What are promotional emails and transactional emails?
Promotional emails are designed to raise awareness for a specific, you guessed it, promotion. So, for example, a Black Friday Cyber Monday email, a Father’s Day gift guide email, a summer savings email, a limited time only discount email, etc. Transactional emails are more functional in nature. Welcome emails, reminders and notifications, receipts, order shipped emails, etc. all fall within this category. Both promotional and transactional emails serve their own unique purpose, but they perform differently. There is a definitive difference between these two categories, meaning the way you approach each has to be carefully planned and deliberate.
When should you send your email?
This is always a common question. When should you send email? When should you tweet? Post to Facebook? Publish an article? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Your email list is different from every other email list, so relying on averages and best practices won’t work. You’ll just have to test different days and times for yourself.
The design
A few design tips to keep in mind for both promotional and transactional emails:
- Quality Assurance: your emails are going to be opened on a wide variety of devices using a wide variety of email apps and web browsers. It’s important that you ensure your emails display properly in all apps/browsers and on all devices. That’s a big ask, I know. But I promise someone somewhere is trying to open your email on a device you consider prehistoric. Start by reviewing your email analytics to find the most common apps/browsers and devices.
- Visual Hierarchy: visual hierarchy is how prominent something is visually. So, for example, the “Item(s)shipped” table moves the shipped product info higher up the visual hierarchy. If the table were a contrasting colour, for example, it would move even higher up the visual hierarchy. Be sure you’ve really thought about your visual hierarchy and that you’re giving the right elements the most prominence.
How can you avoid spam filters?
Spam filters are fairly straightforward. There is a long list of factors that emails are scored on. If the email’s score gets too high, it’s flagged as spam by the email server.
Unfortunately, every server is different and constantly changing. So what’s marked as spam on one server might not be marked as spam on another server. Plus, that long list of factors I mentioned? Always evolving and almost never publicly published.
The call to action
Finally, we get to your most wanted action, to the ask. Some important things to remember:
- Clarity: be very clear about what the next step is. It should be apparent at all times. Don’t leave people guessing, don’t dilute the email with too many competing calls to action.
- Expectations: what will happen when the recipient clicks your call to action? This should be crystal clear. Make sure expectation matches reality. So, for example, don’t promote a BFCM sale on t-shirts and send people to your homepage.
- Patience: don’t rush the call to action. With promotional emails, marketers tend to have this sense of urgency. You have time. Set the context for why you’re emailing, present your value, offer a simple next step. It’s not about making sure your call to action is above the fold or stuffed in there as many times as possible.
- Relevancy: when you add an additional call to action to a transactional email, you want to make sure it’s relevant. For example, a receipt email might have a “People who purchased this also purchased…” call to action. Don’t throw in a call to action for the sake of it. Think it through, make sure it’s relevant to the original purpose of the email.
Conclusion
Email is alive and well, but sending optimised promotional and transactional emails is no small feat. This can’t be a set it and forget it system if you want emails that convert and actually generate revenue.
Fortunately, you’re now armed with the information you need to go forth and rule inboxes.