Newsletters, digests, dedicated sends, behavior-driven emails, lead nurturing emails, and more are all options depending on your business’s goals and needs. Each have their purposes, yet many marketers overlook a particular type of email that tends to get a lot of traction— the transactional thank-you emails.
You heard that right: Transactional emails are one of the most effective types of communication to engage your prospects.
Transactional emails are the messages you receive from ecommerce sites like Amazon, Wayfair, and many others that confirm your order, provide shipment information, and additional details. These messages are triggered by a specific action your contacts have taken and can also be used to inform them how to complete that particular action.
For example, if you were to sign up for a webinar, you’d complete a form and then receive a transactional email, which would provide you with the relevant login information to join.
So, what’s the marketer’s equivalent to transactional emails? The simple, “Thank you” email, or the automated messages triggered when visitors convert on your landing page!
The Benefits of Thank-You Emails
Recipients anticipate transactional/thank-you emails because they help them complete an action. It’s the main reason recipients open and click on them. And as a marketer, you can easily take advantage of this dynamic by including highly customized call-to-actions in your thank-you emails to leverage the fact that the lead is fresh and already actively engaged with your brand. It’s the perfect opportunity to have the attention of a newly converted customer!
Thank-You Emails are Effective for Two Very Important Reasons
First, they place your content directly in the contact’s inbox. Therefore, even if your customer clicks away from the thank-you page they’re redirected to after completing your conversion form, they can still search their inbox and find the information they need to redeem the offer. This may include an eBook download link, webinar login information, and many other actions.
Second, people will often share your content by forwarding it via email, so thank-you emails give you yet another opportunity to extend the reach of your content to a brand new audience.
Thank-You Emails are Twice as Engaging as General Marketing Emails
While we can easily theorize that thank-you emails would be beneficial to a company’s digital marketing mix, we at Fullmoon Digital Marketing wanted to analyze just how engaging they are in a real life scenario. To understand how effective thank-you emails are compared to other email sends, we decided to compare them to another type of email we commonly send: dedicated marketing emails, sent on a one-off basis.
Using one of our preferred email platforms, we dug into the open and clickthrough rates (CTR) of our thank-you emails. We looked at 10 of our existing thank-you emails and found that, on average, they generated a 40% open rate and a 12% CTR. This is a way above average number that is not easily reached!
For comparison, we then looked at the generic marketing emails we’ve sent to one group of our buyer personas. The sample used here was 50 emails that on average generated a 15% open rate and a 7% CTR. In other words, the simple automated kickback thank-you emails generated more than twice the engagement of one-off, dedicated marketing emails. What’s even better, they tend to take half the time to actually create!
Email Marketing Takeaways
Now that we’ve covered some of the fundamentals of thank-you emails and their effectiveness, here are some marketing tips you should start applying today. Choosing Full Moon Digital Marketing means each one of these tips will be included in all our applicable sends. Our checklist for our email marketing campaigns is PAGES long!
1) Use Simple Thank-You Emails
Starting with the obvious, if you aren’t yet using kickback thank-you emails that get triggered after prospects convert on your landing pages, start implementing them sooner rather than later. To take this a step further, you can even make these emails the first part of a more complex lead nurturing workflow. This will help you can control communication your contact receives so you can continue to nurture them over time and move them through your sales and marketing funnel. Most email service providers out there have a pretty easy way to set these up! Don’t get confused though, we still want to be sure that not EVERY “Thank You” email is the same, these should be specific to each persona!
2) Optimize Your Thank-You Emails
This part is key. Make sure you’re also optimizing your kickback emails to encourage secondary conversions. In other words, include call-to-actions (CTAs) for high-value marketing offers that will move your leads further along in the sales cycle. This could look like a consultation with your sales team or a free trial of your product.
If you’re already adding secondary call-to-actions to your thank-you emails, take your skills to the next level by implementing Smart CTAs that adapt to your individual email recipients. Smart CTAs are dynamic CTAs that automatically change based on the person viewing them, creating much more targeted, segmented, and effective email marketing.
3) Make Your Thank-You Emails Social Media-Friendly
As we already mentioned, one of the key benefits of emails is that they get forwarded and shared, helping your content reach a brand new audience. Encourage this sharing of your emails by making it extremely easy for recipients to share your email content with their networks. Include social media sharing buttons/links and language that invites your contacts to forward the message to others.
