The 11 eReceipt Best Practices You Need to Know

1. Train your associates on how to suggest eReceipts.

Your in-store associates are the most important part of your electronic receipt program as they are the front lines and means to activation. Offering best practices on how to properly present digital receipts to customers will vastly improve adoption rates. Here are two points for your associates to consider:

• Try to get comfortable with asking every customer for their email

• Don’t offer the emailed receipt as a secondary option. Instead, suggest it as the primary option

Essentially, you want associates to simply ask at the end of the transaction: “What’s a good email for your receipt today?” rather than, “How would you like your receipt? Printed or emailed?”

2. Include dynamic, targeted marketing content and Calls to Action in your receipts.

Transactional emails have the highest open rates in the email marketing world. Digital receipts, in particular, can see up to an 80% open rate, making these emails valuable real estate for you and an opportunity that you can’t afford to waste. In order to maintain a high deliverability and click-through rate:

• Include dynamic, targeted content and Calls to Action (CTAs) in your digital receipts

• Consider following the 70/30 rule (70% transactional information, 30% marketing content) to help increase deliverability rates and avoid spam filters

Make an effort to personalize CTAs based on the information you know about the customer. One option is to include an invitation to join your loyalty program for those who aren’t in the program. For existing members, report how many points they have and how many more they need in order to reach the next goal.

3. Use a well-branded, responsive HMTL template.

Non-branded receipts are less professional, inconsistent, and potentially questionable. They also do not enhance the shopper experience. Rather than sending out a default or an auto-generated email receipt:

• Ensure ereceipts are consistent and up-to-date with branding across your website and other digital platforms

• Build your ereceipts using responsive HTML and test them on several devices to ensure they display in the fashion you intended

Well branded, responsive ereceipts convey that you are professional, trustworthy and care about each part of their experience. You don’t need to hire a developer to code a great digital receipt template. Digital receipt solutions like flexEngage, make it easy to design gorgeous, dynamic eReceipt templates.

4. Keep subject lines short and to the point.

The prevailing email marketing best practices apply to digital receipts as well. These include:

• Be sure to maintain shorter subject lines, particularly as eReceipts are more likely to be viewed on a mobile device

• A/B Test different your subject lines in order to maximize open rates

In fact, you may discover that “Your Receipt from [Store Name]” vastly out performs “Thank you for your purchase,” for instance. Great ereceipt engagement starts with an effective subjects line.

5. Don’t forget to thank your customer for their purchase.

There is more space for content on a digital receipt than on a paper one. Consider using some of that real estate to thank your customer.

• Adding “Thanks for shopping with us!” somewhere on the receipt is typically a good idea

• In addition, you may also choose to send a follow-up thank you message a few days after purchase to continue the engagement.

Pro Tip: Follow-up thank you messages that include helpful recommendations on ways to best use the items purchased are valuable to the customer, help to improve your brand perception and keep you top of mind.

6. Make your ereceipts printer-friendly.

While digital receipts are convenient for both the merchant and shopper, customers may opt to print the receipt at home – whether to expense a business purchase or to file the receipt away for tax purposes. Therefore:

• Ensure your ereceipt template is home printer-friendly

• Consider attaching a .PDF version of the receipt to every digital receipt you send

Also helpful from an ereceipt adoption standpoint, is the ability to tell those customers who are not yet sure about ereceipts “Not to worry, your ereceipt can be printed at home later should you like a hard copy.”

7. Send receipts immediately following the transaction.

Customers are used to receiving paper receipts immediately. Many customers want to review their purchase right after the sale to confirm they paid the correct amount. It’s important to keep this experience in place – both for the customer and for the retailer. Ereceipts that arrive 30 minutes, even days after the sale are problematic for many reasons. When digital receipts fail to arrive in time, shopper attention wanes meaning retailers lose their best chance to remind the shopper of items they forgot to purchase, repeat purchase incentives they can’t afford to miss or product enhancements available on the website. In fact, 58% of consumer conversions happen within 24 hours of a customer opening and clicking into a flexReceipt.

8. Use a customer lookup during the transaction to speed up checkout times.

If you’re worried that asking for an email at checkout every time may get tedious or slow down the line, there are ways around that. If you’ve included the customer’s email as a part of their shopper profile, you’ll have the option to instantly look them up through a variety of methods. For instance, if you have a loyalty app that includes a QR or barcode, the shopper might be able to scan their phone to pull up their account. Customer emails may also be retrieved using their name or phone number. Once the account is displayed, rather than asking the customer to spell out their email address once more in return for an ereceipt, your sales associates can simply say, “Your receipt is being sent to you by email right now. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

9. Set up tracking to monitor the performance of ereceipt content and links.

It goes without saying, but tracking and analytics are useful in so many ways. Not only can they reveal if something you’re doing is working or not, the data can also alert you to key shopping behaviors you may not have been aware of. Be sure to including tracking on each of the links within your ereceipts and pay attention periodically to the reporting – this will allow you and your customers to get the most out of the ereceipts program.

10. For more, valid emails, consider implementing email validation.

While emails provided in return for ereceipts are typically 25% more valid than those provided for loyalty programs, email validation can help retailers build more accurate databases to support their engagement efforts. A number of services are available to check the validity of an email address in real-time right at the point of purchase. If an error or misspelling takes place, it can be corrected immediately. Best in class ereceipt providers including flexReceipts offer this feature as an enhancement to their solution.

11. Consider adding social sharing buttons to facilitate customers sharing their purchases with friends.

Buying something new can be exciting, and many consumers may want to tell their friends. In the era of social media, making it easy for customers to share their purchases means your products and promotions can be distributed across the social media landscape at no additional cost to you. Social sharing buttons can be configured within ereceipts to auto-include your social media handles within the posts they generate so that even more people can see your products and become engaged with your brand.