My little brother got tinted windows and rims on his sage green Chevy Malibu. (Sweet!) Just as he tricked out his transportation, so must we trick out our transactional emails, leveraging the opportunity to move the meter on the messages that generally enjoy the highest open rates (excuse me—render rates!) of almost any we send. Let’s get to it with 10 top tips and several outstanding order confirmation examples.

10 WAYS TO TRICK OUT YOUR TRANSACTIONAL TOUCHPOINTS:

(1) Brand! Include your company logo and colors to make transactional communications feel consistent with your other marketing materials. Apple, Coach, Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma all do this. A metallic paint job and alloy rims produce a similar effect.

(2) Include navigation items relevant to the transaction, especially a link to the "Customer Service" section of your website, like Williams-Sonoma. (BTW— that is the best rice cooker ever. It plays an aweseome little song when your tasty rice is ready to eat.) This is the basic equivalent of vanity plates.

(3) Use text treatments, color and graphics to maximize usablity and legibility. This is just like hanging plush dice from the rearview.

(4) Add an upper-right “key details” module, making it easy to locate the most critical account and order details. Both Apple and Crate & Barrel pop the most relevant information up top, well within the preview pane. It’s like...the opposite of tinted windows.

(5) Include customer service contact information...and not just a URL, but a phone number with hours of availability, like Williams-Sonoma. This is not unlike the famous bumper sticker: “How’s my driving? Call 1-80…”

(6) Say “thank you.” Don’t forget your manners! Pay attention to tone and consider a letter format, which can feel more genuine and personal. Coach offers flowers with their thanks, which I find cute. They also get early-adapter points, as this particular order conirmation is from 2006. OMG...ancient! (Mariah Carey and I go way back.)

(7) Show product photography and link product names back to your website to reinforce excitement around the purchase. This is not unlike the sensation we experience when cranking up the bass on a souped-up sound system.

(8) Cross- and up-sell relevant products to already-engaged buyers. Apple does this brilliantly. (Not that I would ever listen to Bon Jovi! Must be a glitch in their recommendations engine, right? Ha ha ha...)

(9) Add valuable content and offers. Coach includes an option that allows belated gifters to send recipients an email announcing the soon-to-arrive prize. Just like triple tailpipes!

(10) Protect the primary purpose of the message—to communicate a transaction. Follow guidelines regarding transactional-to-promotional content ratios and offer placement. For instance, while Crate & Barrel does a lovely order confirmation, one wonders whether it isn’t light on the confirmation and heavy on the order. Melinda Kreuger, "The Email Diva", wrote an excellent article about transactional email guidelines just this past Tuesday.

Plus, Email Marketing Reports has culled an exceptional collection of resources and articles around tricking out your transactional email.

A bobble-headed hula dancer isn’t a bad idea, either.

As ever,
Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

We asked the Voices of Email to look into their crystal balls and foretell what 2008 had in store for the email marketing industry. Here are their predictions:

Stephanie Miller of Return Path:
#1 - Email Marketers, if you want to keep your job, segment your file. I was hoping that last year would be the year that we’d see more targeted, tailored, relevant campaigns and less batch and blast. Not sure that happened, although I was half right in that we certainly saw MORE segmentation and targeting than in 2006.

Why will email marketers lose their job if they don’t do it now? Because the email channel is more expensive than ever, and there are too many risks to brand and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Unhappy email subscribers—all that dead wood on your file—is not just a missed opportunity, it’s a liability. Engaging with those folks is going to take more time and effort in creative and list hygiene and segmentation than ever before. To get those budgets, the email marketer has to prove the channel. To prove the channel, the email messages have to be a lot more relevant. To be relevant, they must be segmented. Thankfully, the technology and best practices are already in place and proven. We just need to set our minds to it.

#2 - The Data Capture form goes multichannel. We’ll see more and more email marketers open up their data capture form to include permission to contact via SMS and mobile marketing. Building up the database with these contact touch points will be increasingly important as more marketers start to test the efficacy of those channels.

#3 - Transactions will become touchpoints sometimes too hot to handle. More email marketers are going to push the envelope on turning transactional messages into marketing opportunities. The receivers and FTC will get stricter on standards, potentially causing trouble for some senders. With the need to dynamically create, message and track these messages, ESPs will aggressively go after the transactional email market to build their base and capture higher share of wallet.

Chip House of ExactTarget: Increasing focus on subscriber engagement. When emphasizing the importance of list hygiene, David Daniels of Jupiter Research often compares mailing the portion of your list that hasn’t opened or clicked on your emails in several months to “flying an advertisement over a ghost town.” Many marketers are realizing the benefits to their success potential via email by truly understanding which segments of their list are responding, and which aren’t. The non-responsive segments drag down your deliverability and ROI, and waste your time. This is something that I like to call the “ignore rate.” Marketers that ignore the needs of their subscribers, send irrelevant communications, or make other blunders leading to dissatisfied subscribers, drive a higher ignore rate.

Most sophisticated email marketers now closely track their open and click rates, and more are even tracking subscriber spam complaints by ISP. However, it is often what you don’t see that can be most harmful to your deliverability and campaign ROI. More marketers are beginning to see the benefits of closely analyzing the portion of their customer base that IS NOT paying attention. By doing so they can better reactivate them, opt them in again, or discard them—all to the benefit of their response rates and ROI.

2008 is about flying hundreds of planes, towing just the right message, over hundreds of small cities.

Amy Bills of Bulldog Solutions: I think we will see some shaking out in the use of social media for lead generation. Right now, a lot of companies are really struggling to understand what works and what can be integrated into their existing strategies. Is a blog, a podcast, RSS, an online community, a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. going to be worth the effort and resources? How can you even measure their effect on your objectives? And of course, what works for one company is not going to be the same formula for another. Some have the impulse to try everything. Others want to bury their heads in the sand and deny the landscape is changing at all. A third group is experimenting and trying to be smart about making good choices, thinking about what their prospects will respond to and how to make social media enhance what they are already doing.

After Paul Dunay joined Bulldog in November for a webinar on making sense of social media for BtoB marketing, he made a comment that really stuck with me. “[The question isn’t] if social media is right for your company, but which social media is right for your company. And at this point in time and state of your company, you need to determine which social media is right for your company for next year. A year from now, the picture may look very different. And the answer to which social media is right for your company will be different for each company. My advice is look into next year with an eye toward experimenting with a few tactics to begin to get yourself and your team up to speed.”

So, I predict that more marketers will ease into that third group, and start to get smarter about social media. And by “smarter” I mean more creative and experienced about how to make tactics work and measure their results, and brave enough to admit when a particular tactic might not work.

Tricia Robinson of StrongMail Systems: The email space gets larger and faster daily. With this growth comes change, and I predict we’ll experience much change in 2008.

Automation Becomes The New Buzzword. We’ve lived through closing-the-loop, 1to1 digi-dialogues, and deliverability. Look for campaign automation to catch-on in 2008. We’re seeing more clients rapidly move in this direction. Those that already have are realizing the time/cost benefits of auto-generated programs.

The Final Sunset for the Old Homegrowns. The replacement of the original homegrown system has been a trend since 2006. However, this year we’ll see the last of the first homegrown systems built by Web 1.0 companies and those that thought “email is easy, we’ll make our own.” Some organizations will always custom-build, but most have done it on top of something more sophisticated than generic MTAs.

All Outbound Customer Email Includes Marketing. Even if it’s the inclusion of a logo, all outbound customer email (transactional, customer service, promotional, etc.) will include a touch of marketing. According to MarketingSherpa in mid-2007, 90% of email marketers planned to overhaul their transactional email in the next 12 months. Not sure if they will meet their own deadline by June, but look for an improvement in the look of all outbound email. I’m not crazy enough to predict the death of the text email, but maybe next year.

Still More Acquisitions. 2004-2006 were large vendor consolidation years in our space. I argue that 2007 was the year of the IPO. Now with more cash and CNBC viewers to consider, look for Constant Contact and ExactTarget to make purchases that round out their offerings or extend their reach into new markets.

Unlike many, I like change. It’s good to shake things up as long as the goal is always towards improvement. Happy New Year!

Chad White of the eec: 2008 will be the year that retailers and other B2C marketers increase the transparency of their email programs and relinquish more control to subscribers. In 2007 we saw more retailers allow potential subscribers to view a sample email before signing up. More also offered emails on different topics or allowed some level of content preference selection—which is key to elevating relevancy. Consumers are getting very used to having more control over how they’re marketed to, and email will be forced to fall in line over time. On the upside, giving consumers more control over content and frequency, and being more upfront about those aspects of their email programs, should generate more lifetime value from subscribers. Although eventually we’ll see this kind of control move to the front end, during 2008 we’ll start to see it more and more on the tail end of the relationship when subscribers are fed up and trying to opt out. Rather than lose subscribers, more marketers will give up control over frequency and other elements to boost retention.

During 2008 we’ll also see retailers pay more attention to content—product reviews, videos of product demonstrations and fashion shows, blogs, articles, podcasts, etc.—and do a better job of leveraging it in their email channels.

Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

ExactTarget: CareerBuilder.com Case Study
Taguchi Testing Strategy Delivers Results

Epsilon: The Fortified Inbox
Insight Brief

Bronto Software: Creating A Multi-Channel Strategy
Increase Your Email Performance By Integrating Other Channels

Abad Marketing: Claves para lograr que nuestros mensajes se lean en navidad

Return Path: Stop Sending Email Like It's 1999
Welcome Message Study: Marketers Are Missing Opportunities to Pave the Road to Relevancy

Email Data Source: Email Brand Equity Index™
The Email Brand Equity Index™ is the first score that reflects a 360 degree view of email marketing efforts.

StrongMail: Put the Action Back in Transactional Email
Transform your service-based messages into revenue opportunities.

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

We had a good debate yesterday about whether email could be helpful in a website customer-review strategy. Three guesses as to where my votes were: squarely with email as a powerful tool for both invitation, dissemination and recommendation.

Customer reviews on websites are hot—because they work. A recent survey by Bazaarvoice and Vizu Corp. shows that three out of four shoppers say that it is extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase, and they prefer peer reviews over expert reviews by a 6-to-1 margin.

(Note for our U.K. readers: Ratings and reviews by U.K. consumers were important for over 50% of online shoppers. In contrast to U.S. shoppers, privacy and security information took center stage when making a purchase by over one-third of U.K. shoppers rating this as the most important site feature.)

Email is the perfect medium for attracting and distributing this important content. Consider these opportunities for your own program:

- Use email to solicit customer reviews from recent customers. Trigger a feedback survey after select purchases, along with an appropriate upsell offer. For multiple-purchase buyers—who we assume are more loyal and engaged—make the request for a review more explicit.

- Use the content from customer reviews to convert prospects to buyers. Prospects are in greater need of validation for making a purchase, and if the Bazaarvoice survey has any sway, prospects prefer customer reviews six times over company promotions or marketing. Feature customer reviews in your welcome message as well as throughout the first five to six email touchpoints.

- Feature customer reviews in newsletters as a current and dynamic source of testimonials. Many marketers struggle to come up with relevant content (outside of pure promotions) for newsletters. Customer reviews are relevant, engaging and can be extremely good ways to provide product recommendations that don’t feel like sales pitches. These are also a great way to continuously solicit more reviews. Everyone likes to see their name in “lights”—even if it’s HTML.

- Highlight customer reviews as a secondary promotion in promotional emails. Make it a regular feature (monthly or quarterly) to highlight top selling items. Reviews promote your products without feeling like a promotion. Perfect balance for sales messages.

- Use customer reviews as a trigger for lapsed buyers. Send a special email with customer reviews of targeted products. This new approach to the same promotional messages may break through the lethargy.

—Stephanie Miller

As any good salesperson knows, the best time to engage with a prospect is when they are in market. Dialogue happens and business closes. Email can work the same way—even, in some low-consideration, self-service or low-investment cases, creating a valuable conversation that completely replaces the need for a sales person.

We say "dialogue" but let's face it, it's mostly monologue. A very valuable and targeted monologue, but mostly one way just the same. That's okay if the prospect is truly in market—either self-identified or based on behavior. Many email broadcast vendors and solutions can easily trigger a series of timed email messages along a needs tree, based on prospect behavior. Once I've downloaded your software, requested a whitepaper or abandoned items in the shopping cart, use email to close the deal. The number of emails you need will vary according to your business and prospect knowledge of your brand, but the key is to test for the right timing, cadence and content that will move the majority of prospects along the sales cycle.

Test—that's a key point! Keep testing to keep the material and timing current with market trends and competitive pressures, even seasonality.

Consider the trial software scenario. Technology companies have been using email for years to close from trial to paid subscriber, setting a high bar for success and professionalism in this market. Ideally, the email program would be intelligent, so that when the prospect changes his status, the email program adjusts. Don't keep sending me, "Would you like to try our software" emails after I've already spent five days active in the software. Instead, acknowledge when I've actually opened and used the trial software, when I've provided feedback and especially when I've purchased.

The first key is clear permission. Be sure that the prospects know what to expect and make sure it's easy to get out of the conversation. The other primary keys to success are thinking about both content and cadence. How quickly does a prospect make the decision? Match the email to that. Lots of email bunched up over a few days is rarely the right answer, even if the prospect is highly active. If your email series happens over the course of seven to 10 days or less, be sure that the subject lines are differentiated so that prospects knows there is something valuable in each. Give email a specific purpose and give the prospect some breathing room. Would you take a call from a salesperson every 10 minutes while you are considering? Do you want the sales associate to stand outside the dressing room calling in tips and ideas for color matches? Give the prospect time and be valuable and present, rather than overwhelming.

As with most email marketing, if you don't have the software or technology to do this kind of lifecycle marketing, you can baby step into it and prove the concept. Pull the file of abandoned shoppers or free trial downloaders every week or month and send a series of emails—tracking them closely to watch performance and course correct as needed. If you can't trigger the emails and be intelligent about the file, then err on the side of sending fewer, each with more punch.

Either way, it's critical for prospects to feel like there really is a dialogue. Include feedback mechanisms and actively ask for input (and then act on it). Demonstrate that you've listened. Give prospects options like a telephone number or live chat feature. Even a highly custom email is junk if it's just a one-way broadcast. In any communication, including a monologue, sincerity and relevancy count. Hype is not a dialogue.

—Stephanie Miller