What to ask your agency about order confirmation emails

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on order confirmation emails, these questions are worth asking early.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

It is the most-opened email you will ever send. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A tracking link reduces "where is my order" enquiries. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.