Don’t Just Send Customers a Receipt, Ask Them To Buy More
By Anna Johnson on September 16th, 2010New research indicates that by including upsells and cross-sells in routine emails sent to customers after they buy from you – i.e. ‘transactional’ emails – you are likely to boost your overall transactions by another 20 percent. In other words: don’t just send customers a receipt, ask them to buy something else!
Experian Marketing Services has found that, on average, transactional emails that include relevant and related products and services have 20 percent higher transaction rates than those without.
In fact, after comparing 1,800 order, ship and return/exchange confirmations with promotional emails sent between March 2009 and February 2010, Experian found that customers engage with transactional emails at a much higher rate than they do with promotional and branding-focused campaigns.
This makes sense. Your must recent customers – i.e. people who have just bought from you – are more likely than anyone else to make another purchase from you.
What may surprise you is that order and ship confirmation emails that do NOT include extra incentivise to get people buying upsells or cross-sells have 7 percent and 11 percent better transaction rates, respectively, than those that include incentives.
In other words, you are better off just presenting customers with a new offer without any additional ‘bribe’ to get them to buy.
Again, this may be because these customers already know, like and trust you enough to be interested in what you have to offer and are slightly turned off any additional incentives to get them to buy more from you.
When it comes to including extra offers in your transactional emails sent to customers, this doesn’t mean you have to use a heavy-handed or hard-selling approach. You can make your cross-sell offer as low-key as suggesting, “if you liked this, you might also like…”
Having said that, the best thing is to test different wording to see which generates the best response.
