The Power Of The Often Over-Looked Thank You Email

Email marketing is becoming increasingly popular as marketers discover its benefits. Even so, there’s one type of email that most companies don’t spend much time creating, or don’t bother to send at all: transactional emails. These emails confirm customer product orders, notify customers when their merchandise has arrived, and thank customers for their purchases. The last on the list is surprisingly powerful.

Any marketing agency will tell you that thank you emails are more than worth it. Customers often expect to receive a thank you email for something as simple as an account sign up, and with this in mind, your company should never forgo them. Your marketing information goes right to the customer and is there whenever they need it. This information is also easily shareable when in email format, as a simple forward can expand the reach of your content more than you anticipated.

Most thank you emails contain important links. One may take the the customer to an advertised offer, while the other may lead to a higher risk but better reward offer that committed customers are more likely to take advantage of. They can also be personalized with the name of the customer or a set of products they may like. This is what makes them useful.

Thank you emails are so useful, in fact, that they may exceed typical marketing emails in value. One company found that the open and clickthrough rates of thank you emails were respectively 42% and 14% higher than that of marketing emails. Those numbers are nothing to scoff at. Knowing that you have an effective tool at your fingertips that takes a fraction of the time to create than your original tool should be noted and used whenever possible. Now, let’s go over how to create effective thank you emails.

Keep the content simple. Employ an automatic sending function that’s set off by a particular customer action if you don’t already have one. If you’d like to lead your customers down a marketing path over an extended period of time, put relevant links and information into your thank you emails to naturally direct them to the desired destination.

Optimize the thank you emails you send out for calls-to-action for high reward offers. Your audience will be carried along by the sales current more easily this way, providing them opportunities to interact with your marketing representatives or test a product for free. For those who have already implemented calls-to-action, automate and cater them to each of your customers. Every thank you email recipient will get a better user experience and be more compelled to stick with your company.

The last thing you should do is make your thank you emails shareable on social media. Give your customers access to instant content sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular platforms to reach a greater percentage of your audience more quickly. If you put in some of work beforehand, your customers will do the rest for you.

Don’t focus solely on your email marketing efforts and on creating standard marketing emails: make your thank you emails marketing tools in and of themselves!