How to Measure the Success of Your Transactional Emails?

This blog is for those people who consider transactional emails as a small fish in a big pond. Why would you not track the success of your transactional emails? There can be mainly two reasons – Either you don’t have a tracking mechanism or you ignore transactional emails for no reason. Ignorance is not bliss anymore. Few companies also consider transactional emails as mere notification emails. But we are quite unfortunate if we miss out the real value of transactional emails.

Spruce up your transactional emails by taking all the time and effort to engage with your customers at every step of the customer’s lifecycle. Your business can be in huge loss if your transactional emails are out of sync with the customer’s sentiments and choices.

There is a very important thing which you have to learn. We are talking about the difference between ‘delivered’ and ‘deliverability’. A delivered transactional email means the ISP has accepted it. Which usually happens successfully. But what about deliverability? Let’s talk about email deliverability which is the success of getting into the customer’s inbox.

Here are four easy, must dos to optimize your transactional emails.

1. Inbox Placement Rate
   God knows if your transactional email has bounce or land in spam. A transactional email hitting the inbox is the hardest thing. From an email reaching the inbox to constantly evolving new methods of email filtering, the email service providers (ESPs) make sure to deliver the content users really value. On top of that, one in five commercial emails fails to reach the inbox. In such tough situations when ESPs would not even care to give you an idea about inbox placement rate how would you measure the success of your transactional email?

   First thing first: Find the most critical transactional email sent to the customer. Every business sends atleast one crucial email to its customers. It may be OTP email to complete the transaction, password recovery email or verification email to create an account. Analyze the email content viewed or the links being clicked by the customer. Map the customer’s journey to walk in his shoes. Note down all the touch points and the connection between them. Once you establish the patterns, you will be able to anticipate customer’s next action.The next step is to track the open rates of such emails. The click-through-rate will represent the numbers of customers, who clicked on the link or call to action, within an email. Your email should have an enticing CTA which should be loved and clicked. The short, simple and personal emails will have high open rates as they are coming from someone your customers recognize.

   You can also create email seed list and test email delivery by sending emails to various clients.

2. Email Volumes
   We all perceive too much email is a big distraction. We see many users who unsubscribe from email marketing lists because of large email volume. It is wise to give your readers a way to easily remove themselves from transactional emails such as account updates and social media notifications. Learn to love your unsubscribes as you don’t need uninterested subscribers. But will email volume slow down anytime soon? No, it will only increase in the coming years. How would you stand out in the crowded inbox is worth pondering.You need to analyze the volume of your transactional emails. Transactional emails can vary from welcome emails and alert messages to password reset and cart abandonment emails. You need to understand email volume according to your business flow and activity. You should map the transactional emails to enhance a customer’s journey. It is quite worrisome if your customer receives a large number of emails on just adding a domain. You must simplify the complicated process or steps as much as possible. Do you send welcome emails when someone joins? Now that is a piece of cake because of integrated email automation. To put it in a nutshell: For your customer adding a domain should be as simple as receiving a welcome email.
3. Return on Investment 
   What do you think who is sending you transactional emails? It is not the marketing guys but IT, operations and other teams. You need to connect emotionally with the customers to increase return on investment. Let us bring the two different email templates to the table. We are testing the waters to see if type A or B increase the sales.
   • We Really Want You
     Dear John,
     Are you still deciding as you have left some items while shopping. Please feel free to seek help if required. You can complete your order now.
   • Call to Action
     Dear John,
     We have realized that you have left your items in the shopping cart. Hurry and complete your order within 24 hours to get 20% off. Act now before it is too late.

   Now you would decide which transactional email would be more successful. You can win back the customer by emotionally connecting with him or by creating a sense of urgency. Here we are referring to growth hacking of your email list.

   • Leads generated who turned into customers.Creating revenue stream by giving exciting offers to your customers is a bright idea. Measuring the open rate of your welcome emails is also a good solution up there in your idea box. If there is a high open rate of welcome emails, then convert them into revenue by offering more discount offers. Monitor the customers who have made the purchase. This will also help you to know your customer better.Analyze the email touch point of your transactional emails. This will bring something new to the table. You will know what your email subscribers need to take to become your customers. Keep on providing more value at each stop to convert potential customers into real customers.
     
4. Bounce Management
   Is there any filter for transactional emails? But how can that be possible? Sometimes a customer would take an immediate action on account signup and forgot password emails. While few customers would save the transactional emails in their inbox and create a to-do list. Some users may use apps to save data in transactional emails. However, if the transactional email looks like promotional, then customers will not hesitate to mark it as spam, despite being technically transactional. Unfortunately, emails don’t have to be spam to get blacklisted or blocked.It is frustrating to see my emails bounceDon’t miss the chance of measuring an email bounce rate. This important metric can cover lot of aspects of your business. Go for a solid bounce management system. Even before talking about the bounce system, you have to build an extremely good reputation to get your emails inboxed. Coming back to the system which should blacklist all hard bounced email addresses from your future mailing list. Your email list should grow healthy with all the engaged users. Don’t forget to remove the people who have not opened your transactional emails in few months. Track the users who have unsubscribed from your email list and find out the reason.

   Another important thing is that transactional emails are time sensitive. The timing of your email should be right and email should deliver immediately after a trigger event.
   Example: Emails such as welcome and confirmation emails, password resets and security alerts etc. The results of immediate email delivery will reinforce trust to drive necessary next steps.

Conclusion

You love to spend time on polishing not only your web pages but also in designing the flashy emails and calls to action. You even take pain to craft the newsletters. Your transactional emails also deserve the same kind of love. Don’t just set them up and forget them! Keep optimizing your transactional emails!