Using transactional emails as marketing tools

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

I can state with a great deal of certainty that transactional emails are one of the most potentially effective email marketing vehicles, and yet at the same time the most heavily underutilized!

What are transactional emails? Quite simply, they are they are the ‘confirmation receipts’ you get after taking an action of some sort. Here are some examples:

• User registration
• Sales receipt
• Support ticket
• Forum reply

These emails enjoy the highest open rates of any email type. This is for one simple reason: people are most often interesting in confirming the action taken. They want to make sure their product order went through, or their user account has been activated, or their support ticket answered, etc.

Without compromising the true nature of transactional emails, you can leverage this very high open rate to cross-promote further offerings. This can be done by including a small amount of promotional message after the transaction details.

For example, if you run a forum for webmasters, you could perhaps include a link to a “Website Promotion E-Book” at the end of each notification. You know your audience is interested in the subject already, and now you’ve got a good chance of getting the product noticed.

The biggest caution I can provide here, however, is to not overdo it. If you place too much promotional content too prominently in what is supposed to primarily be transactional, your users will quickly catch on. They may complain, they may unsubscribe or disable notifications, and they may even lose trust in your service, feeling taken advantage of. So use transactional emails cautiously, and you will no doubt have great results!

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide