Here’s the thing about: Transactional vs Marketing email
When I shifted my career from a front-end developer and entered into the wonderful world of email marketing, I was tasked with designing, coding, and sending marketing emails on behalf of upwards of 400 clients across North America and Canada on a monthly basis.
Every single email that I touched was for a marketing purpose and we ran various seasonal campaigns all year round. During the first few years of my marketing career, I never even touched a single transactional email.
Eventually, I made my way over to Silicon Valley to join a FinTech startup company and quickly learned that there was a second type of email that was a crucial piece for building a complete lifecycle journey: transactional emails.
Slowly but surely, through a platform migration, I was thrown into a sea of transactional emails and learned that these are a crucial component to building a long-lasting relationship with your customers.
Today I want to talk a bit about best practices for sending the two email types but before we do that, let’s first define the differences between a transactional and a marketing email.
The identifying qualities can be boiled down to content and purpose. A transactional email contains unique information for each recipient about an action already taken or that they need to take. A marketing email’s key purpose is to drive the recipient toward an action we want them to take.
Now we’ll take a look at a few example emails from each category.
The thing is
Most transactional emails have an average open rate of 80-85%.
They contain the kind of information people immediately want to view or revisit. The primary objective of a transactional email is to keep existing customers informed. Typically, a transactional email is triggered by a behavior-based automation. But they can also be purely informational such as a monthly statement.
Some of the most common types of transactional emails are:
Account creation emails
Password reset emails
Security alerts
Policy updates
Monthly statements
Subscription reminders
Order confirmation emails
Purchase receipts
Payment failure notifications
Shipping confirmations
As mentioned in my intro earlier, discovering the importance of transactional emails was an a-ha moment in my career. Though often overlooked, when you get them right, you should be adding a positive interaction at what are typically mundane parts of the customer journey.
Here are a few examples from my own inbox that I’ve received recently.
Instacart order confirmation email.
Google’s security alert email notification.
Invoice2go’s email verification notification.
Depending on the type of email, a transactional email should include:
Why is the user receiving this email?
What is the action the user took or needs to take
If no action is required, state this plainly as well.
Contact information the recipient should use to reach the business if they didn’t initiate the action that triggered the email.
AVOID a no-reply address. Naomi West wrote a great article explaining why you should not send an email with a no-reply email address.
Take a look at your transactional email automations and give them a bit of love to improve your customers’ overall experiences. Remember, transactional emails are expected and more likely to land in inboxes.
Since you will already be sending these emails to keep your customers informed, why not delight them while you are at it? Optimize your copy, design, and add personalized data to increase the value of your email even more.
The other thing is
Most marketing emails see open rates of around 20-25%
Marketing, commercial, promotional, or bulk emails are mass distributions of the same message to many recipients for a non-specific purpose. As a consumer, we are most familiar with these type of emails which could come in the form of:
Newsletters
Seasonal discount offers
Sales campaigns
Event invitations
Vouchers and giveaways
Upsell emails
Retention emails
My inbox is constantly overflowing with these messages:
Redbubble’s special discount offer email.
Alexis Russell’s seasonal product catalogue
Miro’s event invitation.
The goal of marketing email is to persuade the recipient to click or make purchases directly from that email. This action is known as a “conversion”.
When executed thoughtfully and with best practices in mind, your email marketing campaign could yield a $38 return on every dollar spent.
The last thing I will mention today
**About 60 billion spam emails will be sent daily between 2019 to 2023.
To avoid becoming a statistic, a few things you can do to ensure the deliverability of your transactional and marketing email campaigns are:
Separate your Marketing and Transactional IP addresses.
If you are sending a large volume of emails for your client or company, I highly recommend that you separate the IP addresses for your marketing and transactional emails to ensure that your most important messages will get into the inbox.
Marketing emails can easily become blocked due to spam complaints, filters or traps. Your email deliverability will be negatively affected by sending to bad or old lists, sending poor content such as wrong names, irrelevant content, broken urls, etc.
Transactional emails are 1-to -1 while Marketing emails are 1-to-many. By separating your sending IP addresses, email clients will more easily be able to differentiate and prioritize each type. If the inbox providers see consistently low volumes with high engagement rates (transactional emails) from one IP address, they will usually prioritize those message over ones with lower engagement and high volume from other IP addresses, assuming them to be marketing.
Finally, if your marketing channel is throttled for sending at high volume, it will also slow down your transactional inbox placement rates if they are not originating from their own dedicated IP address.
Here are a couple tools you can use to check your sender reputation.
Separate Transactional and Marketing sending domains.
To further assist your email clients with identifying which type of message is incoming, you can use a different sender name and originating domain.
Examples:
Transactional emails are sent from hello@notifications.yourdomain.com
Marketing emails are sent from hello@marketing.yourdomain.com
Monitor your IP reputation.
Each sending IP address is associated with a sender reputation. This is a score that an ESP (Email Service Provider) like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and others, assigns to an organization that sends email. The higher the score, the more likely an ESP will deliver your emails to inboxes.
If the score falls below a certain threshold, the ESP may send your email to the recipient’s spam folder or even block the message outright.
A few factors that can go into determining the score:
The rate of emails sent by the organization.
The rate of recipients marking your emails as spam.
How often does your email hit the ESP’s spam trap.
How many emails bounce when the recipient doesn’t exist.
How many recipients unsubscribe from the email list.
Build your own list and clean your list regularly.
Never. Ever. Purchase a mailing list.
Your campaign’s performance will be severely affected when you purchase a list and contact people who have never interacted with your brand prior. Not only is this a terrible customer experience, it also violates the GDPR’s rule which requires each European’s consent before you can contact them.
Clean. Your. List. Regularly.
Just because the recipients on your list aren’t unsubscribing does not imply engagement with your campaigns.
It is very tempting to hoard your entire list in hopes of sending more emails but keeping these inactive recipients on your list could do more harm to your performance than good. When evaluating your campaigns without cleaning your list regularly, you are not analyzing your most loyal recipients’ behaviors.
Review your list regularly and remove users who are not engaging with your campaigns every consistent, 6, 9, or 12 months, at most- depending on your business.
Authenticate your email with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is the authentication standard that verifies your identity as an email sender for that domain. Without SPF authentication, your emails may get rejected because they look like they’re from an unauthorized sender address.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) provides a unique public key that pairs with a private key to verify that an email is not forged or altered. Without a DKIM signature, your emails are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks where a bad actor changes your email while it’s en route to the recipient.
Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) creates policies for handling email messages that fail SPF or DKIM authentication, and messages that are missing one or both of those authentication standards. DMARC gives you more control over your email authentication system and makes your SPF and DKIM standards more effective.
Brand Indicators for Message Identification or (BIMI) (pronounced: Bih-mee) is an emerging email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. BIMI leverages the work an organization has put into deploying DMARC protection, by bringing brand logos to the customer’s inbox. For the brand’s logo to be displayed, the email must pass DMARC authentication checks, ensuring that the organization’s domain has not been impersonated.
Provide a double opt-in.
If you have been in the email world for a while, you’ve also probably been in a debate weighing the pros and cons of double vs. single opt-in.
I recommend that you implement a double opt-in for adding a new recipient to your mailing list. When your contact is required to verify their email address after signing up to receive emails from you, you can reduce the chances of bounces and improve your deliverability rate greatly.
The “con” of a double opt-in is that some marketers argue that creating an additional step will deter people from being added to your list.
I say it’s worth it! They are clearly very interested in hearing from us so you are much more likely to receive engagement from them.
Be compliant.
Familiarize yourself with all email laws, especially if you have a global list of recipients. The US has CAN-SPAM act in place, CCPA is specific to California, GDPR applies to countries within the European Union and the UK’s equivalent, and CASL is Canada’s anti-spam legislation.
Be relevant.
Why are you sending this email? What did your recipient sign up for? Make sure that the content you are sending to your recipient is relevant. Keep a uniform brand tone and keep a regular send cadence.
Allow your recipients to reduce the frequency at which they are receiving emails, opt out of a certain email series. (i.e. Some users may not care for your offers and discounts emails but would like to be informed of new product launches.)
Be accessible.
According to WHO, Over 1 billion people are estimated to experience a disability. As marketers, we are responsible making sure that our messages can reach all of our users.
Email Markup Consortium released their first accessibility report back in July. You can utilize tools like Parcel.io when building your emails to make sure that your emails are accessible to all.
Monitor your engagement metrics.
Review the performance of your campaigns often so you can identify which campaigns resonate with your recipients the most. The more you can personalize your content, the more likely your recipient will remain on your list and continue to engage with your campaigns.
Think about the customer’s journey from discovery to purchase. Every action taken will require a proper transactional email so your recipient can receive all the necessary information and transparency.
Without any actions taken, your marketing emails are great for keeping your recipients up-to-date on all of your new feature launches, upcoming events, seasonal offers, educational resources and more.
Transactional and marketing emails serve very different purposes but they are equally crucial to the success of your overall customer experience.
You will gain the trust of your loyal customers in no time if you optimize and utilize each type of email at the right opportunity.
Until next time,
Jello
