Offering personalized recommendations in emails can be a great way to guide your customers back to your website. Many online shops are using this method to attract their customers after a purchase. And also at other contact points.

Find out 5 advantages of offering personalized recommendations in transactional emails.

What are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are all emails you receive by a website or online shop after you did some kind of transaction. This can be a purchase, a subscription or also a free account at some service provider like Facebook. Transactional emails are also all emails you receive after registering.

What is Meant With Recommendations?

With recommendations we mean e.g. personalized product recommendations or articles matching the personal user profile.

Advantage 1: Reactivate Your Customers

A common problem for online shops is to reactivate customers after certain sales activities. If you offer e.g. a 20 % discount on Black Friday, then the customers mostly are one-time buyers and won’t come back to your website afterwards. What chances do you have to attract them after their purchase?

The first contact point afterwards are the sales emails. Offer additional products in your purchase confirmation or your invoice email. Then these customers are maybe attracted by other products or offers and come back to your portal once again. And the chance of binding them to you with a second purchase is exponentially higher than after a one-time purchase.

Advantage 2: Show the Variety of Your Portfolio

If the customer bought or subscribed on your website after clicking some advertising, he maybe did never browse your website at all. With personalized recommendations in the follow-up emails you have the chance to attract the customer once again and show some great other items of your portfolio. This could animate the customer to come back to your website, browse it, stay longer and buy more.

Advantage 3: Make it Personal

Show the customer, that you are responsive to his actions on your website. Yes, sometimes it can be spooky, that the website already “knows” you after you did the first purchase. But most of the customers don’t care about this spookiness and just react on great offers.

With personalized recommendations you show the customers, that you know their profiles and that you can offer more relevant articles, posts, add-ons, products or whatever your business model may be. If you have a subscription service, then don’t only offer items to sell, but also offer knowledge base articles fitting the interests of the customer. This will also make your portal more attractive and the customer will thank you by coming back to your website or even extending the subscription.

Advantage 4: Sell Directly After Selling

One of the main advantages of recommendations in transactional emails is, that the customer who receives such an email normally is still “hot”. This means, that he completed a purchase and gets an order confirmation or his shipment was sent and he receives the sending tracking number via email. Both examples do have huge upselling potentials. These customers

• are satisfied with your online shop, because they bought,
• are happy, that the sending was done and they’ll receive their products soon.

Perfect opportunities for you as a shop owner to directly catch these hot customers again to buy more with recommendations in transactional emails.

Advantage 5: Transactional Emails Have the Highest Open Rate

Just because the user trust you already, bought something from you etc. Read e.g. this article to get some background information regarding the reasons. The open rate  is between 40 and 50 % in average.

Just to make it clear: forty to fifty percent! This is absolutely awesome. Every second email is opened by your customers. And some of them (e.g. like the email with the shipment tracking code) is not only opened once, but multiple times. Therefore recommendations in these kinds of emails make absolutely sense, because these emails don’t cost you anything and are frequently opened. This is a free additional sales channel for you with the perfect target group.

Use the Power of Recommendations in Transactional Emails

All the above mentioned advantages support the integration of personalized recommendations in transactional emails. And above all you already send these kinds of emails anyway. So just start to use its potential. Personalized recommendations are a perfect and easy way to make these emails more dynamic and interesting.