Email best practices
Optimize your holiday transactional emails with these 6 tips
These days, consumers start their holiday shopping well before the end of the year. A recent survey showed that 43% begin buying gifts before Halloween. The last quarter of the year, including Black Friday and Christmas, is therefore the moment for boosting your sales. Holiday transactional emails can play a key role in that!
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Yes, it’s almost that time of year again! We’ll soon be in the holiday spirit, exchanging gifts and enjoying wholesome meals with our families. But we’re missing an important detail – shopping. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner, and as marketers, we must go all in to generate the maximum sales and achieve our annual goals.
Nowadays, consumers start their holiday shopping well before the end of the year. A recent survey showed that 43% of customers begin buying gifts before Halloween. This makes the last quarter of the year a crucial time for businesses. The key to driving sales during the holiday months is transactional emails, which are essential for confirming online purchases and ensuring this period is a success.
What's more, data from Sinch’s 2024 BFCM Communications Survey shows a significant majority of consumers (94.4%) consider transactional messages to be critical during the holiday season (up 14% from 2023). Not only that, but transactional emails also have higher open rates than other marketing emails, making them even more significant to the customer experience.
But what happens when a purchase confirmation never shows up, or a password reset appears two hours after it's been asked for? Problems with transactional emails, like late delivery and lack of personalization, can affect your sales. Presently, customers look for transactional emails within 60 seconds of their purchase.
Table of contents
1. Include visuals
2. Personalize your emails
3. Maintain a festive tone of voice
4. Begin the message with transactional information
5. Send emails in a timely manner
6. Add social media buttons for your company’s channels
6 tips to boost your holiday transactional email strategy
Now that we know the significance of a strong transactional email strategy, let’s look at our top six ideas to thrive this holiday season.
1. Include visuals
Visual elements are one of the first things people notice when opening a message and designing email templates with an appealing appearance can increase your conversion rate.
Since the holidays are a festive time full of joy and celebration, using a cheery visual theme may resonate with your audience and tap into the lighthearted mood – even with transactional emails that are typically more matter-of-fact.
Seasonal emojis are another way to add a fun, upbeat feel to your holiday emails and may encourage readers to pay closer attention to what your company offers. Consider using them in the subject line as well, as it makes them stand out even more.
Emojis add an upbeat feel to your holiday transactional emails.
2. Personalize your emails
Personalizing emails is one of the best ways to improve engagement and increase click-through rates. The holiday season provides an excellent opportunity to do that, where you can add content and images related to Christmas, use a customer's first name, and show appreciation for their business.
And while many marketers include personalization in marketing emails, they often forget about it in transactional emails. That’s a missed opportunity. Adding a personal touch to a transactional email encourages users to bond with your brand and possibly shop around some more.
Personalize your transactional emails
By the way, if you also add a recipient’s first name in the subject line, they’re even more likely to open your transactional email.
Consider adding a first name to your subject line for more attention.
3. Maintain a festive tone of voice
The holidays are a joyful moment in which people have fun and spend time with their loved ones, so make sure to reflect this spirit in the tone of your transactional emails.
During this lighthearted time, an uplifting email that brings cheer to someone's inbox lets you and your audience share good times together. That can nurture an existing customer relationship or encourage the formation of a new one and help your business achieve its goals.
4. Begin the message with transactional information
While the holiday season presents a good marketing opportunity, transactional information is still the core of a transactional email. For that reason, it's important to use a clear subject line and devote 80% or more of a transactional message to details – like items purchased, shipping information, and total cost – and add marketing toward the end.
That way, the customer receives the necessary information, and you can make a low-key sales pitch to cross-sell-related items.
5. Send emails in a timely manner
With the high volume of purchases during the holiday season, customers must receive order confirmations rapidly and reliably.
Doing so lets them know they can count on your company for future transactions and leaves them rest assured that their gifts will arrive as scheduled. Confirmation emails with an even, informative tone provide customers with what they need and are typically more appreciated.
6. Add social media buttons for your company’s channels
You can further encourage customer engagement by including buttons for your brand's social media channels in transactional emails. Offering incentives for new followers, like a discount code or a contest entry, increases their interaction with your company and plays a role in the buying journey.
Social media channels also provide a way to showcase your brand, discuss its values, and convince followers it's a better option than the competition.
Optimize your holiday transactional emails with Sinch Mailjet
During the holidays and throughout the year, Mailjet has everything you need to create professional marketing emails that produce results. Our intuitive Email Editor lets you design appealing templates with a drag-and-drop interface without the need to learn complex software. And our A/B testing tools help you find the emails that work best and further optimize your email marketing strategy.
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This is an updated version of the article “Go all in on your transactional emails this holiday season” published in 2014 on the Mailjet blog.
