Remember — Receipts Can Generate Revenue, Too!

Since receipts achieve such good open rates, it’s a good time to start getting the customer to think about another purchase. “BUT THEY JUST ORDERED!” I hear you say. Yes, that’s true, but a few product recommendation tools can place recommendations in emails, which means you’re offering highly targeted suggestions relating to a customer’s recent order.

Just think… they’ve bought a banana. What would go great with that banana? An apple! Or even an orange! Or both! We’re going for the full fruit salad here.

Selling to engaged customers really works, and since you’ll probably have a few first time buyers, you’ll increase your CLV by encouraging a repeat purchase.

In fact, when providing automated product recommendations in receipts, we saw an increase of 50% revenue from receipts vs. receipts with no product recommendations. Not bad for an email you can pretty much just “set and forget”.

Etsy does this for their store order confirmations — here’s a nice example that they add at the bottom of their emails.

View the full email on Really Good Emails

Consider Incentivising a Repeat Purchase

In tandem with recommending products, we’ve found that providing a coupon off their next order works great for encouraging repeat purchases. You may not want to do that for all customers (i.e. target first time buyers). Or, if you do, you might only leave the offer open for a very limited time (i.e. 7–14 days).

From research of our customers, using a time-sensitive coupon (usually a two week expiry) resulted in a 95% increase in revenue.

We generate unique coupon codes for each recipient

But Isn’t There Some Kind of Rule About Marketing in Transactional Emails?

For CAN-SPAM compliance, it’s ok to have a mix of both transactional and promotional material as long as the nature of the email can be “reasonably interpreted” as non-promotional. That means it can’t be a majority adverts and selling more products — think 20 products plastered into your email before you even get to the receipt and then a teeny tiny bit about your order details.

For GDPR compliance, you can use the grounds of “legitimate interest” to share promotional material (relating to your business) as long as you can justify doing it. For example: it doesn’t negatively impact the customer and it’s something that might be reasonably expected. Also, in a most of cases, the privacy of the recipient is not impacted by having promotional content on transactional emails.

Dynamic Images Make Receipts ZING

I’m excited to see how much more affordable and available dynamic images are to the everyday business now. And this means that they can and should be used for transactional emails, like order confirmations.

Imagine how useful it would be to go back to your order confirmation email and see the order status updated dynamically.

Here’s a great example from Movable Ink:

There’s so many opportunities for using dynamic images — how about a custom order confirmation image instead? Or displaying a “returned” badge on items that you’ve sent back?

Spice up your bland transactional copy

Yes, there’s some pretty standard information you need to convey in your transactional emails, but that doesn’t mean these emails have to be BORING. There’s plenty you can do to inject some fun into these emails and bring some warmth to your brand.

The most famous example of great order confirmation copy is this funny email from CD Baby — it really sets the bar high!

Here’s another nice snippet of copy from Harry’s order confirmation that I think fits the bill nicely:

View the full email on Really Good Emails

Finally this Screenhero copy is totally on point, too:

View the full email on Really Good Emails

Find Simple Ways to Keep Things Updated

A while back, one of my freelance clients contacted me about the transactional emails I had helped them set up. Their developer had left, and they noticed that some of the content and images they’d placed in their emails were out of date. So, I found an easy solution.

Instead of having to keep editing the image and link urls in the emails, why not replace those urls just once? By hosting the images themselves, they could just overwrite the old images (since usually these need to be replaced more frequently), and then use url forwarding on the site to change the links so that it simply redirects the original link to another one each time.