Part of the E-Commerce User Experience Series

Confirmation email is one of the most important touchpoints to inform a customer of their transaction. Good email usability can save money by reducing telephone calls to your call center. This report identifies how real people interact with email, starting with the inbox (where many messages are ruthlessly deleted) through their consumption of the email content.

This 312-page report contains 144 recommendations for improving the design of transactional messages that are generated automatically by a computer (the report doesn't cover human-authored customer service). Discussions and 182 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Benefits

• Checklist of 144 design guidelines for creating effective automated email messages
• Get an inside look at how customers handle transactional email messages in their inbox
• 182 screenshots of real email messages that worked well or that have poor usability
• Techniques for using confirmation e-mails to answer user questions and enhance your customer service reputation

Topics

• How people use and manage email
• How email affects trust
• Common issues with transactional email
• Subject, sender, and message body
• Recommended features for all transactional messages
• Message sequences
• Distinguishing your messages from phishing messages

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in this report is based on our usability study with 37 participants, processing 92 transactional email messages from more than 80 organizations.