I’m a sucker for Black Friday email deals, and this week I took advantage of two really good ones:

• 40% off a one-year membership to a very cool online training site for entrepreneurs
• 50% off a WordPress plugin that’s going to save me tons of time customizing themes for clients

Both deals won me over with clever emails — they each put a lot of thought into their design and copywriting, and I don’t know if it was on purpose, but the more expensive entrepreneur site emailed theirs later in the day. That’s smart considering some of us get a little grouchy during the holidays and might be having a glass of wine at the end of the work day … was I more inclined to pull out the credit card?

I spent $300 after the discounts, and I’m the type who loves to share deals like this on Twitter (I don’t do Facebook). Can you see the problem with the confirmation emails I received after my orders were placed?

Order Confirmations are a Missed Opportunity for Most Email Marketers

Transactional emails are undoubtedly the highest open rate you’ll ever get, because everyone wants to know their order was received correctly and their payment was processed. In the case of the second email example, there were files to download, so that’s an email I might need to come back to a few times. So where are the social sharing buttons? These emails should be encouraging me to tell everyone I know about the great Black Friday deals I just took advantage of.

The final stage of the Inbound marketing methodology is to delight customers and encourage social sharing. Let your customers help with your holiday email campaign, and send their friends into your sales funnel. Imagine how many more customers these two businesses could have gotten if they made it easy for me, a marketer, to spread their messages on Twitter or via email.