The phrase “Thank You” is a universal way of expressing gratitude. Every language and culture have a code of saying thank you. In online marketing “culture”, a simple thank you email to a customer who has bought a product or service from your ecommerce site is all it takes to express gratitude.
What exactly is a thank you email?
There are many types of emails that you can send to your customers and prospects. You could send to them newsletters, lead nurturing emails, abandoned cart emails, promotional emails or thank you emails depending on your business goals. In ecommerce, one of the most important emails is the transactional email. This is one type of email that gets the visitor’s full attention.
A transactional email is a message the customer receives from the ecommerce site that confirms an order or gives additional information such as shipping and other details. It is one email that a customer will be looking forward to receiving and as such it provides a very effective communication channel to engage with customers. Transactional emails are used by both small and large companies, ranging from Amazon to the bakery around the corner. For many businesses, the transactional email is the thank you email.
The thank you email is an automated message that is triggered when a visitor purchases a product or simply signs up for an offer on your ecommerce site. When customers receive your thank you email they experience a sense of satisfaction in the knowledge that their purchase has been completed successfully and all the important details regarding the purchase will remain in their inbox for future reference.
If properly written and executed, a thank you email can go a long way in building customer loyalty and pitching a few more relevant products. The customer has already purchased something from your site so a thank you email will impress them further and even make them more likely to visit your store again and buy another product. Best of all, the customer will always open all of the emails you’ll be sending in the future.
Benefits of thank you emails
From a marketer’s point of view, thank you emails provide a number of benefits. To start with, the recipient will almost always open and click links in the email. The thank you email is also very effective because it places your content directly inside the contact’s inbox. If he or she clicks away from the email, they’ll still have access to the information whenever they want to redeem an offer you had promised them in the thank you email.
Another great benefit a marketer gets from thank you emails is the fact that people always share interesting email content simply by forwarding the entire email to friends and family. A thank you email gives you another opportunity to reach a brand new audience, assuming you’ve done something unique.
More importantly, the thank you email earns you customer loyalty. To the customer, you become a trustworthy seller who can be counted on to respond in case of any problem with the product. Remember, a loyal customer is one of the best investments an ecommerce business can have.
5 Ways to use your thank you emails more effectively
Here are a few ways of using thank you emails for selling more products and building better relationships with your customers.
1. Promote related offers
The receiver of your thank you email is a hot prospect so why don’t you take advantage of that with other relevant offers? The thank you email is a perfect place to promote additional offers such as related products and special discounts for new products and complimentary services.
A thank you email normally includes two links. The first link points the contact to a landing page where the user can access the product if it is a digital product or a page with further details about the purchase. The second link takes the visitor further in your sales funnel with a relevant upsell offer. Just make sure that the additional offer or offers in your thank you email are relevant to, or can be used with, what the customer bought. The offer must have compelling value to the customer.
The person who has just bought your product is excited about your company and definitely trusts your expertise. You can easily showcase and promote your products to the customer by including links to product description videos in the thank you email.
2. Encourage the customer to create an account in your store
There’s one thing you need to know when you are running an ecommerce business and that is the fact that 35% of customers abandon their carts if they are forced to create an account before they can purchase anything. If requesting them to sign up before they purchase makes you lose business, why not ask them to do it after they have completed the purchase process? The thank you email provides a perfect place to request them to create an account with your store.
You can even take it a step further and provide an incentive to customers who create an account with your store after they have made a purchase. The incentive could be in the form of promo codes to entice them to make another purchase or any other user benefits that your business provides. For instance, you could inform customers that opening an account gives them an opportunity to track their orders and save their important details for the next time they shop at your store. This is a user benefit that most would not turn down.
3. Conduct brief surveys
As a business owner, it pays to know what attracts visitors to your site in the first place and if your product or service is up to standard. Check out GoDaddy‘s thank you email with a survey request at the end.
It is also important to know what type of incentive converts visitors as soon as they land on your page. This information will help you to improve your marketing strategies so that you can reach a wider audience and get more conversions in future.
When a customer trusts you enough to purchase your product, he or she will also be willing to share some relevant information with you. Your thank you email is a perfect tool to conduct brief surveys about customer experience and learn how you can improve your business. You, however, need to reassure the customer that the short quick survey will not take up much of their time.
Ask them simple questions about their user experience in your site especially about the checkout process and problems they may have encountered while shopping on your website. Many customers will appreciate your concern and even happily oblige the information you want. Remember, happy clients mean more sales.
You could also offer them an incentive for giving you this feedback. For example, you can organize a raffle for a $50 gift card to your store every month between everyone who fills out this survey.
4. Ask customers to connect with your company on social media
One of the most effective ways of increasing your ROI is by increasing the reach of your service or products. If every customer who buys from your site shares his or her shopping experience with friends and family, you would end up with more leads and sales. The easiest way of asking customers to engage with your business on social media or share your offers on social media is via your thank you emails. If they trusted you enough to purchase from your site, then they’ll not have a problem telling others how great your store is.
Here is Sony‘s email to their subscribers to follow their Pinterest boards:
Notice the attachment at the end of the email. Though you do not have to send out an email to ask them to join your social media channel directly, you can at least add this to every email you send out.
5. Include CTAs in your thank you emails
If the goal of your thank you emails is to encourage the customer to take further action, then make sure to include a call to action (CTA) in the email. The CTA can be for another relevant offer, a piece of content, or something else. It should be an offer that continues the customer’s journey in your sales funnel. Many companies use smart CTAs in their thank you emails that can change the CTA according to who is receiving the email. Smart CTAs help you to avoid situations where a customer keeps on receiving the same offer in his or her thank you email.
Check out Delfin’s thank you email where it includes a 5% discount code. It has a clear CTA button at the button that will direct customers back to their website.
Conclusion
Having talked about the benefits of thank you emails and different strategies that you can employ to make these emails benefit your business, it is important to touch a little bit on how to craft your thank you email. How do you make thank you emails more interesting and what should you include in the email?
First and foremost, add something personal to the thank you email. The customer’s name is a good starting point. Personalize each email by addressing the customer by his or her first name. Do not make them think that the same email is sent to everyone out there. Your goal should be to create trust and build a good relationship with the customer.
You can provide them with something that will make them remember your company or at least make them laugh. When you give them a reason to remember you then the open rate for all of your future emails will definitely be higher.
Some companies send out thank you emails from the Founder’s email address and have an image of his/her signature in the end. Now that’s impressive and memorable – it makes the customer feel important.
It is good to impress your customers but mind the language you’ll be using. Avoid going overboard with lengthy and complicated thank you emails that sound like another sales letter. Use simple easy to understand language and always get straight to the point in your presentation.
In the end, keep in mind that it’s a simple email, not sales copy. Don’t go overboard, simply try to be grateful for your customers and create even more value for them.
