Article

Why You Shouldn't Sleep On Transactional Emails for Your Shopify Store

Compared to promotional emails, which can be challenging to get your customers to open, transactional emails have an open rate of 80% to 85%

Customers are excited to see when their products will arrive. 

You can make the most out of your Shopify transactional emails by adding custom styling and branding. Enhance brand recognition, and boost sales by including recommended product suggestions for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Transactional emails can also be used to develop your online audience—embedding helpful blog posts or adding links to your company’s social media profiles can generate traffic to your website and stimulate engagement right away.

Don’t sleep on transactional emails by sending another boring Shopify notification email—take charge and use UpOrder templates for more sales and repeat purchases. 

What is considered a transactional email for Shopify stores?

Transactional emails are automated messages sent from the Shopify store owner to the customer immediately following a predetermined action, such as:

  • Completing an online ecommerce order
  • Requesting a password reset
  • Signing up to become an online store member
  • Leaving a full shopping cart before finishing the checkout 

Most commonly, transactional emails are used to verify order confirmations and shipping confirmations. 

By law, a store owner must send transactional emails to their customers following an online purchase. This is to promote transparency, verify that the order details are correct, and to offer a great customer experience.

Commercial (or promotional) emails can be sent at any time to include deals and promotions. 

But transactional emails are timely messages sent automatically to inform your customer of recent changes made to their account (password resets, recent orders, signing up, etc). 

Are transactional emails the same as post purchase emails?

There can be considerable overlap between transactional emails and post purchase emails, to the point where the terms have been used interchangeably.

However, we’ll review the key differences and similarities between these two common Shopify email notifications.

Post purchase emails

Post purchase emails are automated messages sent from the seller to the buyer after an order has been placed. Multiple post purchase emails are sent to inform the customer of their package’s order status and arrival time.

Examples of post purchase emails include:

  • Order confirmation
  • Shipping confirmation
  • Out for delivery
  • Shipment delivered

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are automated messages sent from the seller to the customer after a predetermined action has taken place, such as:

  • Creating an account
  • Activating their account
  • Resetting their password
  • Placing an order (order confirmation)
  • Fulfilling and shipping the order (shipping confirmation)

As you can see, all post purchase emails are considered transactional emails, but not all transactional emails are considered post purchase (e.g. a password reset email is transactional only, because it’s not related to making a purchase).

Why you shouldn’t sleep on transactional emails for your Shopify store

Since online store owners are required to send transactional emails following a purchase, why not optimize these emails to enhance your customer’s ecommerce journey and make more sales easily?

Did you know it’s 5 times more cost-effective to sell to an existing customer over advertising to a new one? 

Not only that, but existing customers are more likely to spend 67% more on average than a new customers.

Let’s review the ways transactional emails help support your online store’s growth goals. 

Enhances the customer journey

Keeping your customer informed through every step of their customer journey will improve the customer’s experience, eliminating any worries they may have related to their order and its shipping status.

When a customer completes their order or requests a new password, don’t leave them waiting to hear back from you. 

Shopify's transactional emails are there to automatically inform your customer their order has been successfully placed, and shipped, or welcome them to your online store after signing up.

Improves brand recognition

Transactional email templates don’t have to be boring — they can be beautifully branded with your company’s logo, style, and colors to become an extension of your Shopify store.

Adding your custom branding to your emails can help spread your marketing reach. 

Instead of paying more for ads to increase brand exposure, you can send out personalized, branded transactional emails that familiarize your customers with your company’s brand image.

Constant exposure to your company’s emails and logo can help deepen brand recognition, making them more likely to open up non-transactional promotional emails later.

Improves customer retention

Did you know that 49% of customers will contact a company if they don’t receive a confirmation email following their purchase? 

When this happens, the customer is left wondering if their order has gone through properly, hurting the company’s brand and reputation.

Promptness is crucial when sending transactional emails and for retaining customers — one bad customer experience can turn a customer off from a store for up to two years

Improves sales

Have you ever opened up an order confirmation email and saw recommended products at the bottom of the page? 

These add-on products are also known as product cross-sells or upsells and are one of the easiest ways to boost sales from your transactional emails.

Getting people to open up your promotional emails can be difficult. That’s why you’ll find more success adding recommended products at the bottom of order confirmations and shipping confirmation emails—when your customers are most engaged

Using UpOrder, you can recommend products that are related to your customer’s order history, ensuring you’re recommended similar products that they haven’t seen yet in your store.

Improves customer loyalty

The promptness and accuracy of transactional emails help reinforce your store’s brand as being reliable and trustworthy, both qualities that are important for developing customer loyalty.

To convert new customers to loyal customers, consider adding a special limited-use discount code to thank your customer for their business.

Adding these special promo codes to an order confirmation or welcome email can turn your new customer into a repeat customer right away.

They’re timely and automated 

The best part of transactional emails is that they’re sent automatically. 

All you have to do is set up the predetermined actions in your store to trigger these automated emails, such as:

  • An order confirmation immediately after checkout
  • A shipping confirmation immediately after the order has been fulfilled
  • A shipment delivered email after the shipping carrier’s package status has been marked as delivered
  • Password reset link immediately after the customer clicks “forgot password”

Try UpOrder—branded transactional email templates for Shopify

Say goodbye to boring Shopify notification emails and say hello to UpOrder transactional emails.

UpOrder is a Shopify app that makes it easy to fully brand and optimize your Shopify notification emails to drive repeat customers and sales.

Install the UpOrder app to begin your free trial and start maximizing your Shopify store’s revenue from your existing customers today.

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