Do you want to sell one product to one customer just one time — or do you want to sell A LOT of products to that one customer OVER time?

THE fundamental principle of successfully selling anything, on-line or off, is repeat customers. Let me repeat that: REPEAT CUSTOMERS.

And if you want more repeat customers, make sure your “confirmation emails” are both Useful – and Great!

OK, you’re thinking, convince me that confirmation emails are really that important for creating more repeat customers.

 

 

 

The primary reason is this: after customers leave your website, a confirmation email is your best — & likely only — opportunity to:

1. Communicate your value (i.e., reinforce/remind the customer about what you have to offer).
2. Provide a critical and valuable service (i.e., effectively communicate the current transactions that have occurred between you and your customer).
3. Strengthen and enhance the relationship with your customers (i.e., show them you care). 

Confirmation emails are those emails that communicate the transaction(s) that have occurred between you and your customer. You may be surprised – if not outright shocked – by the number of different types of “transactional emails” that you could send out: 

• order and service confirmations
• shipment notifications
• reservation confirmations and e-tickets
• available-now notices
• billing and payment notices
• cancellations, returns, refunds, rebates, and
• bonuses
• information-request responses
• government responses
• customer service messages
• failure notices
• registration and account information  

What Do I Do?

OK, you’re saying, I’m convinced, but now I’m also overwhelmed & confused – exactly how the hell do I make sure my confirmation emails are both useful – and great!

 

 

 

To start, an international team of usability experts, lead by Jakob Nielsen, studied the usefulness of various transactional email messages, and they came to a conclusion that you may not find that surprising — they found that (surprise surprise) reading, filing, and responding to email is a time consuming pain in the ass:

When users check their email, they’re dealing with multiple requests for their time, including messages from their boss, colleagues, and family. People just want to be done with most email, and quickly move past anything that is not absolutely essential. (Nielsen J., Molich R., Snyder C., & Farrell, S., E-commerce User Experience, Nielsen Norman Group, 2001).

Nielsen et al., (2001), found that effective transactional emails fulfill three goals:

1. They are NOT mistaken them spam.
2. They enhance your company’s reputation for customer service and increase your customer’s confidence in their dealings with your company.
3. They prevent your customers from calling in for information they need.

The first goal should be self-evident: Spam is a huge problem, and your customers’ email programs are getting increasingly sophisticated about automatically detecting and eliminating email before they even see it.

If your transactional emails do not fulfill the first goal – well, achieving the other two goals won’t matter.

Specific guidelines for how to do this are beyond the scope of this newsletter, but generally to avoid having messages summarily deleted from your customer’s in-box, you must put “effective” information in the “from:” and “subject:” fields in the e-mail header.

Fortunately, this is easy to do: make sure the from: field shows two things: your brand name and a transaction description.

For example, Nielsen et al. (2001) also found that effective senders included reservations@hilton, tickets@amtrack.com, and ship-confirm@amazon.com. Do this & both humans and spam algorithms are unlikely to mistake your email for spam. (Note that the transaction description should be 20 characters or less to avoid truncation by your customer’s in-box view).

 

Nielsen et al. (2001) discovered that only certain subject lines were effective. The best subject line explicitly related to a customer-initiated transaction. For example, they found that Order has shipped was the best subject line for an order shipped confirmation email. Short, sweet, to the point. It was the perfect subject line for that type of transaction email.

 

You can achieve the second goal, “enhancing your company’s reputation” by the simple act of just sending out well thought-out transaction emails. Make it your goal to look for ways to use transaction emails to enhance your company’s reputation for customer service. This will automatically increase your customer’s confidence in their dealings with you, & it increases the likelihood they’ll be repeat customers.

 

Achieving the third goal, i.e., “prevent customers from calling in” is a win-win for both you and your customer in terms of both time and money, i.e., telephone call centers are expensive, and talking to customers on the phone is time consuming and can be a constant interruption for your people. The solution? Just ensure that your email answers all common questions, simply but completely.

 

Confirmation Email Builds Trust

 

Good transactional emails show the customer that you respect their time by telling them exactly what they need to know. In an increasingly time constrained world, this can do wonders for your customer service reputation. The fact is, your potential repeat customers at first just don’t trust you, but when they get good confirmation emails, they feel like you care about them because it shows you are taking care of their needs immediately.

 

By the same token , sloppy, poorly designed, hard to understand transactional emails can erode your company’s credibility:

 

We asked users to rate their level of trust in each sender on a 1 to 7 scale; poor design elements decreased a company’s ratings by up to two points. Lack of contact information was a primary concern, as was sending too much email, but even things like not getting to the point quickly could hurt a company. Remember, users are extremely busy and stressed when reading email. Wasting their time makes them feel like you don’t care. Worse, you become part of the problem, not the solution. (Nielsen et al., E-commerce User Experience, Nielsen Norman Group, 2001).

 

In sum then, confirmation email and automated messages are really the only way for you to connect with your customers after they leave your site.

 

Effectively designed, they successfully “close the loop” in e-commerce and other transactions and thus increase the likelihood of turning that one successful sale into repeat business.

 

Any ya can’t have enough of that, can you?

NOTE: A full discussion and treatment of the specific guild lines you should be using to create highly effective transactional email requires far more space than is available in a short article/blog post. If you’re interested to see how your customer service emails stack up against known and tested guidelines, contact us today!

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