Stop wasting your highest open rates: how to turn receipts into revenue

Take a moment to think about how much time you spend obsessing over your marketing email campaigns.

If you’re anything like us, you’ll tweak the subject lines, test the call-to-action buttons, and segment your recipient lists until your eyes hurt. But people get a lot of email. Even with all that hard work, the average open rate for a standard marketing email hovers around 20-25%. If you’re lucky.

But what if I told your there’s a hidden goldmine sitting right under your nose.

Email that boasts a typical open rate north of 90%. Emails that your attendees are actively looking for in their inboxes.

I’m talking about your transactional emails – those confirmation notices, invoices, badge receipts, app download links, etc.

Most event management platforms treat these messages like an ugly administrative afterthought, pumping out plain-text, robotic blocks of functional text that look like they were generated in 1998.

This is a big mistake. Huge! Because at the exact moment someone opens a registration confirmation, their engagement with your event – and by extension the rest of your brand offering – are at their absolute highest.

At that moment of receiving a confirmation, or any other important functional email about the event, your registrants are highly attentive, fully committed, and ready to take action.

It’s a precious window of opportunity to promote any add-ons, upgrades, similar events, or other related services your organisation has to offer this registrant. Because, simply put, they will open this mail and they will pay attention to it.

Why then do so few event marketers bother to tap into the cross-selling potential of transactional emails?

Well, mostly, it’s because the platforms they use to handle this stuff make it impossible. Everyone gets the same, functional, system-generated emails – without the powerful custom configuration, tags and conditional display that you’d see in a modern email marketing tool.

We think this is terrible waste, so we built AttendZen with a different ethos. Our platform allows you to highly customise and personalise all system and transactional emails using the exact same drag & drop tools, dynamic blocks, and design features as our core email marketing engine.

You don't need to touch a line of code to turn a boring receipt into a beautiful, high-converting marketing asset.

So let us show you how you can stop wasting your highest open rates and start turning transactional emails into extra revenue, complete with real-world inspiration and actionable steps, to get you started today.

The psychology of the post-purchase up-sell

First of all, it’s important to understand why transactional emails have such unique growth potential.

When an attendee finishes filling out a registration form and enters their credit card details, they move past a critical psychological milestone. They are officially ‘in’. They have validated your event, carved out time in their calendar, and allocated budget to be there.

It’s a powerful trust moment. So rather than simply ending the conversation with a cold ‘Payment Received’ screen, this is the perfect time to introduce hyper-relevant, secondary options.

Our colleagues in the B2C world already understand this and make huge sums of money from it.

Look at the transactional emails you receive from your favourite online clothing stores or food delivery apps. I bet they contain carefully curated offers for a piece that will complete your outfit, or a great new accessory, or £10 off delivery from that new sushi place.

We should all take note.

What should I sell?

Well, what have you got? And no, this is not the way to offload that expensive mountain bike your husband never uses that takes up space in the garage.

The key here is relevance. Most organisations, whether corporates, associations, commercial conference producers etc, have other events or related content offerings which will be of interest to new registrants.

These might include:

• Upgrades to this event (VIP package, gala dinner etc)
• Upcoming webinars / summits on related topics
• Magazine / subscriptions
• Information services (reports, custom research services)

Here are some examples of how our customers have successfully used their transactional emails on AttendZen to maximise the value they get from registrants.

Commercial conference producers

A client of ours runs conferences aimed at the investment community in the US. They set up beautifully branded transactional emails that look much like their marketing messages, and they never miss the chance to up-sell.

They use conditional logic to show / hide content blocks in the email, so the offer the registrant sees in the conformation message depends on the registration type they just bought.

A standard pass only costs around $600, whereas their full VIP package goes for $1,800 and includes lots of extras. Lots of people opt for the standard ticket, and their confirmation mail includes a tempting offer along the lines of:

‘Want to access the VIP Lounge and the closed-door investor breakfast?
Upgrade your standard pass for just $300.’

Now, this upgrade only includes two of the ten or so benefits of the full VIP package, but it’s hugely profitable for them. They tried selling a mid-tier version on the registration form, but hardly anyone bought it.

And this is the magical part! Once an attendee has registered at the value price, they’ve made a commitment. They’re invested. Consequently it’s much easier for our client to get them to drop the extra $300 to get access to big hitters at the breakfast.

They offer this upgrade at all their summits and they told us it’s the easiest extra $200k they generate in a year.

Trade associations

Associations need a wider focus than just events. They need to evidence member value, professional development, and community growth.

Another of our customers in Australia uses their transactional email to do exactly this. Whenever a non-member registers for the annual conference at the higher non-member rate, the confirmation email has a nice content block that says:

‘You could have saved $200 on this ticket! Apply the difference right now to a 1-year Association Membership and unlock full member benefits today.’

Registrants look at the extra stuff they could get throughout the year and it’s a no-brainer! Joining would not have occurred to them before they registered, but now they’re going to the annual conference it feels like a much smaller step.

And it works! They’ve signed up more than 100 new members this way in just two years.

Other associations we work with use confirmation emails, joining instructions and ‘thanks for attending’ messages to promote peripheral benefits like CE / CME credits and certificates.

One even leverages the fact that the registration engine knows where the attendee lives to show localised content blocks:

‘We notice you are based in Chicago. Join your local regional chapter right now to attend the pre-conference mixer next month!’

B2B publishers and media houses

For publishers, events are a great way to feed their subscription funnels and leverage their editorial content.

We have a customer in this space who likes to include a special offer in the ticket email whenever a non-subscriber registers for one of their conferences.

‘Your ticket includes 1 month of premium content. Extend this to a full-year Digital Subscription today at 50% off.’

They also use operational event emails to cross-sell their research and intelligence reports. They have success with this because the reports and publications they offer are tightly mapped to the technical subject area of the specific event. A steep, time-limited discount helps drive action too.

‘Prepare for this year’s Retail Luxury Summit event by downloading our 2026 Industry Trend Report for just $299 (normally $599).’

Conditional logic and tags allow you to ensure attendees only see relevant offers – never items that are already included in the registration they just purchased or offers that will likely be outside the scope of their professional interest.

This strict personalisation, together with the immediacy of making the offer at the same time you have both their attention and their trust, is what makes transactional emails such a golden opportunity.

And it’s not just about sales

Even if you don’t have any upgrades or related events or products to sell, you could still be using transactional emails to drive the behaviour you want from your attendees.

Do you need attendees to do anything before they arrive at the venue?

Do you want them to have the ticket QR code in their wallet on their mobile ready for a fast check-in?

Do you want them to install the attendee app? Fill out any pre-sheets for workshops?

Harness the attention they give to those vital emails to drive the action you need. Don’t wait until they arrive.

Tips for success

Here are just a few things to keep in mind to ensure your transactional emails convert well without ruining the customer experience.

Always respect the 80 / 20 rule 80% of the email content must serve the operational purpose (receipt, ticket, confirmation), and only 20% should focus on the marketing pitch.

Keep it contextual If someone registers for a mining conference do not market a completely unrelated product category like wristwatches or pies. This may seem obvious, but trust me …

Never hide the data The key facts about the registration (type, price, reference number, arrival instructions etc) must always sit at the top of the email in plain, easy-to-read text.

Still think transactional emails are nothing special?

Consider how many of these messages your platform is sending out automatically every single day. If you are leaving them as plain, unbranded text, you are essentially leaving money, engagement, and brand equity on the table.

Because AttendZen unifies your system notifications and your marketing campaigns into a single, cohesive design suite, you have the power to create beautiful, high-converting, and deeply personalised email journeys without needing a complex web of disconnected software to do it.

Take a look at your current confirmation email today. Is it telling a story, driving revenue, and building excitement? Or is it basically just a digital receipt?

If you’re ready to unlock the hidden marketing power of your event data, get in touch.

Our team can show you how easy it is to create seamless, high-converting messages from the emails you’re already sending.