Why Personalization is important in transactional emails

Absolutely no one wants to feel like “unknown” or “valued customer” when they’ve purchased your product. They want to feel like an individual, who you know by name and appreciate. Failing to properly merge your clients’ names with your transactional emails isn’t just the sign of an inferior SaaS billing service or marketing automation software. It’s just plain bad business. There are no secrets online anymore, and a simple Google search can reveal everything consumers want to know about your competitors. Personalizing your transactional emails is key to retention. As Seth Godin has famously stated, “I don’t want email, I want me-mail.”

The Why and How of Personalized Emails

To be perfectly honest, personalization isn’t actually that difficult. If you billing service, mail platform or marketing automation software lack this functionality, you’re making things much harder on yourself than you need to. Known to industry insiders as MERGEVARS, it should be automatic for your automation to pull relevant information, like an individual’s name, from their profile and insert into an email.

It’s no secret that disengaged subscription business customers are the enemy of a healthy average customer lifetime value. If your clients simply aren’t using your service, why should they continue letting you charge them month after month? Post-sale emails let your client base know they’re appreciated, and open the door for a two-way dialogue between customers and your brands. Here are a few post-sale emails that can boost engagement, and let clients know they’re truly appreciated:

1. Thank You/Confirmation Email

Lindsay Kirchoff of HubSpot has written that after a customer makes a purchase, they’re essentially presented with a fork in the road. They can emotionally move on, or they can become an engaged, and a potential target for future upselling. Confirmation emails that are immediately triggered by a conversion can open the door for contact with your customer service team that’s critical to maintaining engagement. Managing expectations can also reduce the chances you’ll be hit with chargebacks.

Personalize the email with their name, and ensure your billing service or software provides the ability for you to reference the level of service they decided on. Including a secondary call-to-action can trigger better engagement.

2. Service Surveys

Net Promoter Scores are an effective means of capturing a snapshot of how your brand’s image is faring among your customer base. By asking clients to score on a scale of 1-to-10 how likely they are to recommend your subscription business to a friend, you can gauge whether their satisfaction has earned your company a promoter, or whether they’re at risk from detracting from your company’s reputation.

No customer wants to provide data or time to a business that can’t even get their name straight. When surveying your customers, it’s critical to personalize with their name to let them know they’re not just another data point.

3. Billing Emails and Upselling

When you launch your product, there will be a need for a lot of email communication going out from your billing system. For example, invoice, expired credit card notification, payment decline notification etc. These emails are also transactional in nature and you need to make use of these emails to your advantage. You can include a discount coupon for purchase of other products in your system after communicating the original message. Say for instance, you send an invoice, you can include a coupon of 10% off on your next purchase to get repeat purchases.

Selling to your existing customer base will likely have the highest ROI of any form of marketing you engage in. Your current customers are 67% more likely than your leads to spend money with you, and Amazon has successfully increased sales by 30% simply by cross-selling to their contacts. However, if you’re asking someone for more money, it’s more important than ever to get their personal details straight. If you’re offering an upgrade, don’t mix up their service level, reference their loyalty as a customer with specifics about how long they’ve subscribed, and definitely address them by name.

A large email list is no excuse for failing to personalize your emails, each and every time. Let your customers know you care, and they’ll reciprocate.