One of your toughest challenges in email marketing is persuading people to open and read your email sales pitch. Your customers are busy, and distracted, and inundated with spam. No wonder the average open rate is a mere 35.5 percent, according to email service provider Harte-Hanks Postfuture.

The secret to improving your email open rates is to make your messages more timely and more relevant. And there’s no better place to do both than in transactional email. Transactional email messages are the ones you send to website visitors who have transacted business on your website. An email that confirms a purchase is a transactional email. An email notifying a customer that a product has just shipped is a transactional email.

Research by Harte-Hanks Postfuture demonstrates that customers open transactional email messages more than 70 percent of the time. That’s double the open rate for traditional opt-in email messages. Clickthrough rates are also higher, reaching more than 50 percent when the transactional email includes a link to a discount offer. Traditional opt-in emails generate only 6.6 percent clickthroughs according to email marketer ExactTarget.

Open rates and clickthrough rates are higher in transactional email because transactional emails reach people who have just bought from you or asked you for more information. So they are expecting to hear from you.

What all of this means for your business is that a promotion or offer included in a transactional email is about twice as likely to be read as the same message sent in a traditional email.

Some tips:

1. Personalize. Speak to your new customer by name. Name what she just bought, or name what she just signed up to receive. Be specific to show that your message is timely and relevant.

2. Thank before you pitch. Make your transactional email look transactional. If it’s a receipt, make it look like a receipt. If it’s a welcome message, make sure it says welcome. Put your offer or promotion after the thank-you or welcome.

3. Offer something of value. Don’t just try to sell your new customer something else. Offer an incentive, such as savings on future purchases or an exclusive discount on supplies.

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About the author
Alan Sharpe is a direct mail copywriter who helps business owners and marketing managers generate leads, close sales and retain customers using direct mail and email marketing. Learn more about his creative direct mail writing services and sign up for free weekly tips like this at http://www.sharpecopy.com.

© 2007 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and in print provided the links remain live and the content remains unaltered (including the "About the author" message)

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