Zrinity Email Marketing Blog

Recently, Amy Day, Chief Marketing Officer for Cowtown Creative, went online to purchase a new printer from a Website she learned about through a friend. According to Amy, the site itself was very innovative. It had loads of interesting links, was able to make recommendations based on preferences she had defined, and the shopping basket/checkout experience was fairly seamless.

Amy has been ordering office supplies online for some time and knew that she could expect an email confirmation of her order once the checkout process was complete. True to form, the email appeared in her inbox within one hour of the transaction. However, when Amy opened the email, expecting to find a communication that was just as advanced as her online experience with the company, she was a little put off to find a rich text notification containing only a confirmation number, tracking information and her mailing address along with a vague disclaimer about returns.

She found this odd for the seemingly advanced online provider. In the recent past, after purchasing from other companies online, she had received a follow-up email that not only provided her with the details of each transaction, but also the opportunity to purchase products that may have been overlooked while placing the original order. In this case, the company would have received a positive response from Amy, who forgot to purchase toner for the printer.

Amy found that by continuing to do business with the site meant extra steps in the buying process, including loading the site, entering the search information, as well as re-entering all of her order detail again. As a result, she opted to go with a large name brand toner manufacturer who already has her account on file and required a simple one-step order method.

“The truth is, the service that I received from the online experience from this company was superb, but the fact that their back office process seemed to lag far behind that of its online presence has made me think twice about ordering from them again,” says Amy. “I’m not a fan of spam mail, but I don’t think of this type of transactional email that way – I think about it as an extension of the business transaction. I am familiar with them, I’ve placed an order with them, and I only expect they’ll want my business. Therefore, I also expect that they’ll remind me of potential cross-sells or complimentary products of that which I just ordered. Had the experience been more user-friendly on the back-end, they probably would have captured my ongoing business.”

It’s a simple scenario, but it’s easy to see how the absence of such a tool from a company’s arsenal of marketing activities could equate to lost revenue from future and ongoing purchases. This is in addition to the failure to turn one-time customers into long-term customers due to the inability to capture their continued business when competing against other companies that simplify their shopping experience through the use of transactional email.

It is this and similar experiences as the result of the disconnect between businesses and this form of marketing that this paper will address.

More Transactional Email Marketing Sources: Transactional Email Server, Full Transactional Email Marketing White Paper (PDF) , Transactional Email Definition