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5 things to include in your order confirmation emails

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Guest post from SmartrMail: So you’ve just made a sale with your online store? Congratulations! At this stage, you might be thinking that your marketing efforts are finished. That all you have to do now is send a simple confirmation email and then ship the order. If you’re thinking this, then you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity: your order confirmation email.

These emails are among the most opened and read, regularly achieving open rates of up to 70%. This fact alone makes them a prime opportunity to any email marketer.

Getting these emails right also helps convert one time customers into repeat buyers.

This can have an impressive impact on your bottom line. Even a modest 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by as much as 95%.

But how do you design your order confirmation emails to achieve this feat? What do you need to include to ensure you’re taking full advantage of this opportunity? Well, that’s exactly why this post exists: To let you know precisely what you should be adding to maximize the potential of these emails. So without further ado, let’s get into the five things to include in your order confirmation emails.

1) Order confirmation

Let’s start with the basics. The entire point of an order confirmation email is confirmation for your customer that their purchase was successful. Afterall, it’s why people open the email.

Confirming someone’s order isn’t as simple as letting them know the transaction was successful though. Instead, you need to provide all of the following details to ensure your customers will find what they’re looking for:

? Time and date of purchase
? Order number or ID
? Details of the products purchased
? Payment method and amount paid

The example below does a good job of this.

(Source: Really Good Emails)

2) Shipping details

Once you’ve properly confirmed the order, the next thing your customer will be looking for is the shipping details.

Often people will use order confirmation emails as a reference for this information in the future too. So to ensure your email has all the information customers are looking for, at a minimum include:

? The final destination address
? Expected arrival date
? Shipping method
? Tracking link if available

Depending on how your store handles shipping, sometimes it’s not possible to provide all this information straight away. In this case, you simply provide the details you can and tell your customers to expect a follow-up shipping notification email shortly.

3) Your contact info

People make mistakes, even when it comes to something as important as handing over money during a purchase.

Whether someone has entered the wrong address or ordered a t-shirt in the wrong size or colour, you want to make it easy for them to correct the mistake.

The best way of doing this is to display your contact details prominently and make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch. Doing this will save your customers the headache of desperately searching for a phone number or email address to amend the order before it ships.

If you’ve ever been in a similar situation yourself, you’ll know how appreciative customers will be for you including this.

4) Product recommendations

Now that all of the fundamentals are out of the way, it’s time to take advantage of the remarketing opportunity.

People receiving and opening your confirmation emails represent an incredibly targeted group of people primed to make another purchase. This is largely because it’s much easier to generate another sale from your existing customers than from people who’ve never purchased from you before. In fact, it can cost around six times as much to make a sale to a new customer than an existing one.

The best way to utilize this opportunity is by including similar or complementary products in the email. Dollar Shave Club does a good job of this:

(Source: Really Good Emails)

The line “add before we ship” is also clever as it entices people to make the additional purchase before the order ships to avoid shipping charges.

You can set up the recommendations manually to cross-sell particular items, but it’s easier to use dynamic personalized product recommendations. Many good eCommerce email marketing apps will easily let you add these.

5) Include a special offer

Sometimes it takes a little bit more of a push to get someone over the line.

Usually, this can be achieved by including a simple offer as a thank you for making a purchase. Something along the lines of ‘15% off your next order’ can do wonders for conversions. Of course, you can get more creative with your offer.

Building on Dollar Shave Club’s example, you can include a time sensitive offer under the guise of the customer needing to check out before their original order ships. Getting people to act quickly also reduces that chance that they’ll forget about your offer.

Over to you

Now that you know what goes into a great order confirmation email, it’s time to start creating your own. In other words, stop relying on the default template that comes with your eCommerce platform.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, there’s a great collection of order confirmation emails here to kick start your own designs. By optimizing these emails, along with a great design, will ensure your customers are excited to receive their order and get them coming back to your store.

About the author

Aaron Wiseman is a marketing executive at SmartrMail, an email marketing app for Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Neto stores.