Transactional emails are comfort food. “Thank you for your order from ourstore.com …” with a shipping estimate and order management link is the sort of post-sale follow up most customers expect. They get opened and read. So why are so few marketers leveraging them?
Elaine’s suggestion is great. I think I’ll add this as a switchable option to my cross-selling software.

Just listened to Stephen Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution. Classic Covey, no big surprises. The four disciplines are:
- Focus on your Wildly Important Goals
- Create a compelling scoreboard
- Translate lofty goals into specific actions
- Hold each other accountable all the time
What differentiates a Covey book from the typical “execution” or “decision-making” tome written by some ego-driven CEO is Covey’s distinctively avuncular manner. Somehow it makes it easier to take the hard messages.
The timing of this was serendipitous, because I just had a chance to listen to an HBR Ideacast in which the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
were interviewed. They discussed how the decision making cannot adequately be evaluated in isolation. Instead, they argued that including quality of execution and follow-through would yield a more holistic measure of decision making effectiveness.