mails, but forget that traditional confirmation and welcome emails have long followed that model.
After all, if customers make a purchase, they get an order confirmation…if they sign-up to your list, they get a welcome message.
Consider some real-world numbers:
- A study by Experian CheetahMail revealed that welcome messages get four times the opens, five times the CTR and over eight times the revenue per email of typical promotional emails
- Tafford Uniforms discovered post-purchase survey emails got 20% more revenue per email than their standard broadcast messages
- Retailer Isabella found that clicks on product recommendations in order confirmation emails converted at more than double the rate of clicks from standard emails
Three areas that often let senders down with these messages are inbox recognition, clarity of communication and optimization for marketing. Let’s explore each, with the help of an Amazon.co.uk order confirmation email.
Inbox recognition
The typical transactional message already has a crucial head start in the inbox.
People expect to get some kind of confirmation after placing an order or signing up to a list. Indeed, many actively seek out this confirmation (we all want to be sure the order went through OK).
That heightened awareness makes it easier to grab attention.
You simply need to give people what they’re looking for: a sender and subject line that clearly identifies the source and the contents of the mail…there is no pressing need to think up clever, intriguing headers.
Here some examples:
The trap for the unwary is to assume the expectation of an email is all that matters.
You still need recognition cues in the sender and subject line, specifically brand/site names and a reference to the behavior that triggered the administrative email (like “order” or “welcome”).
Here some poor sender names from my “transactional” folder:
The preview pane also plays a role in ensuring recognition. Amazon.co.uk’s order confirmation email, for example, contains a logo at the top left and the words “Thanks for your order, Mark Brownlow”:
Given the sender address features amazon.co.uk and the subject is “Your order with amazon.co.uk”, it would be hard not to recognize this email instantly for what it is.
It doesn’t matter whether I check the sender or subject line or use a vertical or horizontal preview pane…I can immediately see that this is an email about the order I just placed with Amazon’s UK site.
Clarity of communication
When we talk about the marketing value of administrative and transactional email, we forget the top priority is to clearly communicate the transactional information the recipient wants to know.
Consider the Amazon.co.uk confirmation. It tells me…
- My order has been taken
- What was ordered
- Where it will be sent and who gets charged
- How much it cost
- When it’s likely to reach me
A welcome email could, for example:
- Confirm the subscription
- Indicate how subscription preferences can be modified
- Remind the recipient of likely content and frequency
- Provide a feedback option
- Explain how to ensure the emails get delivered to the inbox
…all before we get into any “marketing” text or features.
We might also give some thought to the order of this information…just as we think deeply about the order of text, images and calls to action in promotional emails.
An order confirmation can contain many key information points: shouldn’t we also consider ordering these to reflect recipient and communication priorities?
Two thoughts from the Amazon.co.uk email:
1. They make me scroll down quite a way to find out which items are being confirmed by an order. Yet a key concern for me is whether the right item got ordered. Also, it’s a pain when reviewing order confirmations a little later.
2. It takes seven clicks on the scroll bar (in my preview pane) to find the information that the reply-to address accepts no incoming email. The info is buried below returns policies and contract legalese. (The rights and wrongs of do-not-reply addresses is a topic for another day).
Marketing optimization
Every email you send is an interaction point. And every interaction leaves an impression on the recipient. So every email you send is a marketing email, whether you like it or not.
1. Marketing – the experience
Your image or brand in the eyes of each individual reflects their cumulative experience when interacting with your brand or organization. And that includes each email.
If the message is clear and addresses all my informational needs, then I come away with a positive impression of the sender.
To this we can add whether the email’s design, style or personality reinforces your desired “corporate image” or confuses it.
Does a badly written text-only shipping notice chip away at the modern, dynamic image you built through a powerful HTML template for your promotional emails?
Should a transactional email take a functional style (like Amazon’s) or should you add flair and personality (like CDBaby’s famous shipping confirmation)?
Are your confirmations and welcome messages delivered instantly (exploiting the power of the moment) or do they arrive days later when nobody’s looking for them anymore?
At the very least, don’t rely on the stock wording typically used in default e-commerce and email marketing software installations. Software designers are great at designing software, not so great at copywriting.
2. Opportunity for further interaction
Once I see a confirmation or welcome email, it’s not impossible that I may want to change something about the order or subscription. Equally, it may simply stimulate me to return to the website to search for more information or purchases.
So it makes sense to include links to popular site destinations to smooth the path to further online interaction.
Amazon’s message header includes links to common transaction-related destinations, like the shopping basket, help section or wishlist. The logo is linked to the index page:
Two issues, though. If the header is viewed with images blocked, those menu links don’t show up at all in, for example, Thunderbird:
…nor is there an explicit “home” link to follow as a catch all. Not everyone knows to click on a logo.
3. Upsells, cross-sells, offers
Quite rightly, the bulk of a transactional email deals with the actual transaction. But sidebars provide an opportunity to present offers and other marketing links without distracting from the main purpose of the message.
This is especially important if you want to stay within the boundaries of what the law defines as a transactional email.
Amazon, like the iTunes store (see left) and others, use clever software to populate this space with upsells and cross-sells based on user purchasing patterns.
The rest of us without clever software can still use the space for more generic promotions, advance notice of sales or events…or any other marketing message.
Given the transactional environment, one tactic is to pitch these marketing links as a service, rather than a(nother) promotion. Amazon, for example, talks about “Recommendations for your next visit” and includes the catch-all “See all your recommendations” link in case the showcase products aren’t quite right.
4. Social integration and user-generated content
Again, we’re all excited about adding “share with your network” (SWYN) links to promotions and newsletter content. Why not to transactional emails?
This approach might also work in follow-up emails. We’re already seeing dedicated emails requesting reviews…why not combine that with opportunities to “recommend the purchase to others”.
The ultimate trigger email program might send a dedicated “recommend to your friends” email only if the recipient bought the product and posted a 4 or 5 star review in a follow-up…
Anyone doubting whether product purchases are shareworthy enough to deserve SWYN links should simply search Twitter for the phrase “just bought”.
Bonus – ghosts of the past
The above ideas and concepts are not set in stone, but simply a catalyst to get you thinking more about those “throwaway” admin mails.
In researching the post, I dug out an old Amazon order confirmation email from 2001 which I thought you might enjoy. Fascinating how the priority back then was educating people on what they can do with their account!
Find related articles:
Get posts like this: RSS feed | via email | via Twitter | via G+
You can follow any comments on this blog post through the RSS 2.0 feed.
6 comments on “Marketing through admin and transactional emails: Amazon lessons and ghosts of the past”
Nice post Mark. Very clearly structuring the priorities to ensure transactional emails deliver the service elements anticipated by recipients.
We all accept the delayed gratification of online purchases and feel more assured when it is confirmed quickly and clearly.
I am 50/50 on whether plain text or HTML is better received as confirmation – but agree on the layout and copywriting.
I would be pleased to see comments from others as to whether subsequent marketing emails (assuming the first email sent is transactional) should come from the identical from name, from domain and possibly IP address
Yep, I think the key takeaway is to give these messages some love and attention, because they matter more than many people think.
Will see if I can find some opinions on your question Robin.
Thought-provoking stuff, Mark – thanks!
To your point/question about adding personality to transactional messages: I think the voice used in those, how far you take any playfulness, your choice of language/vernacular, and so on should reflect the way your business talks to customers in other mediums.
To use a recent example (and I know I’m not the only one to cite them), I purchased from Moosejaw.com earlier today. The order confirmation email (which did make the mistake of using “orders” in the from line) might even take playfulness further than CD Baby.
See http://yfrog.com/f/0ptq6j/ – I’ve added some notes & underlined a few examples of how they did it.
Would this sort of order confirmation make sense for Amazon? Not likely. But it works for Moosejaw because it’s consistent with their overall customer experience.
Thanks Justin: great points you make. I agree that the style/voice etc. best mirror your wider communication. I’m generally for adding personality everywhere.
My only concern with offbeat transactional stuff is how it looks after the sixth order. Personality in promo mails and newsletters stays fresh because the words and “jokes” change each time. But transactional messages tend to remain the same. Or maybe they should be revised regularly, too?
Perhaps there’s a happy medium somewhere.
While I agree Amazon’s transactional emails are better than most, they manage to destroy any brand positivity they create by automatically opting you in to their marketing channel and then making it impossible to opt out (I’ve attempted to unsubscribe half a dozen times now to no avail).
It just goes to show, getting the basics right is absolutely essential if you’re going to get any benefit from more sophisticated email marketing techniques.
Good point Benedict: I agree completely that getting the basics right must precede any of the advanced stuff. And a lot of folk still haven’t got the basics in place.
I unsubscribed from all their marketing emails a few weeks ago and haven’t had an email since. I didn’t unsubscribe through an email link though: I went into my account and checked the “do not send me email” section under “Email Preferences + Notifications”