How to get order confirmation emails right
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. The short answer to order confirmation emails is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What it costs to ignore
It is the most-opened email you will ever send. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Include everything needed to avoid a support ticket
- A tracking link reduces "where is my order" enquiries
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
A tracking link reduces "where is my order" enquiries. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
What to do next
In practice
In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. 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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.