The Opportunities and Threats of Transactional E-mails

As a growing number of marketers take advantage of the opportunities presented in transactional e-mails, one expert is sounding a note of caution.

Yes, order confirmations, account statements, and product-and-service updates get clicked on more often than other types of e-mail and as a result present an opportunity to do a little extra selling, said Stephanie Miller, vice president, strategic services for deliverability concern Return Path.

But there are rules governing the use of sales pitches in transactional e-mails and marketers who over-sell in them run the risk of drawing the attention of the FTC. If an e-mail’s primary purpose is determined to be commercial, then it falls under Can Spam and requires the sender to give the receiver an opt-out mechanism.

“Transactional e-mails present a huge opportunity. An order confirmation is the immediate highly valued, highly read message, so it’s a great opportunity to do cross selling and upselling,” said Miller. “But marketers should do it respectfully.”

Return Path recommends marketing messages in transactional e-mail account for no more than 20% of the total message.

Examples of companies doing transactional marketing right are travel firms, she said. They often send offers for rental cars, hotels and other services in the cities to which customers are headed along with ticket-purchase confirmations.

“Expedia, for example, drives tons of purchases off of their transactional e-mails,” said Miller.”

According to the FTC, e-mails containing both commercial and transactional relationship content are considered commercial if a recipient reasonably interpreting the subject line would likely conclude that the message contains commercial content.

It would also be considered commercial if the e-mail’s transactional relationship content does not appear in whole or substantial part at the beginning of the body of the message.

“The subject line and the headline have to be about the transaction and not the marketing,” said Miller.

The FTC’s rules on dual-purpose e-mail also take into account the proportion or weight of the various parts of the message, such as font size and color, to determine whether the e-mail’s primary purpose is transactional or commercial.

“If the transactional stuff is all text and the marketing stuff is all flashing banners, that might fall outside the bounds of what they would call transactional,” said Miller.

She added: “One of the reasons transactional e-mails get such high open and engagement rates is because they’re valuable. If we start taking away the value, which is confirmation of the transaction, we start hurting ourselves as an industry.”