Getting started with order confirmation emails
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to order confirmation emails for teams who have not touched it before.
In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The reason this keeps coming up
It is the most-opened email you will ever send. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Include everything needed to avoid a support ticket
- Change one thing and measure it
A tracking link reduces "where is my order" enquiries. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
How to tell if yours is fine
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about order confirmation emails before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Include everything needed to avoid a support ticket — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.