Transactional emails that sell: what to include in order emails without overwhelming customers

A good newsletter gets opened by a minority of recipients. An order confirmation gets opened by almost everyone, and so does the shipping notice, sometimes several times. These are transactional emails: the ones customers expect because they have just done something in your store.

In many PrestaShop stores those emails are still the template that came out of the box, with the logo and little else. That is a missed opportunity, but it is also easy to get wrong: an order email packed with offers no longer looks like an order email.

First, what the customer needs to know

A transactional email has a job to do, and the sales part comes after. Before adding anything, check that each email says what it should:

• Confirmation: order number, products, amounts, address, payment method and, above all, when it will arrive.
• Payment pending (bank transfer, for example): payment details and what happens if they don't pay.
• Shipping: carrier, tracking number with a direct link and estimated delivery time.
• Delivery: confirmation, how to return something that isn't right, how to get in touch.

If the customer has to write to you to find out where their order is, the email has failed before it even tried to sell anything. Every "where is my order?" enquiry is a customer service cost that a good shipping notice avoids.

Out of the box, PrestaShop does not send an email when the order is marked as delivered. Yet that is exactly when the customer has the product in their hands and is most willing to leave a review or buy again.

Design: what email clients respect

Email HTML is not web HTML. Email clients ignore much of modern CSS, each in its own way:

• Inline styles. Style sheets in the header get lost in many clients.
• Constrained width, around 600 px, and a single column on mobile.
• Blocked images: many clients don't load them until the user asks. The email has to make sense without them, with alt text and buttons made of text, not images.
• Dark mode: a black logo on a transparent background disappears. Test it.
• Plain-text version, which also helps deliverability.

If your store has migrated from PrestaShop 1.6 or 1.7, review the templates: customised emails from older versions often carry variables that no longer exist or layouts that don't adapt to mobile. An up-to-date store with five-year-old emails looks worse than its website.

What to add to sell, and in what proportion

The rule of thumb: transactional content at the top, taking up most of the email; sales content at the bottom, as a recognisable block. Three things work:

1. Relevant recommended products: those bought together with what they ordered, accessories or the same category. Never what they have just bought, and never out-of-stock products.
2. A coupon for the next order, unique and single-use, better in the delivery email than in the confirmation: the customer has already seen that you deliver on your promises.
3. A campaign banner with a start and end date, when you have one. An expired banner in an order email is worse than none.

Three or four products are enough. An order email with fifteen products looks like a newsletter and starts ending up in the promotions tab.

The legal side

A purely transactional email needs no consent: you send it because the customer placed an order. As soon as you add recommendations, coupons or banners, the email carries a commercial communication, and article 21 of the LSSI (Spain's Information Society Services and E-commerce Act) applies. You may send it to a customer with whom you have a contractual relationship if it concerns products similar to those they bought, but every email must offer a simple way to opt out.

Getting them into the inbox

A good email is useless if it ends up in spam. Check with your hosting provider:

• SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured for the domain you send from. The big mailbox providers enforce them more strictly every year.
• Sending through an authenticated SMTP server, not with the server's mail function.
• A recognisable sender and a reply-to address that someone actually reads.
• Light images and no third-party shortened links.

Why the open rate is misleading

Since some email clients, such as Apple Mail, download images automatically to protect user privacy, the open pixel fires even when nobody has read the email. Corporate security scanners do something similar with links. A high open rate may be noise.

What does measure whether the email sells:

• Clicks on products and on the coupon, filtering out bots.
• Coupon redemptions and the revenue from those orders.
• Sales per template: confirmation, shipping and delivery don't perform the same.
• Visits with UTM tags in your analytics.

Common mistakes

• The coupon in the confirmation, before the customer has received anything.
• Recommending the same product they have just bought.
• A sales banner that keeps appearing weeks later.
• Not testing the email on mobile, in dark mode and with images turned off.
• Sales blocks without an unsubscribe link.
• Resending an email and generating a second coupon.

Checklist

• Each email answers the customer's question at that moment.
• Tracking with a direct link in the shipping notice.
• Delivery email switched on.
• Sales block at the bottom, short and relevant.
• Opting out of sales content without losing order notifications.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC checked.
• Measurement by clicks, redemptions and revenue, not by opens.

How to do it in PrestaShop

RKR Mail Editor gives you a visual email editor (subject, HTML and plain text per language) and adds to order emails recommended products based on six criteria, a single-use coupon tied to the customer that isn't duplicated when the email is resent, campaign banners and an "Order delivered" email in six languages; every email with sales blocks carries its unsubscribe link. If you don't want to touch the templates, RKR Ofertas en emails transaccionales inserts recommendations, a coupon and banners into the confirmation, shipping and delivery emails with 23 themes and inline styles, and measures signed opens and clicks (excluding scanners), redemptions and revenue per template.