The Importance of Email Deliverability in the Ecommerce Industry

Your regular article about transactional emails in ecommerce focuses on content and design. You learn how to create a message that will not only transmit important information but also improve your relationships with customers. You look for the perfect wording to correspond with the voice and tone of your brand or graphics that will be aesthetically pleasing. All those elements indeed make the perfect transactional email and are important for achieving your business goals.

But what if that perfect transactional email doesn’t reach your customer’s inbox?

That’s why ensuring high email deliverability is just as important as crafting the message, especially in an ecommerce context. From unhappy customers to rising costs of storage and shipping, the consequences of failing to deliver a message are tangible. Fortunately, taking care of your deliverability is not only doable but probably easier than you think.

Let’s take a look at this issue.

Improving email deliverability in ecommerce – what’s in it for you?

When you work on improving your email effectiveness, you will usually take a look at metrics like open rate or click-through rate. Email deliverability means additional statistics to look at, so why is it worth the effort?

Ensuring everyone’s on the same page

Transactional emails usually send important messages to your customers. That’s why you ought to know whether or not they are delivered to customers’ inboxes. Having this information lets you avoid complications and react immediately if there are some problems with your email communication.

You’ll also know for sure that your customers have learned about the important information you sent: whether it’s about changes to their orders, account notifications, or replies to any complaints. This can help you in some more complex situations, such as solving serious customer complaints.

Respecting both your and your client’s time

Any delays in communication – like, for example, a message that doesn’t get delivered – are reflected in wasted time. Starting with waiting for a reply that doesn’t come to reaching out to a customer with more messages or via a different communication channel, all of that wasted time can be prevented and instead spent on more vital issues.

Also, you can lose a lot of time trying to figure out something that has happened when all you really need to know is if the message was delivered or not. You will observe the effects not only on your customer service team. If your marketing or communication team works on transactional emails, they want to assess the effectiveness and tweak the messages to bring the best results. If some of them don’t reach the intended recipients, those teams will get incomplete data.

Taking care of the technical aspects, like the technology you use to send your emails, also has another facet to enhance your day-to-day work. It can impact the speed that your messages reach users’ inboxes, which is important considering each second adds up to your customers’ impatience when waiting for a payment confirmation or password reset.

Spotting technical issues

Tracking email deliverability helps you with spotting technical issues and solving them as they appear. You’ll be able to limit the probable causes of communication problems and focus your efforts where they are most required. What’s more, you’ll have access to detailed information that helps you find the root cause of problems. Is it an issue with one type of inbox or maybe particular customers? These details help with finding solutions.

Transactional emails and poor deliverability examples – what can happen with your ecommerce business?

What exactly are the consequences of poor transactional email deliverability in ecommerce? Well, that depends on which emails don’t reach customers’ inboxes. Take a look at six examples below where we look at the costs of poor deliverability.

Order status

Let’s start with the most common type of transactional email: informing about order status. Failing to deliver these messages has two different effects on your ecommerce business depending on the situation. If the messages don’t arrive but there is no action required from your customer, you’ll observe the impact of lower customer satisfaction.

Some clients who are concerned about receiving no information may try to reach out to you in a different way. This will let you learn about the problem yet it will also waste your team’s resources on an issue that could have been prevented.

If there are some problems with a given order, such as rejected payment or other issues that require action from customers, a lack of communication is then more problematic. Your team has to contact the client via another channel or the issue won’t be resolved. In any case, this only adds up to the complexity of the situation.

Shipment updates

A shipment update is another crucial type of message in ecommerce. It usually requires some action from the customer in order for them to receive the package. So, when the communication process fails, it has multiple effects on your business such as low customer satisfaction and complaints that can contribute to a poor reputation. Add to that the costs caused by delays, return shipping for packages, and additional storage, then you have the sum total that poor deliverability can cost you.

Login details

Inviting your customers to create accounts in your ecommerce store definitely brings you a lot of business value. You can analyze their buying behavior, understand their needs better, and use these data to improve your business.

Nevertheless, it’s another area where poor deliverability can backfire. If a customer can’t remember their login details and can’t finalize an order without them, they will probably use the “Remember password” option. However, if your message arrives late or not at all, it will only cause disappointment for that customer, harm their satisfaction, and send them to another store.

Account notifications

The consequences of not delivering account notifications vary based on the nature of a given message. Of course, you want each message you send to arrive in your customers’ inboxes. Yet some messages, such as asking customers to fill in a survey, are of minor importance compared to notifications about problems.

Serious issues like data security breaches are another story altogether. If you fail to inform some of your customers about such important problems then both you and them can suffer from serious consequences.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment notifications are an efficient way to remind customers about completing their orders and thus to increase conversion. Usually, though, the technical aspect of taking care of email deliverability isn’t mentioned at all.

If you don’t analyze that side, you could get stuck with poor results and looking for solutions in the wrong places. In effect, you’ll waste your time improving a message that could deliver results perfectly fine as is - if only it made it to customers’ inboxes. Tracking deliverability helps you to eliminate that pain point.

Complaints

Handling customers’ complaints is a very delicate process itself, as any false step can multiply the damage. In an era of social media, when word of mouth and opinions are crucial to purchasing decisions, any storm can harm a business.

And there’s nothing worse than customers thinking a company ignores their complaints. Monitoring whether or not a reply gets delivered to a customer lets you take appropriate action if it doesn’t. For example, you can then reach out to the customer via other channels. This way, you’ll prevent them from feeling ignored or angry and can solve their issue appropriately.

Transactional emails with Coresender

Coresender lets you keep an eye on your email deliverability. You can see what percentage of messages are delivered and how many of them result in hard or soft bounces. If there’s a particular email you need to analyze, you can see the exact time when it was delivered.

But there’s more to it than just that.

Fast delivery

Coresender technology supports you not only when trouble is brewing. Having a separate infrastructure for transactional emails ensures fast delivery of password change, order confirmation, or any other messages that need to be sent immediately. Even when you reach the peaks of your email marketing campaigns, your transactional emails won’t be affected.

But, what does fast delivery mean? You can always check on our website where we publish the average delivery time from the last 30 days to the most popular email services. Thanks to that, you’ll always know what to expect.

Scalability

No matter if you’re sending a regular daily dose of transactional emails or dealing with a Black Friday spike, Coresender manages it. You don’t have to extend your infrastructure beforehand to handle a rising number of messages. Also, your transactional emails aren’t affected by your marketing campaigns because they are sent by separate channels.

Automation

Coresender lets you create entire workflows by connecting the system with other tools via webhooks. This way, you can receive Slack notifications about certain events, and send the important information right to your CRM. As a result, you’ll eliminate the need for manual checking and entering the data into other systems.

Recap

Email deliverability is just as important as crafting the perfect message, but often we don’t appreciate the former until some problems arise. Investing in tools that support your email deliverability will ultimately pay off, especially when it comes to ecommerce and transactional emails. We’ve talked about the consequences of failed delivery. From unhappy customers through logistics delays to wasting time or other resources, they vary in the degree of damage to your business. Yet most of these effects are easy to prevent, either by working on delivering your messages properly or finding out quickly if and when something goes wrong so that you can fix the problem.