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Email marketing can be pretty complex. There’s quite a balancing act involved in growing and retaining subscribers. In matters of business, the ultimate goal is to have your subscribers engage with the business and click your call to action. You would expect them to buy something that you’re selling, enroll in your program or course or read the latest blogs on your website. No matter what your goal or goals are for a certain email marketing campaign, one thing is certain: email confirmations play a big part in creating a smooth customer journey and increasing conversions.
Once a customer triggers a condition (subscribing to your site, purchasing from your website or registering for an event, etc.) writing a confirmation email should be the next step. Confirmation emails are twofold – it gives the customer the opportunity to continue on with a business relationship with you and it gives you, the business, an opportunity to continue engaging with a customer that is really interested in what you have to offer. Even more so, in many cases the users expect to receive a confirmation email after interacting with a brand in various ways, and will worry that something went wrong if they don’t receive one.
But how do you write a confirmation email, you ask? Let’s break it down into 7 actionable steps.
1. Confirm the registration
The first thing you should do when writing a confirmation email is to confirm the customer’s registration with your website. Within that confirmation email should be detailed instructions on how to activate their account with you. There should also be an option for the customer to opt out of future emails, in the event that they subscribed to your site in error, or simply don’t want to receive your emails anymore.
This first step will give you an opportunity to create a bond with your subscriber. Take a minute or so to connect by providing information about your site and what the subscription entails. Keep the focus on your website and the benefit(s) that the services you provide can bring to the user and how they will help them achieve their user goals.
2. Set clear guidelines
You have confirmation that the email address is valid and that the prospective customer has activated the account. Now what?
This is where a lot of businesses lose their customers. Without specific instructions on what action they should take next, customers will lose interest and with that, your business will lose opportunity to expand. If by signing up to your newsletter, for example, a customer can use a special discount code to get 20% off of a course that you are offering, they are much more likely to turn into paying customers. However, the coupon is only valid if the course is purchased within a set number of days. This will create a sense of urgency and more likely than not will trigger the users’ fear of missing out. Make sure this is communicated to the subscriber and that all links (and the coupon code) are in working order before you refer them to another page.
3. Use CTAs
Now that you have their attention, casually present your call to action in a way that is not too wordy or intrusive. Create an overall atmosphere that says you would love for them to take this next step and describe the benefits and rewards of taking that next step.
For example, if you are offering a course as the call to action, here is where you would outline the course you’re offering. Go into detail about how the course you’re offering is better than any other course of the same type. Discuss the reward and outcome of completing your course. This is where you get to show off and toot your own horn a little bit. Make your subscribers feel like the reward and benefit of completing your course is something that they can’t afford to miss out on.
4. Use visual appeal to your advantage
Make sure that your confirmation email will get noticed and that it stands out from the pack. On any given day, a person will receive an insane amount of emails, for which the open rate ranges between 20 and 40%. You don’t want your confirmation email to end up in the junk folder or moved to the spam folder. Instead, have an email verification process in place that will ensure better email deliverability. You may also set up an email validation API for your website to prevent invalid emails from submitting your forms.
A good practice that will improve the chances to get your confirmation email noticed and opened right away is by using graphics and making sure the design is sleek and creates a professional feeling. Choosing the right color scheme (preferably based on your brand colors), making sure the fonts you use will be displayed correctly across various devices and browsers, using high quality images and considering mobile responsiveness are all things to consider when thinking about the visual appeal of your email confirmation.
Having a well designed email will also help you with highlighting the CTA in the email. After all, you need to keep the main goal of your email marketing campaigns in mind and a good design will definitely assist you in your efforts.
5. Write a good subject line
Make sure that you write a catchy headline; one that will generate enough interest, at first glance, to be opened right away.
The first thing you see when scrolling through your emails is the title. Without an appealing title that stimulates the receiver to click-through, the chances of getting your message across are greatly reduced. If you are not convinced yet that the headlines are so important, check out these statistics. You don’t want your headline to be an attention grabbing clickbait type of thing, so it is really important that it is relevant to the contents of your email and touches upon the already defined user goals. Another thing to consider is the length of your subject line. Subject lines that are longer than 9 words or 60 characters will be cropped when displayed, which might cause ineffectiveness for your confirmation email. Check out this compiled list of best practices for email subject lines to learn more about how you can write top-notch headlines.
6. Offer contact information
You must have a valid contacts page. You would want to provide your subscribers with valid contact names, numbers and email addresses.
For example, if a prospective subscriber received your confirmation email, activated their account and attempted to purchase the course mentioned in example 2, but ran into issues using the discount code, who do they contact about that? A common practice is to include links to your business’ social media pages and a contact email and phone number in the footer of your email.
7. A/B Test emails
The links that you include in your email and the CTAs you want the receivers to click on will in most cases lead them to a landing page on your website. Considering the different variations that an email can be written in, A/B testing is a common practice in email marketing. It is used to verify what the most effective type of email is for a certain campaign. For example, if you are sending confirmation emails to verify subscribers to your newsletter and notice that they don’t get opened as much as you’d want them to, a good idea is to design a different variation of that email and compare the data that is relevant to your goal (e.g click-through rate, conversion rate). The variations that can be used for A/B testing include changing the subject line, the CTA button, or the landing page.
Conclusion
Confirmation emails can be sent for a variety of reasons. The main reason is to confirm that the user’s action has been captured and completed . Not every single subscriber will open the confirmation email and not every subscriber will participate in the call to action. However, consistency and deliverability will account for some of the conversions. One thing you can try to improve the opening rate is writing a reminder email after a certain period of time after sending the initial confirmation email that didn’t receive a response.
A lot goes into developing a marketing email strategy. Handled the right way, confirmation emails can be a powerful tool in the grand scheme of things.
