Ecommerce User Experience Vol. 12: Transactional Email, Confirmation Messages, and Notifications

Automated emails and notifications are crucial methods to inform a customer of their transactions — purchases, returns, account changes, contact requests, and other types of confirmations.

Well-designed transactional messages can establish trust in your brand and save you money by reducing customer service costs. This report explains how real customers interact with emails and notifications they receive from organizations, from the moment they receive the message (where many are ruthlessly deleted or ignored) through their consumption of the message content.

This 345-page report contains 143 recommendations for improving the design of transactional messages that are generated automatically (the report doesn't cover human-authored customer service). Discussions and 247 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

 

Topics

• How customers handle transactional email messages in their inbox
  • How email impacts your relationship with customers
  • Common issues with transactional email
  • Customer expectations on transactional email
• Transactional SMS and application push notifications
  • Similarities and differences between transactional email and notifications
  • Attributes of transactional notifications
  • SMS or push notifications: When to use which
  • Opting out from specific channels
• Transactional email general guidelines: Subject, sender, and message body
  • Presenting helpful and recognizable sender information
  • Writing effective subject lines and preheader text
  • Using appropriate style, content, and format for the message body
  • Recommended features for all transactional messages
  • How to streamline message sequences (for example: order confirmation, shipping notification, and delivery notification)
  • Conveying important information using only the subject line (where appropriate)
• Transactional email guidelines by message type
  • Order placement and fulfillment
    • Order and service confirmations
    • Shipment, pickup, and delivery notifications
    • Cancellation, return, refund, rebate, and bonus notices
    • Failure notices
  • Reservations
    • Reservation confirmation and etickets
    • Status notifications
  • Product and service updates
    • Return-to-site prompts
    • In-stock notifications
    • Agreement-change notices
  • Accounts, registration, and billing
    • Registration and account information
    • Account-update notifications
    • Billing and payment notices
  • Customer service
    • Automated customer service messages
    • Information request responses
  • Reviews and recommendations
    • Information-posting notifications
    • Recommendations from a friend
• Transactional SMS and application push notification guidelines
  • Sender name, content, and formatting
  • Receiving information from multiple channels
  • Order placement and fulfillment notifications
  • Reservation notifications
  • Product and service update notifications
  • Account, registration, and billing notifications
  • Review and recommendation notifications
• Methodology
  • The methodology of our transactional email and notification studies
  • How to conduct your own transactional message study

Research Method

The information in this report is based on five separate rounds of ecommerce studies for this and the previous four editions of this report. These studies included a mix of the following methodologies.

• One-on-one usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal studies
• Eyetracking
• Expert review

Representative users tested 350+ ecommerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, India, and China.