Traditional brick and mortar stores get many things wrong. Particularly receipts. Long and lacking value, most people just throw their receipts away.

In e-commerce, it’s just as easy to get email receipts wrong.

Many businesses use the boring, unoptimized email receipt their e-commerce software provides them. If you do this, you’re missing an opportunity to delight customers and grow your business.

Here are five easy ways for you can revamp your email receipts for a boost in conversions and customer retention.

1. Add Discount Codes to Your Email Receipts

Fact: Acquiring new customers is hard and for many businesses, expensive.

But growing revenue over time requires increased sales and acquiring new customers is just one way to do this. In fact, according to Marketing Metrics, businesses are 60 to 70% more likely to upsell an existing customer then sell to a new customer.

So making it easy for your existing customers to buy more makes smart business sense.

One simple way to increase sales from your existing customers is to give your customers a discount code for on next purchase in your email receipts. Why? A recent study showed that 70% of people make use of coupons or discounts they learn about from email. This is a huge opportunity to help you gain repeat customers.

Unfortunately, handing out coupons to every customer won’t solve all of your problems. So of your customers won’t be interested and some will just forget to use them. To encourage your customers to use their coupons, try to use a time sensitive offer to increase conversions. You can also go one step future when you notice certain customers haven’t used their coupon and send an email reminder about the coupon before it expires.

2. Add a Survey to Your Receipts

Your email inbox is empty and you have no new support requests from customers, so you’re doing just fine, right? Maybe not. Did you know a typical business hears from 4% of it’s dissatisfied customers? The other 96% are complaining on social media, to their friends, or just vowing never to buy from you again.

Don’t risk losing customers just because you didn’t know they were unhappy. Make sure you give your customers an easy to provide feedback as often as you can.

So how can you get feedback to fix their problems and turn them into satisfied customers – without knowing if your customers actually as dissatisfied? With frequent, easy to answer surveys. An easy way to do this without pestering your customers is to add a customer satisfaction survey to your email receipts.

Now don’t panic, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to do this or spend hours creating your surveys. There are a few easy to use tools like Promotor.io or Clickinsights that make getting feedback from your customers painless.

Another easy way to get feedback from your customers is to encourage customers to personally reply to your emails. This is an easy way for customers to tell you how you’re doing without the burden of filling out a survey. Again, you don’t have to spend all day emailing each and every customer about their experience after each purchase. The key here is automation. With the right tools, it’s easy to automatically send an email to ask for feedback with free email marketing tools like Autosend. Autosend will help you not only create good looking and effective email receipts to add your post-purchase feedback surveys, but it will also help you automatically send personal emails to each customer that doesn’t answer the survey to get feedback.

Besides, you’ll be surprised at how much more insightful your customers’ email response will be than surveys.

3. Include Product recommendations.

Did you know that upsells are responsible for 20-30% of the average e-commerce business’ revenue? Make sure you take advantage of this and include new product recommendations in your each and every email receipt.

Now, don’t be tempted to simply recommend your top selling products or add the products recommendations for the products you’re trying to get rid of. To make this technique effective, you can personalize the recommendations based on what the customer bought. You can also add products they added to their cart, but didn’t buy and products they viewed.

4. Don’t Forget Your Contact information.

Businesses like Flowr have learned that adding a phone number to your website helps increase trust and conversions. So what would having contact information in your email receipts do for your business?

Customers often look back to email receipts to find contact information if they need to reach you. Make it easy for them and add your phone number, an email address that someone will actually answer, and your social media links to give customers different ways to reach you.

5. Ask for Referrals

What do you do after buying a product? If you love it, you tell people about it of course.

In fact, 74% of consumers identify word of mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision.

Give customers more incentive to share their new purchase by asking for referrals in your email receipts. Add a referral link to make it easy for customers to share along with social sharing buttons. If you don’t already have a referral program – start one now. It’s simple (and free) to do with easy tools like ReferralSnip.

There you have it. That’s five easy ways to make your email receipts money-making machines. Don’t wait to put these five ideas into action! Use one idea now and get an immediate lift in conversions and customer retention.

What other ideas would you add to this list? Tell me in the comments section below. 

This article was written by Sujan Patel from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

eCommerceforbesmarketingreceipt