The historical open rates of transactional emails hover around 70% because they are, by nature, highly relevant. These messages usually pertain to a recent customer action and contain important information such as a printable receipt, order confirmation and details, tracking number or estimated time of delivery.
Traditionally, transactional emails were executed by IT or back-office transactional systems. As a result, their "just the facts" content represented a huge missed opportunity for companies to better market their products and open up valuable dialogue with consumers.
Today, many marketers are in a better position to enhance the messaging and appearance of transactional emails, as new technology enables them to manage branding and offer management while the transactional sending infrastructure is handled by IT. For example, marketers can offer cross-sell and up-sell opportunities within transactional emails for a specific purchase, such as including a follow-up offer for headphones within the shipping confirmation for the recent purchase of an MP3 player.
Yet with 67% of consumers now open to receiving marketing messages in transactional emails, according to database marketing agency Merkle, and nearly three-quarters of the US email market not including offers or ads in their transactional messages, according to data from JupiterResearch, marketers have only scratched the surface. Additionally, with the amount of transactional emails received by consumers expected to double from 2007 to 2012, as found by JupiterResearch, there is no question that marketers can stand to benefit by taking more control over this key part of the dialogue between a company and its customers.
