We’ve talked before about the email types you should be sending out to your subscribers, but there’s one automatic message (or, at least, we hope it is) that might not be getting as much love from you as it needs. We are talking about (if you read the title to this post then you already know) confirmation emails.

Though transactional emails rate on the lower end of messages customers click on, according to our good friends over at Litmus, confirmation emails have a whopping 114% higher open rate when compared to bulk emails. Not only that, but 64% of subscribers said that confirmation emails were the most important messages in their inboxes.

So what does this mean for your email marketing? It means you need to optimize those confirmations. Let’s take a look at one confirmation message that could use a little help:

No, you aren’t looking at a quote box, or just poorly formatted text in a blog — this is a confirmation email from Pistol Lake. Not shown is all the usual information (shipping address, billing information, etc.), but this is pretty much it. Really, really uninspiring.

So what’re some things William can do to optimize his confirmation email?

Provide Contact Information

Right off the bat, the only contact information we have is the email address that sent this message. So, if someone is constantly reading and replying to messages sent to that address, great! Kind of! You should still always provide a number that can be called or, if you really want to take customer relations to the next level, offer an opportunity to do a livechat with a brand rep.

Deeper Personalization

We will say that Pistol Lake gave us the customary “Dear ___,” greeting, using an actual name. So that’s a start. However, this isn’t the first purchase. This was second. They could change the “Welcome to the Pistol Lake family” copy, OR, even better, they could have a trigger set up for repeat customers that sends them an entirely different message.

Recommendations

Your confirmation messages are a great way to encourage another purchase, and you can do this by offering recommendations based on what the customer just bought. Look at how Amazon does it:

Backing up a bit, the lack of CTAs in Pistol Lake’s email in general is pretty depressing. And by “lack of CTAs” we mean “there are none.” If setting up a recommendations widget is a bit complex, having a simple call-out to check out other sections of your site or buy a gift card are still better than nothing.

Shipping Notice

Pistol Lake lets us know that they’ll be shipping the order shortly, but there was never an actual shipping confirmation sent. This presents two issues, the first being that, well, people like to track their package. If you don’t send them a tracking number, they can’t do that, and we’re pretty much back to living in the Stone Age.

The other issue is that the shipping notice is one more opportunity to engage with the customer post-purchase. Without it, that’s just another missed opportunity to keep the customer lifecycle going.

Also check out 5 Important Email Types That Should Be In Your Marketing Arsenal and The 5 Stages Of Lifecyle Marketing Explained.