 Matt Pritchett, I do a bunch of different things in WordPress, transactional email, AI writing, and a host of other things. I want to kind of set expectations. Today's talk is not a technical talk. It is more of a, here's how you can improve your business, your online store, your membership site, your brochure site. Transactional emails come from all of those. And so today we're going to walk away with at least one action step that you can take today that can help bring in more money for your business. But first, I want to start with the story. So the year is 2014. I'm an intermediate-level front-end developer. I work with HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, that kind of thing. I was working for a extremely large advertising agency. We worked on projects like Chick-fil-A and Motel 6 and Home Depot. And so we're working on big clients. But I'm just this little bitty peon of no power, not making a lot of money, none of that. I don't sit in the room with clients. I don't get to go out on these fancy dinners, nothing like that. Although those things are all occurring at the agency. And one day, my boss comes to me and he says, Matt, I know you have a Dr. Pepper addiction. And he was right. And we were based in Dallas, which is right down the road from where Dr. Pepper is headquartered. And I had a problem. And he said, I know you have this addiction. Well, guess what? We're going to make that worse because we're about to pitch the Dr. Pepper Snapple group. And if you don't know, Dr. Pepper Snapple, they're owned by the same company. They're now actually owned by Curegg, the coffee machine. That doesn't make any sense to me. But at that level, not many things do. So he said, we're going to pitch Dr. Pepper Snapple. They're interested in acquiring a new agency of record. And we think we're the right solution for them. And I said, that's great. Maybe we'll get some swag or some free Dr. Pepper. That sounds awesome. And he said, no, you don't understand. I want you to help us pitch this client. And I immediately became very nervous. I started sweating, you know, because typically in an advertising agency, I don't know if you know this, you don't put your developers in front of your clients. You hide them in rooms where they can't ever be seen. And so I was like, well, that sounds like a terrible idea, but let's do it. So we started preparing pitches. We started talking about how we were going to engage them, why we were the right agency for the job. And my boss looked me in the eye and he said, Matt, you can say whatever you want, but I want you to be honest with them. We're going to have weaknesses in our pitch because every pitch has weaknesses. Don't lie. Don't try to cover them up. Be honest. But also have an answer when they ask questions. Don't just say, well, we'll get back to you. No, discuss it with them. Be upfront, engage. All right, I can do that. I'm a pretty upfront guy. So fast forward a couple of months. We're sitting in the room with the client. There's the head of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, their chief marketing officer, all these guys in really fancy suits. And I'm sitting kind of over in the corner. And we're going through our pitch. And if you've not been in big advertising pitches, they're very flashy. They take you out to fancy dinners. You do everything you can to schmooze the client. And they're used to that. And they love that. It must be nice. It's all I could think. But we're talking and they did. They asked questions and we were upfront. We were honest. We didn't have all the answers, but we were willing to engage. In fact, their CTO was probably the most anti-word press person I've ever met. And I don't know if you know this, but pitching to somebody who doesn't want the technology that you use is hard. And so it was a struggle, but we were open. We were honest. We didn't try to cover things up. This was about 10 years ago now, nine years ago. And back then, there were no good solutions to say like, I want Jimmy the intern to be able to edit this one page and no other pages. That was hard to do in WordPress back in the day. It's gotten a little easier, but it's still not the easiest thing. And so we were open with problems like that and how we would tackle them, custom solutions and all of this. And at the end of the day, several months later, we won their business. And that was a really exciting experience for me because I'd never done sales. I've never done pitching clients like that before. I had pitched freelance clients, you know, the church down the street, the automotive repair guy down the road, but never this large of a client to the tune of $7 million a year. And that's an accomplishment that I'm still very proud of, but I don't tell you that to pat myself on the back. I tell you that because of what happened next. So my agency was in an office building, 15, 16 floors, but they always, when we won a client, brought them into the central room that we had that span multiple floors where they could gather the entire 700 people from the agency together with the client's team. And they could basically give a, hey, we're really excited to work with these folks. They allowed the client to speak. It was this whole thing that they did every time. And it was really interesting. But what made this really, really worth it to me is that the chief marketing officer got up with his chief technical officer and the CEO of the Dr. Pepper Snapple group, and he gave this nice speech. And to be honest, I don't remember most of the speech, but I remember one phrase. He said something that has stuck in my mind since that day. He said, you guys answered our questions. You didn't lie. You didn't try to cover up your weaknesses. He said, you built trust. And trust makes sales. And so today, we're going to talk about how transactional emails, the emails that no one ever thinks of, that no one that owns a business probably ever looks at, and how those build trust, and how that can help you make sales. Two numbers. What do they mean? Bain and company. Does anybody know who that is? No, I wouldn't expect you to. It's a very like think tank within a think tank within a think tank. But Bain and company is the group that helped come up with net promoter scores. Does anybody know what those are? Okay, net promoter scores are a way of judging where your customers are at, how they feel about you, and how likely they are to help you communicate to other people that can become your customers, how happy they are with you. And so it's a scale of one to 10, you're shooting for a nine or a 10. Once you know somebody is a nine or a 10, that means they're really likely to tell someone else about you. That's a big deal. This is used by basically every Fortune 500 company in the world to help measure how good a job they're doing, how engaged their customers are. And what Bain and company, they do research all the time, they're a think tank, that's what they do. Bain and company did some research. And what they found is that for every 5% increase in customer retention, you gain a minimum of a 25% growth in revenue per year. That number on the high end was 95%. 25 is the minimum. So we're not talking little bitty things, and we're not talking huge companies either. This was true of companies with $10,000 in annual recurring revenue and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Transactional emails are a way to help increase your customer retention, because it is always easier to sell to somebody who's already bought from you and likes you than it is to bring in new customers off the street. Transactional emails build trust. Who knows what a transactional email is as opposed to, say, a marketing email? Anybody? We got one? A couple more? All right. I'm going to define it. Transactional emails, shockingly, are emails that occur after a transaction. I know, really tough to understand, but to be honest, most people don't know that, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with not knowing something. Transactional emails occur after a transaction or after a user, a customer, takes an action. That can be direct. It can be indirect. It's things like password resets. I forget how to log into your website. I've got to click that password reset. I'm going to get an email that says, hey, click this link. It's things like e-commerce receipts. It's things like, hey, did your order arrive? Do you want to submit a review? Anything that comes from your website based on a customer's action with you, even if it's not an immediate action, is transactional. Its purpose is not necessarily to promote your business, as opposed to marketing or bulk email, which is, hey, we're having a Black Friday sale, and we send that email to 10 million people. We wish. Transactional emails, marketing emails, not the same thing, and it's important distinction because you can quickly get into problems with US law, GDPR, and Europe, a bunch of other laws if you conflate the two. So we want to make sure we understand the difference. Transactional email occurs because of a transaction, an action based on the user's input. Marketing emails, hey, let's promote our business, our service, our product. Let's send it out to millions of people all at the same time. Transactional emails, mostly go to one person at a time, maybe a few, maybe a small group, something like that. Who here in their marketing emails sees an open rate about 25%? About 25%? Who here sees less? Yeah, I've got products that have that problem. Who here sees more? Anybody got the magic touch? All right, we got one. I'm going to talk to you later. 25%, that is the industry standard open rate for marketing emails. It can be a lot higher. It can be a lot lower. It depends on what industry you're in. It depends on how engaged your customers are. It depends on the quality of your emails. It depends on a ton of things, but this is the industry standard. That's a tough pill to swallow. If I'm writing something, even if I'm sending it to a lot of people, I'm only getting 25% of people to even look at it. That's demoralizing. I spent hours writing this email and only three people in this room are going to read it. That's rough, but it's the standard. To be honest, we spend a lot of time and money. Probably every person in this room spends time and money getting a 25% open rate on marketing emails. It's hard to say, let's spend more time and more money, but we all do because even 25%, as long as you're getting enough people, brings in revenue. What if I could tell you that you could bring in revenue with a much higher open rate and a much higher click rate to boot? 80%. That is the low end of the industry average for transactional email open rates. We see our customer basis average around 96%. You could have almost every single customer open an email when you send it to them. That sounds better, right? Again, like I mentioned, you can't just send whatever you want and call it a transactional email. That's not how it works. Somebody's going to complain and you're going to get your email marked as spam and then other people aren't going to get your email. You can't just do whatever you want. Transactional emails, according to US law, cannot primarily be to promote your business. A sale, product, service, none of that. They have to be in response to an action. Let's talk about a few ways that you can take action today to improve your transactional email, build trust with your customers and bring in more revenue either through customers you've retained or by providing a good service to customers who are interacting with you but haven't yet purchased. The first thing, super basic. Transactional emails should be reliable. I cannot tell you how many large businesses, people like Amazon, but like Stripe, people like name a company. I forget how to log in or my customer or my client sends me, hey, here's the email. Just do the password reset. That's how you get into our account, whatever. I don't care. Okay. I click the link. Go to password reset. Click the link again to have them send me the email. Crickets. Who here has experienced that? Yeah, same thing. If I purchase from you, I like to buy my shoes. Whoa, that got loud. I like to buy my shoes from a store called Kizik. They only have internet stores. One of my favorite brands of shoes, I buy from them all the time. They had a problem recently. When I would buy, I wouldn't get a confirmation. I wouldn't get a receipt. So I reached out to them multiple times and was like, hey, what's the deal? Did my purchase go through? You took money out of my account, but I don't know what's happening. Causes frustration. Frustration causes loss of revenue. Your transactional emails first and foremost have to be reliable. You need to find a reliable provider that is going to help you deliver your emails. Cannot tell you how many customers of send WP, how many customers of other products that I have talked to that before they chose a reliable provider were like, oh yeah, my website just sends my emails. Who in here has experienced their website like emails just vanishing into the ether? Anybody? Yes. And if you didn't raise your hand and you don't have an exterior provider, I guarantee you your emails are being lost to the ether. You just don't know it. Your website, no matter who your host is, there are a few hosting people at the conference today and they're going to probably call me out. Your host doesn't want to deliver your emails. They don't. That's not on them. That's not a thing they're doing that's wrong. They're a web host and your email sends your emails out through their servers that are not configured properly to do so because they don't want to be in the email game. As someone who is in the email game, I can tell you it is not always a fun game to be in because I spend a ton of time and a ton of money and a ton of my team's time dealing with people who want to spam you. That is honestly probably my biggest job as an email provider is dealing with domain reputation. If your domain has been used for spam, your IP address, those servers, your host name, all of these things, has been used for spam, people like Google, Outlook, Yahoo, they don't want to receive your emails because they don't want their customers to complain. And so when you try to send your email through your website without another service, I guarantee you that if you're on shared hosting, you're having a problem with your email deliverability because they don't want their customers complaining. When your IP address that's been used to send 25 trillion spam messages, your website sends through that same IP address. And they don't want those emails. So they block them. And a lot of times you don't know until a customer complains. And for every customer that complains, there's 100 that said nothing. And so you're losing trust from the very get-go. So first recommendation, find an email provider. It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be expensive. There are lots out there. If you Google transactional email for WordPress, you will find results. I promise. Reliability, the most important thing that you can focus on today. Next, on brand. This is something that if there were a lot of developers in this room, I would get heckled about. And I, as a developer, would have joined them a few years ago because text emails are delivered better. People like text emails. But text emails are very difficult to maintain your brand. You've spent time on your brand You've spent time building trust. Building a reputation. Building a recognizable brand in your space. Why would you not communicate that through everything? And I mean everything. Your password reset emails should be on brand. Your e-commerce receipts should be on brand. Every email you send, no matter how insignificant it may seem, should be on brand. Our data says that 4% of the emails that we send every year are on brand. This is something that no one is doing. And yet every single person that is doing it is seeing an increase in customer trust, customer retention, customer engagement. And because of all those things, I know for a fact, they're seeing increases in revenue because trust makes sales. Sure, absolutely. So on brand, what does that mean? Your brand, it's not just your logo. Your brand is not just the font that you love. Those things are part of your brand, but your brand, kind of a broad strokes definition, is how your customers see you. When I think about Amazon, ooh, quick shipping, they have everything. You could think of a thing and they have it for sale almost assuredly. And they'll get it to you in one to two days. That's their brand. Yeah, they have a logo that's got a little smiley face on it, which was shocking to me. I don't know if anybody else never realized that the little swoop is a smiley face. I didn't realize that until like two years ago. I don't know why I missed that, but apparently that's a thing. That's not their brand. It's part of it. But your brand is how your customers see you. And your brand doesn't get to be set by you. You can try and you can do things that can help, but ultimately your customers are the ones who experience your brand and have the, this is how I see you. And so you can influence that, but you don't get to say what that is. And so your emails should communicate that in your tone of voice, your verbiage, your font choice, your color palette, your logo being there, all of these things help keep you on brand, but they are not your brand. Does that answer your question? Lastly, add value. This one, even on the 4% that are getting it right, is the one we see least often. Because it's something nobody thinks about, even less than all the others. Your transactional email, transactional emails cannot be promotional in nature primarily, but that doesn't mean that you can't promote things at all. Now I will preface that. I am not a lawyer. I'm not giving you legal advice, but I have been in the space for a while. I'm very familiar with the US law around it. If you are international, you'll have to research that. I'm not as familiar. But in the United States, you cannot send email that is considered transactional and not make the main thing the main thing. You cannot put your Black Friday advertisement that takes up 99% of the screen real estate for a password reset email and then have a little bitty link at the bottom. Not allowed. But you cannot value. Let's talk about what that means. By looking at a few examples. Anybody familiar with Casper, the mattress brand? Yeah, if you're not, highly recommend them. I don't get paid by them, but they're fantastic. They make pillows, mattresses, mattress covers, all kinds of stuff to help you sleep better. This is one of their emails. It's not mine. I have a slightly larger head than most people, so a standard pillow wouldn't fit for me. This is just something I grabbed off the internet. This is an e-commerce receipt. Let's talk about how they've added value to this email and how they've stayed on brand. Casper has a blue color palette. They have a very specific font face. They do these SVG line drawings that are really creative and cute, but it's on their brand. If you're selling missile systems, the United States government probably don't want a cutesy little illustration in your emails, but if your brand is fun and energetic and cute, you absolutely should. Casper has a fun, cute, energetic brand, so this is on brand for them. A couple of ways they're adding value. In fact, this, I think, is an excellent way of adding value. You can view your order. Pretty standard. Most e-commerce receipts, if you use Woo or anybody like that, you can click a button to see your order in your e-commerce receipt, but they're going a couple steps further that I really like. They're doing a referral program. If you're an e-commerce store, you should probably be thinking about a referral program. Their referral program shows up in all of their emails, and it works to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Below this, this, I actually think, is the most important thing you can add to any of your emails, is links and telephone numbers for your support, because if your customers are seeing emails from you, I can guarantee you they're going to reach in to support at some point, and having to look that up decreases the sentiment of your support tickets across the board. We added this to our emails about a year ago. We saw, so we love AI at our company. We use it for all the things, and one of the things we do is sentiment tracking, and we noticed a 10% bump in the average sentiment of our support tickets. What does that mean? That means when people wrote in, they were 10% happier, 10% less angry. I don't know about you, but I don't like dealing with angry customers in my support channels. It just makes my day worse, and when people are less angry, and you can help them with their problem quickly and efficiently, you retain them. Look at another one, shoe company, and off the top of my head, I don't remember which one this is, to be honest. Another order, confirmation. What do I like about this? They show you the image of the product, cannot tell you how many stores, confirmation, and receipt emails we see. Don't have any images on them, and images are expensive to get done. I understand. They make a huge difference, because at my house, we order three or five things a day, and so if you send me an email that says, hey, you purchased a thing, great. I have no idea what you're talking about. It could be for me, it could be for my wife, it could be for one of my kids, it could be someone's broken into our account and purchased two iPhones, like happened to me a couple weeks ago. This causes me to lose trust without images, because I'm like, ooh, am I getting scammed? Somebody get my credit card? Now I have to go figure this out. You've made me waste time. Now I don't like you anymore. Images make a difference. Where the shoes are being shipped to. This is how I caught the iPhone scam, because it was going to Los Angeles. I live in Tennessee, and I've never been to Los Angeles, and don't know anyone there. I got an email, which I don't know why you would scam someone and not change the email, but that's what they did. Where the things are being shipped to if you do physical goods, an absolute must. Further down, another illustration. This one's a little less cutesy, but still nice. Still on brand. Easy way to exchange your return. If you're doing physical goods, you probably already have this, but if you don't, please add this right now. Like stop what you're doing, go at it right now. They also are very eco-friendly. That's what their brand is on. They're talking about waste. That's on brand. If you're a petroleum company, probably not your brand. Don't do that. But if it is on brand for you, do that. Your customers care about that. That's the reason they bought from you is because that's what they liked. Why would you not reinforce that at every turn? Last example, J Crew. I don't know about anybody else, but like five to seven years ago, me and my wife spent a ton of money at J Crew. We had an outlet near us. We were in there all the time. This email is from some stuff that I bought ages ago. This is actually one of my emails. It's when not for me, because those clothes wouldn't fit me. But this email is a great branding email. It uses their fonts. It uses their colors. It shows images. You get to see the thing you bought and got excited about enough to click that buy it now button. But this, this is an email that I had not seen before up until that point. Share your thoughts. Nowadays, this is pretty common. Back then, not common. Here are the things you bought. We know when they arrived because we do shipment tracking. 24 hours later, how are they? Do you want to get some awesome reviews? Send this email. Make it on brand. You will see reviews. Guess what the third most searched for thing is when someone learns about your product? When they hear about you, first they want to know if you're legit. Second, they want to know how much you cost. And third, they want to know what people think about the things they bought from you. This is how to get those. Send email. So, we've talked about being reliable. Your transactional emails have to show up on time. They have to show up to the right address. They can't get stuck in the spam folder. They have to be on brand. Reinforce that trust that you built with the customer up to this point and increase it. They have to add value. Now, they have an immediate value, password reset, e-commerce order, which can also add the links and other action steps that they can take. If I buy something from you, and in two weeks, you're going to run a Thanksgiving day or Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday, and this thing has an accessory that I didn't buy because it was too expensive, you should include that in my e-commerce receipt because I'll probably click it and buy it. But all that's overwhelming. That's a lot to take in. My business, since 38 transactional emails, 38 types of email that I send out, I have 10 million things as a business owner to keep track of every single day. I can't pay attention to 38 emails all the time, and I am in the email game. So, I understand if you're sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, where do I start? I'm so overwhelmed, I'm just going to go get a cup of coffee and forget this ever happened. I get it. It's overwhelming. Start with one. You don't have to do them all. This is true on most things, but it's more true about this talk than any of those things are relevant right now. Start with one. If you're an e-commerce brand, start with your order confirmation, because that's the one you send most often. If you're a software as a service, a SaaS company, I think I would start probably with your password reset just because it's the one that generally creates the most frustration. If you're a membership site, start with your notification emails. Somebody gets a new post. Somebody comments on a thing. A new lesson comes out. They get notified. Most of those notifications, not great. Start with one email. You start with one. Make sure you're sending it reliably, and you can run tests on that. All you got to do is click the button. Most of us have 100% off-discount codes or a way to test Stripe, PayPal, these kind of things in test mode, sandbox mode. If you don't, let's chat. I'm here afterwards. Love to help you get that set up. Start with one. Test it. Track it. Most people track their marketing emails. You have active campaign, mail, chimp, all of these services. They do a good job of going, hey, we're just going to add our analytics to your email. You don't need to think about it. That's great. Almost no one tracks transactional emails, because no one's thinking about it. But you can add tracking to transactional emails. It's allowed. In the United States, I can't speak to all the countries, but in the United States, it's allowed. There are certain rules that you have to follow. You can't do some really crazy stuff. You can't get their social security number or anything like that, but you can check if they open it. If they click links, you can track that. Lots of platforms allow for it. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And if they don't, you can add your Google analytics tracking to that. Google analytics has a tool. It's kind of hard to find, but it will allow you to put those things into emails. Test one. Make sure it's arriving on time. Make sure it's on brand. Make sure it's adding value. Track how it performs. In fact, if you want to, you can set up an A-B test, which is just we send this email to 50% of people, and this email to 50% of people, and then we compare how they perform. And you can track and analyze how your old email does and how your new email does. And if it doesn't improve, you let me know. And I'll just never give this talk again, I guess. From there, don't stop once a week, once a month, once a quarter. Make sure you don't stop. Iterate on those improvements. Try another email. Update another email. Send a new type of email. Try a different font. Try a different color. Move the buttons around. There are literally infinite things that you can change about an email to see how it improves your conversions, your open rates, your clicks, literally endless possibilities. Always iterate. Don't have to do it all at once. Start with one. Track the performance and iterate on that performance. This is me. I'm at MR Pritchett on Twitter and LinkedIn and probably a bunch of other places too, but those are the ones I'm most active on. If I can help you at any point, not a sales guy, don't want to sell you on my products if they're the right fit, we can talk about it, but I want to help you. That's the reason I come do these talks, so that I can help you reach out to me. I'll be hanging out here all weekend. I'm happy to discuss whatever you want. Obviously email is kind of my thing, but if you want to talk about Florida Gators, that's my football team. Love to talk about how awesome they are or terrible, but here's where you can find me online. Happy to talk, happy to help you out, happy to answer questions, whatever you need. This is where I am. Questions? All right, you guys are apparently email pros. I love it. They want it on video so they can hear. So I don't know if this is exactly pertinent, but in terms of just email reliability, I've been using something called Postmark, which is an SMTP. Essentially, you stick some code into your clients domain name settings and it verifies and it will pretty much ensure that your emails to and from your website will be received because it verifies your domain name. I think clients who have not gotten form entries, who have gotten spam, lots of problems, but this Postmark is very, very easy to use. I have not a developer. I will say that. I also have clients who have their emails set up through posting services. I would say avoid it at all costs and try to get people out of Google Workspace. There's one other plugin I love. I just love to share it. It's called Clean Talk. Clean Talk allows you very, very easily for people like me who are not developers to add a website to your account and it's an amazing tool to just block tons of spam and bad stuff and it's very low cost. So those are just nice tools to have even if you're just setting up your client site and you have a content for them. Yeah, Postmark is great. That's owned by Active Campaign if you're familiar with them. They do a great job. We've used them in the past on certain projects. Yeah, they're great. Anybody else? All right. Well, thank you all for your time. If I can help out, let me know.