As Jordan noted in his earlier post, there are a lot of things you can do to make your transactional emails better. But as any busy email marketer knows, there are also about a million other things you could be working on instead. The question is, how high of a priority should improving your transactional emails be? After all, only a small sub-set of your entire list receives one of these messages every day.

Let’s be clear: your transactional emails should take an extremely high priority, regardless of your industry or line of business.

In our latest research, The transactional email report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting purchase behavior to email marketing, we see that two key indicators — revenue per email and transaction rates — are off-the-charts for transactional emails. The transaction rate of order confirmation messages is eight times higher than standard promotional messages.

In other words, you can get much more bang for your buck by improving your transactional emails rather than, say, your weekly newsletter.

So what are you waiting for? Have a look at The transactional email report to learn more about what makes transactional messages so valuable to email marketers.

In just a few weeks I’ll be hopping on a plane to South Africa. This will be a long trip, and as such, has required me to make several travel-related online purchases that have yielded some particularly interesting email lifecycle campaigns.

The first example comes courtesy of Toktumi, a company offering VOIP calling via an iPhone application and service. Like many subscription-based services, Toktumi offers a free trial period of their product followed by an enrollment deadline. Toktumi’s lifecycle campaign, while very rudimentary from a creative perspective, is outstanding in several other key areas including time of delivery, relevant content and especially clear subject lines.

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Today, Experian CheetahMail released “The remarketing Report: Benchmark data and analysis on connecting web behavior to email marketing.” This white paper delves into the details of deploying emails based on website browser behaviors, and reveals some surprising results along the way.

As most of us would expect, abandoned cart messages pull higher open, click and transaction rates than standard promotional messages. However, marketers might be surprised to learn that cart abandoners respond differently to triggered emails that leverage web analytics data. A few specific notes on browsers versus abandoners include:

• Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.
• Meanwhile, customers that only browsed products but did not add any items to their cart (i.e. ‘browsers’) are much more likely to respond to an incentivized email offer.

This report confirms that email marketers don’t need a special remarketing offer to convert abandoners into buyers. This is a positive development for the email industry in that we don’t effectively encourage our customers to abandon their carts with the hope of receiving a discount email at the end of the process.

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