In today’s customer-centric corporate world, customer satisfaction is a major parameter of success. This article explores how order confirmation emails can help you improve your customer satisfaction.
The words ‘Order Confirmation Email’ may invoke an image of an uninteresting mail containing a receipt of your order. In most cases, your mental image is spot on as often these emails are strictly informative, bordering on the clinical side.
While it is important to provide order details, you should leverage the fact that approximately 60% of these order confirmation emails are read by your customers, giving you a great opportunity to add something extra to these emails.
Opportunities for reselling, upselling, and cross-selling for repeat customers are much higher than gaining a brand-new customer. Always check how you can wow your customers through these regular ‘Order Confirmation Emails.’
What is an Order Confirmation Email?
An order confirmation email is what you send out to the customers after they have checked out and paid for an order. This email is commonly sent to both new and repeat customers. These emails usually contain details such as when the order was placed, what item was ordered, the price, an approximate date when the package will arrive, and the billing and shipping addresses. These emails can play a small but significant role in email marketing strategy.
How do Order Confirmation Emails Work?
Nowadays, the email to confirm the order is sent through an automated order processing system. Depending on the service you use to send these emails, all relevant details are added to an email before sending it to the customer. This email is triggered whenever a customer clicks the button to confirm their purchase while checking out their order.
How to Boost Customer Satisfaction with Order Confirmation Email?
You can use these order confirmation emails to improve customer satisfaction. You don’t need to make the verbiage to be “salesy,” you can use these emails to further your relationship with the customers and improve your brand impression.
The following are a few ideas for improving customer satisfaction through order confirmation emails:
• Providing Customer Assurance
Ensure that you send the confirmation email as soon as the customer places their order. This will assure them that your business is genuine and not a scam. Sending this email also lets the customer know that you are genuine and that they can track their order status anytime. You should add details such as the next step, order tracking information, and your customer support number in this email, thus building trust further. Add the necessary information about your return policy for the customer’s ease and convenience.
• Beginning a Long-Term Customer Relationship
Your most stable customer base is your repeat customers. A simple order confirmation mail goes a long way to build trust to ensure that a customer buys your product regularly. More than 60% of customers find these emails to be of great value. They are assured that you are actively working on delivering their order on time.
• Reducing Customer Requirement to Contact Support Services
In your order confirmation email, you can detail the next steps of the ordering process. Ensure that you add your customer support details in the mail. These details will ensure that the customer knows the steps in the ordering process and will not contact customer support for information.
How can you Improve your Order Confirmation Email?
Almost all order confirmation emails have similar standard information. The following are some ways in which you can make your emails more effective and ensure that you strike the right tone with the customers:
• Sending the Email on Time
Ensure you send the order confirmation email on time and when the order is created successfully. The service provider for emails and the automated inventory management system must work in tandem to ensure this confirmation email is generated instantly and sent to the customer immediately. You can also add a Note in your order placement system to inform the customer about this email that they will receive and ask them to check the Spam folder of their mailbox if they don’t receive the confirmation mail within a specified timeframe.
• Including Pertinent Information in the Email
Ensure you include all the relevant information about the customer’s order in the email, such as when the order was placed, what item was ordered, the price, an approximate date when the package will arrive, and the billing and shipping addresses. The more detailed your information is, the less chance of the customer contacting customer support to get common details.
• Setting Practical Expectations at the on-set
Ensure that you mention important details such as the next steps, approximately when the customer will receive the ordered item, what they should do if the ordered item is damaged, and your returns policy.
• Being Creative with Your Emails
While mentioning that the email confirms the customer’s order is important, nothing stops you from being creative in the subject line and the email’s message. For example, “Phew! It was a load off your back” or “Take it easy, we have got you covered from here” can be good options.
• Driving Customers to Social Media Channels
The order confirmation emails have excellent open rates, and the links added there are clicked almost more than 15% time. So, if you send 200 order confirmation emails daily, you could get almost 238 clicks weekly only from your emails alone. Not a statistic that you can afford to ignore. Use these emails to direct the customers to your social media channels and encourage them to follow, subscribe, share, and comment.
However, the CAN-SPAM Act requires 80% of your emails to contain details of the order and transactions. So, ensure that you are subtle and don’t promote too much.
Conclusion:
Although the order confirmation email has become a necessity today, we tend to overlook the other benefits that the merchant can get from such emails. The benefits and the repeat customers that a strong order confirmation email bring makes this avenue worth exploring for all buyers.
If you inform the customer at every step of the ordering process, inform them beforehand of any possible delays, and are prompt to return or exchange items that are damaged or not fit; it will assure the customer that you can be trusted as a brand. Then they will prefer your products sometimes over other famous brands just because of the little value additions that you provide.
About XPDEL:
XPDEL is a leading hi-tech provider of Fulfillment and Logistics Services on a mission to enable growth for eCommerce companies. We are futuristic in our vision and constantly work on creating technology that helps us meet customer expectations for today and tomorrow. We have a wide network of Fulfillment centers that enables us to efficiently handle nationwide delivery in the US – same day, next day, and 2-day delivery. Being closer to the end consumer, we deliver much faster than others.
