Order Confirmation Email Optimization
Dear Readers,
I am delighted to announce the launch of our new reservation confirmation email, a result of five months of intense work! The email had a soft launch three weeks ago and has now been hard launched globally. This is a story of our journey, a journey that was not without its challenges but one that I am incredibly proud of. The project's complexity was significant, but our team's resilience and determination never wavered.
It all began at the start of the fiscal year when we recognized that our reservation confirmation was outdated and not aligned with our new branding, established over two years ago. The reservation confirmation is one of our most crucial emails, triggered across 18 different countries in 16 different languages. It also remains our highest RPE of $3.50 (revenue per email) in our triggered/transactional program, but also one of our more complex with over 650 dynamic parameters. This was a daunting project, with many moving parts and stakeholders, but most importantly, a unique design challenge to ensure we meet our brand promise, which sets us apart in the industry.
This brand promise consists of ensuring our guest's anonymity and granting requests no matter how strange or odd they might seem to the everyday person. For example, the reservation confirmation email needed to have the element of the alternate guest's name/fictitious character they are or plan to be when entering one of our hotels. I should mention that no one is allowed to enter a NoTell Hotel without an encrypted code and/or “other” secretive way (that I cannot say), proving that they either have a reservation or are a confirmed member of our invite-only “loyalty” program. The email sent must have some unique identifier and the appearance of it being a “normal” hotel reservation if they are first-time guests or wish to hide it from others. Other than that, there are a few other secretive things that I am not at liberty to discuss. It's a pretty normal email with elements similar to those of other hotel chains.
Our clientele appreciates minimalistic design, exclusivity, anonymity, and, most importantly, a way for them to soak in the offering of NoTell as a way to completely disengage from the real world they currently live in. If you are thinking, “Why send an email out if they want all of this,” the answer is simple; we are bound legally in most countries to provide some sort of confirmation to the end guest and also need to have an accurate record to ensure our hotels are at occupancy for our accounting department. I should note that over 70% of our subscriber base uses Subatomic email, based in a remote part of Greenland, which is the most highly encrypted and private email service in the world. In short, our guests love their privacy. 🙂
We spent the first 75 days in the design and layout of the new email template, creating over 20 wireframes and mocking up what these emails would look like based on the 10-15 most common scenarios our guests had via research of the last two years of data. Ultimately, we settled on a single-column layout based on guest focus groups and senior management feedback. We intentionally should have involved local staff in each of our markets to limit the amount of feedback and opinions that could cause significant delays in our design process. The following 60 days became a scramble to align the data coming from our registration system with the new template and areas for data points and also figure out how to encrypt and/or change it based on the guest's character/pseudo persona. Once aligned, the template variations had to be coded properly, and layers of QA needed to be looked at to ensure a perfect email experience for our guests. At one point, I checked our project management tool’s QA section and our chat rooms, and over 2300 tests were done over 12 days, including teams like IT, email production, design, QA, directors, and more. These emails also had to be tested for translation alignment across the 16 languages, ensuring that the tone and messaging were aligned across cultural nuances to avoid offending or confusing those who read them.
After all of that, we spent a few weeks in a soft launch before getting the all-clear from our QA to push live the new template. It’s too early to tell if the performance has been affected, but we have aligned the new branding.
***CORE insight from Andrew Kordek @emailnucleus***
Order confirmations (or any transactional email) can be one of your arsenal's most celebrated and highest ROI emails. You need to take time to assess how it's doing, and if there hasn’t been any optimization attempted in the last 3 years, it’s time to look for ways to make it a better experience for your customers. However, I don’t think this is an easy project, as there are many moving parts, especially in the injection of data and the balance you have to have when it comes to marketing vs. transactional messaging.
I recommend that your brand always have one transactional email project happening constantly. It would start with the most important ones, determined by you and the team, and then have a project plan with solid timelines to get it done promptly. Transactional emails and their optimization should be owned by you in the marketing department and not by IT. Make the business case that this is a part of the revenue stream for the program, and fight hard to ensure you own it.
