The Emails Your Website Should Send Without You

Your website is probably silent the moment somebody leaves it. Somebody browses, gets as far as the basket, gets interrupted by the school run, and that is that. No follow-up, no reminder, nothing.

A handful of automatic emails will do a week of polite follow-up on your behalf. Most businesses have none of them switched on, usually because no one has ever laid out which ones do the work.

Here are the ones that earn their place, in rough order of how much they return.

Abandoned basket reminders

Someone adds things to a basket, gets distracted, and leaves. One email, a few hours later, with a link that puts the basket back exactly as it was.

That is the whole thing. One email, not a sequence of five with a countdown timer and an increasing discount. The reason it works is not persuasion, it is convenience: rebuilding a basket is annoying, and you have removed the annoyance.

If you add a discount to it, you teach people to abandon baskets on purpose. Some businesses accept that trade. I would not start there.

Order and dispatch updates

Confirmed, packed, sent, here is the tracking number.

These are not marketing, they are the cure for the "where is my order?" email. Every one of those you prevent is five minutes back, and they arrive at the times you are least able to deal with them.

If you sell physical products and are only sending the initial confirmation, this is the cheapest improvement available to you.

Back in stock

Somebody wanted a thing you did not have. They said so. Telling them when it arrives is the least you can do with that information, and it converts better than almost anything else you will send, because the person already decided.

Asking for a review

A few days after delivery, once they have actually had the thing. Short, easy, one link.

This is the one that compounds. Reviews feed your local search visibility, they answer questions for the next customer, and if they live on your own site rather than a platform you pay monthly for, they are yours to keep.

A nudge to re-order, sometimes

Only if it fits what you sell. If someone buys something that runs out on a predictable schedule, a note at roughly the right moment reads as useful, not pushy. If they bought a sofa, leave them alone.

The line between helpful and irritating

This is where automated email goes wrong.

One message per event. Not a sequence. If the basket reminder did not work, the answer is not three more.

Say something the recipient needs. Every email above is triggered by something the customer did, and tells them something they would want to know. That is what makes them different to a newsletter.

Make unsubscribing easy, one click, no login. Beyond it being the law, an easy unsubscribe is cheaper than being marked as spam, which damages every email you send afterwards including the order confirmations.

And keep the tone the same as your other emails. The most common mistake is switching into marketing voice for the automated ones, so they read as though they came from a different company.

Getting them switched on

If you are on WooCommerce or Shopify, most of this exists and a lot of it is switched off by default. Go and look before buying anything.

If you are on our CMS, the shop side does the lot natively, which was the point of building it that way.

The platform is the least interesting part. The order I would do them in is: dispatch updates, basket reminder, review request, then the rest.

If you are not sure which of these your site already does, that is usually a ten-minute check. Get in touch and we will have a look with you.