With email marketing, engagement is a tough thing to achieve. Most promotional emails achieve open rates of around 20 percent. More often than not, they remain unopened, get filtered into secondary inboxes, or are dismissed at a glance.
Transactional emails are a different story. Messages like bills, payment confirmations, and service updates generally achieve open rates between 60 and 85 percent. Customers open them because they need to. The content is timely, relevant, and often action-based. That reliability makes transactional emails some of the most effective, yet underused, communication tools a business can send.
With great attention comes great opportunity
A billing email that gets opened is a tried and tested method to inform customers of their account status. But it can also be a chance to explain, reduce effort, or reinforce trust. Similarly, these emails can be a golden opportunity to promote special offers and deliver personalized product recommendations. Many businesses are still treating transactional messages as system outputs. The format is functional, but static. It may link to a PDF or a web portal, but it rarely gives the customer as much as it could within the message itself. That’s a missed opportunity.
Imagine a customer receives a billing email. The amount due is immediately visible. The reason for the charge is clearly explained. There is a one-click option to pay or ask a question, directly from the email, SMS or WhatsApp. The experience is fast, easy, and respectful of the customer's time.
This billing message could also include a targeted promotion for a product that fits the customer's profile and circumstances, or a link to a new special offer tailored for that particular customer.
Now compare that to the standard process: an attachment to download, a login page to navigate, a vague or technical description and/or a helpline number hidden in the small print. One experience leaves the user cold, the other delivers a much easier journey and a reason to remain loyal.
Why the gap exists
In many organizations, transactional emails sit outside the marketing or customer experience function. They are generated by core systems and maintained by operations or IT. The formatting is rigid, updates can be difficult to coordinate, and compliance often takes priority over clarity and experience.
At the same time, marketing and service teams may not have visibility into these communications, even though they affect the same customers. Silos, legacy workflows, and disconnected systems all contribute to the problem.
As a result, transactional emails are rarely designed with the customer experience in mind. They meet the basic requirement but miss the wider goal of supporting, simplifying, and strengthening the relationship between the brand and the person on the other end.
The strategic role of CCM
Customer Communication Management (CCM) tools can help to close this gap. They allow teams to build and manage dynamic, compliant communications across multiple channels, without relying on complex processes.
A CCM system allows businesses to:
- Automatically include the right customer data in the right place
- Design communications that meet legal and regulatory standards
- Personalize content based on context, account history, or preferences
- Offer responsive layouts and smart actions across mobile, email, and messaging
CCMs create a shared platform that bridges operational and customer-facing teams. That makes it possible to improve the communications customers already engage with, without increasing volume or risk.
A better way to use transactional messages
The engagement potential of transactional emails is clear. So is the challenge: they are built to serve operational needs, but they reach the customer at a point of trust.
Making them more helpful, more human, and more aligned with how people actually use digital channels can be a huge opportunity. An email that gets opened is an increasingly rare thing. You should be making that count.
Talk to EDC about how to reach your customers more effectively with a CCM.
