Order Confirmation Email Best Practices to Help Your Business Stay Ahead
In this blog post, we will teach you how to compose an order confirmation email that comforts and reassures your customers.
We will tell you how marketers like you make the most out of the excitement and the shopping-rush that comes with online purchases, to generate even more profits.
What makes Order Confirmation Emails Special?
Order confirmation emails are one of the most relevant and valuable transactional emails.
The following data highlights the importance and benefits of sending great confirmation emails:
- Transactional emails receive 8 times more opens than regular marketing emails.
- Confirmation emails have one of the highest engagement rates, with an average open rate of 65%, an average click rate of 17%, and an average order rate of 3.77%.
- 64% of customers consider confirmation emails to be the most valuable type of email.
What this data tells us is that customers are more likely to click on an order acknowledgment email.
Customers engage more with order confirmation emails than full-fledged promotional emails.
The potential that lies within order confirmations is huge, as supported by the statistics above.
It takes carefully-planned and laid-out strategies for any marketer to be able to tap into these potentials.
Types Of Confirmation Emails
1. Order Confirmation Emails
When a customer places an order on your website, they expect to receive a purchase confirmation email.
This confirmation email provides them with the reassurance that their order has been successfully placed and reminds them of their order details.
Similar to registration confirmation emails, confirmation emails are expected by online shoppers who want to double-check if they have ordered the right product and if they entered the correct delivery address.
They also want to receive more information about the shipping period and customer service.
Post-purchase emails is also an excellent opportunity for e-commerce businesses to promote more products to their new customers.
Subject Line: Your Tens order is confirmed! ☀️️
2. Shipping Confirmation Emails
Once you send out the first transactional email to your new customer, it’s time to send the second email: Shipping Confirmation Email.
The goal behind shipment notification emails is to reassure customers that their order is on the way and provide them with a specific arrival date if possible amongst other shipping information.
Some companies put in place a product tracking system that allows shoppers to follow their packages online.
Here’s a great example of a shipping confirmation email.
Subject Line: Today is the day! Your order has been shipped.
3. Order Receipt Emails
In this day and age, everything has become digitalized. And order receipts are no different.
Here’s a good order receipt email template used by Uber.
Subject Line: [Business] Your Thursday morning trip with Uber
4. Booking Confirmation Emails
A booking confirmation email is sent when a customer books a flight, a train ride, accommodation, or any other type of service.
Subject Line: Your trip confirmation-RGE6500 28JUL
Booking confirmation emails provide more details about the client’s reservation and can in some cases serve as a digital ticket ( example: digital boarding ticket).
Subject Line: FlixBus Booking Confirmation #1048411735
Here’s another example of a reservation confirmation email sent by Airbnb.
Subject Line: Reservation confirmed for San Francisco
5. Appointment Confirmation Email
Appointment confirmation emails are pretty straightforward.
When a client books an appointment to benefit from your services, send them an email to confirm your availability or ask for their final confirmation.
They will be impressed and reassured that you will be waiting to take care of them.
An appointment reminder email can also be sent a few days, or even hours, before the appointment date.
Subject Line: Appointment Confirmation: Haircut at Blind Barber
6. Account Confirmation Emails
Many companies and SaaS businesses verify users’ email addresses before granting them a free account.
An account confirmation email must be sent to the user.
Subject Line: Confirm your Depop account, @NAME
7. Subscription Confirmation Emails
As a marketer myself, there is nothing more satisfying than when a user decides to opt in my weekly newsletter.
When a new subscriber decides to join the marketing email list, send them a subscription confirmation email. This is what we double opt in emails.
This will help you verify the email addresses and weed out the un-engaged users from the very beginning.
Subject Line: Confirmed! You’re In
Here’s another double opt in email example.
8. Cancellation and Unsubscribe Confirmation Emails
Sometimes, customers choose to cancel an order or unsubscribe from your service. That’s when you should send a cancellation email.
As much as we hate to see our customers leaving us, we shouldn’t take it personally.
Cancellation or unsubscribe emails should confirm to customers that their action has been completed.
The unsub email can be used to collect insights from the user. Ask them why they decided to leave your email list or to cancel an order.
You can use that valuable data to improve your future email campaigns.
Subject Line: I’m sorry it didn’t work out
Order Confirmation Email Examples
The priority of every marketer should be retaining and nurturing existing customers; which is less expensive than running promotional marketing campaigns to gain new customers.
- It costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to maintain an existing one.
- 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition Vs. Only 18% focus on customer retention.
- 89% of companies see customer experience as a key to driving customer loyalty and retention.-via Invespcro
A brief look at the data above can tell us two things:
First, focusing on customer retention is strategically more beneficial (financial and customer loyalty) than investing more resources on customer acquisition.
Second, and despite being more beneficial in terms of customer loyalty and financial resources, very few companies are opting for customer retention in their marketing strategies.
A marketer’s goal is to be among the few that prioritize customer retention.
And your customers’ experience starts with a great confirmation email.
Capitalize on Reviews
Your first shot at getting your customers to review your products and services is through the order confirmation email, and later, your shipping confirmation email.
Set up an automated email flow and make sure your order confirmation emails get in your customers’ inboxes right after completing a transaction.
Remember that your customer is still excited about the transaction that has just taken place on your website — leverage on that.
You can offer your customers incentives for reviewing your product. Attaching a sense of urgency to it plays a big role in pushing conversion for you.
The order acknowledgment email sample below makes ample use of this strategy in racking up useful reviews for their products. And their excited customers keep coming back for more.
What did you think of your recent order #65006006500600?
Go Social with your Order Confirmation Email
Even though email marketing is more viable in getting high ROI, social media remains an indispensable tool for engaging your customer.
Online users are more likely to first read reviews on social media before making an online purchase. In fact, 46% of users count on social media to make purchase decisions.
Growing your social media communities should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. When merged with positive reviews, you are positioning your brand for skyrocketing ROI.
Postable sends out a very concise order confirmation email and encourages customers to join community forums.
With this additional email block, Postable engages with customers on social media and starts building a long-term relationship.
Postable Order
Beyond giving your customers reason(s) to follow your social media pages and handles, how you leverage your subsequent engagement with them matters. For example, you can create a hashtag for your product on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
You can encourage your customers to share images of your product when the order finally arrives, give feedback, leave reviews, and lots more with the #hashtag you are encouraging them to use.
The result of this community engagement will be a collection of raw, priceless user-generated content.
Read more | Integrating Email and Social Media to Amplify Your Marketing Efforts
User-generated content is invaluable in driving brand advocacy and your overall marketing strategy. You can leverage on your thanks for your purchase email in getting them at a minimal cost.
Promote your Marketing Emails
If the bulk of your marketing strategy is focused on emails, then your order confirmation email or/and your shipping confirmation email are opportunities to get your customers signed up to your email marketing list.
Remember that the customers you’re dealing with at this stage are most likely first-time-users of your product and are not on your email marketing list — yet.
You can outline the benefits of them joining your email marketing list and include a clear call-to-action for them to subscribe.
The UPS store has done this remarkably well, as shown in the image below. A clearly-placed button is prominent, urging users to sign up to their email marketing list.
Getting your customers to subscribe to an email marketing list or to join your social media communities are both effective ways of engaging them. The route you’d prefer taking is dependent on your overall marketing target and goal.
Run a Referral Program
Running a referral program is an old, but highly effective marketing technique. Integrating a referral program into your purchase confirmation email is prudent and cost-effective.
A referral program is a clever way of getting your customers to be willing brand advocates for your products, thereby establishing a long-term trust with new marketing leads.
92% of respondents in a poll conducted by [Nielsen] said they trusted referrals from people they knew. New York Times reports that 65% of new businesses come from referrals.
Referral programs are two-way processes. You have to give your customers incentives to carry out the word-of-mouth marketing for your brand. At the end of the day, you stand a chance of gaining more in terms of trust, loyalty, and, in the long run, revenues for your company.
Airbnb, in the order confirmation email sample below, offers monetized referral programs in the form of credit cash in their confirmation email.
Source: AirBnB
Airbnb offers you $35 when you refer a friend who ends up traveling with Airbnb. And if your friend ends up hosting with Airbnb, you get $65. And they make it easier for their users to invite their friends by providing links to popular social media platforms.
Confirm Tycho’s booking with Ana now
Good News – Your Food52 order (#650050) has shipped!
Encourage your customers to share their referral codes on various social media platforms.
Again, adding a sense of urgency to your referral program is a great way to get your customers to make use of them. The goal should be ensuring conversion while the completed transaction is still fresh on their mind.
Reward customer loyalty
Rewarding customer loyalty can come in handy in purchase confirmation emails if you want your customers to return. This can be in the form of a discount or coupon for the next buy.
Godaddy offers attractive discounts to new customers in their first thanks for your order email.
We saved your order for you!
Source: Godaddy
You can decide to raise your discount and make it a limited-time offer. This again creates a sense of urgency. By leveraging on your customer’s fear of missing out on the reward, you’re increasing conversion when it matters most.
Order Confirmation #R6500600
You can also offer to simplify the ordering process for your customers by getting them to subscribe to a monthly shipping service.
An opportunity to cross-sell and upsell
People are more likely to accept your upsell and cross-sell offers immediately after a purchase, and your order confirmation email is timely.
Some strategies on upselling and cross-selling have already been touched on previously.
When upselling or cross-selling, the relevant cues to have at the back of your mind are:
- Not overloading your customer with many advertised products. Be as minimalistic as possible. 2 or 3 promoted products is a decent range.
- Customizing the products you are upselling or cross-selling helps a lot in running a minimalistic campaign. Recommend products that are within the same context of the transaction that has just taken place.
- Make your up-selling/cross-selling promotional drive secondary. As much as you want your customer to make a return buy, it shouldn’t be the most prominent part of your content. This should also be reflected in your email design as well as your email copy.
- The prices of the products you are promoting should be within the same price range as the one just purchased. This is just logical thinking.
Walmart’s approach to this is something I personally connect to.
Source: Walmart
With the bulk of the email focusing on the details of the transaction, Wal-Mart proceeds to offer highly-personalized products as part of its cross-selling drive.
In this case, a student chair with an arm was promoted to a customer who bought a student desk. That is as proactive as cross-selling can get.
Interactive Email
Marketers are looking at ways their customers can interact directly with emails. An interesting example of this is customers being able to add one of your upsell products to their carts directly from the order confirmation email you have sent — without revisiting your website.
The aim is to cut down more on the barriers to deeper customer engagement.
The sophisticated interactive email sample below allows you to engage more deeply with the email content on your device without leaving your email app.
The challenge with this technology is the fact that it is mostly supported for delivering a mobile experience on just Apple devices.
It is likely that, in the near future, most email clients will begin rolling out support for the CSS functionality that interactive emails need to thrive.
It will then be possible to create sophisticated email displays and effects for users to seamlessly interact with.
Animation and Video in Email
Videos and animations are increasingly playing a strategic role in email designs. Email marketers are turning towards motion videos and animations in order to deliver a fresh element to the user’s inbox.
A little motion in emails boosts user engagement. Videos and animations support the message of the email and importantly, captures imaginations and attention.
Using HTML 5, videos are being deployed daily in driving email messages. Some email marketers are going a step further in using videos as email Background. Fallback images are also included to ensure it works in all cases.
For more inspiration check out these 30 animated email template examples.
You only have a few seconds before a user moves to another email or on to something else. Think of your emails as an experience between you and your user. Make it worth their time! A little motion helps.
Note: If you still haven’t found an example that you like and that you want to use in your campaigns, you can take a look at our email template collection with professionally designed order confirmation email templates.
Access the collection here. You can use this free email template designer, builder, and editor to easily add your own images and text.
How To Write an Order Confirmation Email
A customer has just placed an order for a product. They are both excited and anxious.
This excitement presents a window of opportunity to say more about your company and promote other interesting products.
Begin with a Thank You
Begin your order confirmation email message with a simple “Thank you for your order.”
Avoid generic and sloppy language; humanize your voice.
Show your customers that you care about them, that you are happy they joined the family, and that you appreciate them.
Provide Detailed Purchase Information
Your customers want to know if they placed the order for the right product(s) and whether or not they made any errors writing down their shipment address.
The majority of the confirmation email message should be about the transaction that has just taken place.
Some of the important customer-centric details that should be at the forefront when drafting a copy of your order confirmation email are:
- Photo(s) of the product(s) purchased
- Name(s) of the product(s)
- Quantity of the product(s)
- Order number or ID
- Billing Summary
- Payment information
- Shipping address
- Shipping method, example: overnight shipping
- Estimated arrival date
Be concise with your confirmation email message.
Add specific details about the products: make sure you touch on all the details your customers care about.
The order confirmation email sample below demonstrates a highly customer-centric order confirmation email.
Your Etsy Purchase from TheHeartDepartmentCo (6500600)
This order confirmation email sample uses a language that sounds personal and gives the brand a voice.
This thanks for your order email sample combines great design elements and personalized email copy that instantly reassures the customer and leaves a good impression.
More importantly, this order thanks for your purchase email is 80% about the transaction and only 20% promotional.
Be Reachable
Proactive marketers would also consider providing on-the-spot support for their customers.
If they filled in the wrong information, are there available options for them to update the details of the transaction they just made?
Provide a direct link to your customer support service in your email, in case the customer really needs to speak to someone.
Etsy factored this in when drafting the copy of their order confirmation email template.
The company provides links to its various help pages as well as an option to directly contact the seller.
How to Design a Great Order Confirmation Email
An order confirmation email is about the customer.
Traditionally, marketing — and business in general — has always been about customer satisfaction.
This core principle dictates that you continuously adapt your business strategy to suit your customer base.
The idea of your order confirmation template is to ensure your products and services are in harmony with the customer’s interests.
It is therefore crucial that this basic principle is your first consideration when putting together your copy of a thank you for your purchase email.
Human brains process visual information 60,000 faster than text, and it takes your recipients much more time to go through a plain text email while only a second to process a visual one.
That’s why you need to create an appealing HTML order confirmation email that will amaze your recipients. To not waste hours on coding, you can use a free email template designer that will help you design your order confirmation email within minutes.
Make your Order Confirmation Email Template Mobile-Friendly
In the last four years alone, smartphone usage has increased by 394%.
Businesses no longer consider mobile optimization a nice-to-have; A “Mobile-first” mentality in crafting email marketing campaigns is central to driving the clicks, opens, and conversions which bring revenue back to your business.
You shouldn’t be left behind. More than 55% of email opens happen on mobile.
The challenge, therefore, is how to adapt your order acknowledgment email template to offer an enriching mobile experience.
The best way to go about optimizing your campaign for mobile is to use a responsive email template and a mobile-ready landing page.
In the last few years, a couple of Email marketing companies have done a lot of work in pushing the transition from Desktop experience to a full-fledged mobile experience.
There are, consequently, numerous email builders in the industry that help you optimize your email marketing campaign for mobile with ease.
The following mobile-friendly order confirmation template we designed in our professional email template designer within minutes.
You can use this template for free. Just modify images, text with the flexible drag’n’drop editor and it’s ready to be sent out. Access the template here.
Professional email template builder helps you create responsive, easily customizable email templates that render perfectly on all devices. It is suitable for teams because you can work in the same tool with your colleagues or clients on your email designs.
If an in-house development team is responsible for designing your template, the useful question that should be at the heart of their effort should be “How does the email template render on various devices of varying sizes?”
In creating mobile-friendly emails, deploying templates that adapt to the various device sizes in today’s market is indispensable.
A relevant cue to have at the back of your mind when bringing this concept to life should be:
- Ensuring you track the email clients of your various users. Doing so keeps you updated with the latest development and changes your users’ email clients are implementing.
Prioritize Email Template Design and Visual Engagement
Order acknowledgment email design and the flare of your template is vital to your overall marketing strategy.
In order to create a good email design, we recommend you to use a professional email template designer because of it’s flexible drag’n’drop editor. You can craft a beautiful order confirmation email within minutes. There are many great email template builders & designers that you can use for free.
Steve Jobs understood the vital role that design and flare played in Apple’s products when he said:
Design is not just how it looks; design is how it works.
To encourage your customers to continue engaging with your future promotional emails, you must take the design and visual appeal of your thanks for your order email seriously.
In order to create a good email design, we recommend you to use a professional email template designer because of it’s flexible drag’n’drop editor. You can craft a beautiful order confirmation email within minutes. There are many great email template builders & designers that you can use for free.
According to insights from Brainrules, people are more attuned to remembering pictures.
- Images make or break your email design.
When people hear/read information, they are likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant, visually appealing image is attached to that same information, people retain 65% of that information in the same amount of time.
Implementing images is, however, quite tricky when designing your email templates. Images can sometimes be too heavy and cause emails to load slowly, which negatively impacts user experience and engagement.
The width and size of an email, with its limitations, can also affect the use of images when designing an order confirmation email template.
Some users are also likely to disable images in their email. This means avoiding over-reliance on images to convey vital details of the transaction. You can make up for this possible lapse by ensuring the important details of your order confirmation email are displayed or mentioned in plain text as well.
- Use buttons that stack, not links.
The use of buttons boosts the visual appeal of your email; they help in punctuating the columns of text in the content of your email and, overall, offer a more satisfying user experience.
- Use fonts that are readable and won’t strain the eyes of the user.
In designing responsive email templates, the size of the font also plays a huge role. Are they large enough for the eyes when rendered on mobile?
The font type and font size you use in the copy of your order confirmation email are as important as the content of the email itself.
You should spend some time exploring the best practices of using fonts in email design.
A great example of a thank you for your order email that pays attention to minimalist, visually-appealing design is from Etsy.
Source: Etsy
The order confirmation email sample above manages to pack several, useful and relevant blocks of information into just one column.
Design sleek, simple, responsive, and visually-appealing email templates. They help cement your brand personality.
The visuals of your email must not stray away from your brand identity. Colors and logos must be consistent with what is obtainable on your company website.
Optimize each compartment of your email content
Designing emails that your customers actually love to read begins with the realization that most users skim emails.
This makes the structure of your email content even more important.
You want your customers to spend as much time as possible going through your purchase acknowledgment email and other future promotional emails.
- Your “From” name must be easily recognizable and on-brand.
This is so your email doesn’t come off as suspicious to your customer’s email client.
You don’t want your email to end up in the spam folder of your customer.
- You can spend time experimenting on compelling subject lines.
Subject lines are vital to how your customers receive your email. Writing a good one isn’t that easy. It comes with doubts, several checks, and more doubts.
Marketers usually capitalize on the email subject line to lead the user to open the email and direct their attention to the conversion goal.
There are several subject line templates and formats used for delivering effective transactional email campaigns.
- The body of the email, as earlier stated, must be concise and detailed enough in providing information on the transaction that has just taken place.
If you intend to cross-sell, upsell, or use any form of call-to-actions, ensure that doing so does not infringe on the important details of the email.
However, they should still be carefully highlighted or preferably in attractive buttons.
Conclusion
The crux of order confirmation email borders most prominently on satisfying your customer. It is important that this is the goal and primary focus when drafting the copy of your order confirmation email.
When customer-centricity is the focus of your email, it is easily radiated through the content and design of your email.
- Is your language understandable enough?
- Are you providing the right support?
- Does your design make it convenient enough for
your email to be read? - Will your customer be happy receiving an email from you in the future?
As much as customer-centricity is the bedrock of modern marketing, order confirmation emails also provide a window of opportunity to drive conversion and ROI.
This, in itself, should be guarded by the philosophy of keeping the customer happy.
These are the bedrocks of order confirmation emails.
Of course, there is no rule against trying out something new.
Sometimes you have to dive into unfamiliar territory in a bid to better understand your customers and to simultaneously boost revenue.
This involves experimenting with new technologies and marketing techniques.
If these rather simple rules are adhered to, you are inadvertently securing your customer loyalty while upscaling your revenues.