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Transactional beats promotional
Order confirmations, shipping notices and invoice mails are opened almost every time. Adding one relevant, useful line to those — 'you usually reorder this every 8 weeks' — outperforms an entire newsletter campaign.
The reorder reminder
Look at each customer's purchase interval per article and mail them shortly before it runs out. For consumables this is, in our experience, the single highest-revenue automation a B2B shop can run.
The quote that expires
A quote sitting untouched for ten days is not a lost deal — it is a forgotten one. Two automated reminders and a note to the responsible salesperson recover a meaningful share of them.
Respect the inbox
Every mail you send that is not useful trains your customer to ignore the next one — including the one about their late delivery. Fewer, better, and always with an obvious reason for existing.
- Put the offer inside the mail they already open.
- Reorder reminders are the top B2B automation.
- Every useless mail devalues the next useful one.
Frequently asked questions
Two separate causes, and people only ever check the first. The technical side is authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly on your sending domain, which your provider or we can verify in an afternoon. The other side is behavioural: mail nobody opens teaches filters, and your customers, to skip you. Fixing the records will not rescue a mail that had no reason to exist.
If you sell consumables, the reorder reminder. Look at each customer's actual purchase interval per article and write shortly before they run out — it is useful at the moment it arrives, which is why it works when a newsletter does not. Second: put one relevant line inside the order confirmation, a mail they open anyway.
We build the system; we do not decide this one. German advertising and data protection law treats consent, existing customer relationships and transactional mail very differently, and the line depends on your specific case — so ask your lawyer and get the answer in writing. What we will say technically: keep the consent state in your data, per contact and per purpose, so whatever your lawyer decides is actually enforceable.
Probably less often than you are planning, and the frequency is the wrong question anyway. Every mail that is not useful trains your customer to ignore the next one — including the one telling them their delivery is late. Send when you have a reason a specific customer would care about. A slot in the calendar is not a reason.
We do this for a living — Shopware, Node.js, React, ERP integration and automation for B2B.
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