A GUIDE TO TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL
A GUIDE TO TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL
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Table of Contents
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Intro To Transactional Email
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Transactional v. Bulk Email
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Why Is Transactional Email Important?
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What Are The Downfalls?
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How To Make It Better
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The Difference A Year Can Make
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Missed Opportunities
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The Key Takeaways
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More About Dyn & Dyn’s Email Delivery Products
Who Should
Read This?
Novice
Beginner content is for readers who are new to email delivery. This content will typically walk you through the basics and give generalized overviews of various subjects.
Intermediate
Intermediate content is for readers with some experience in email delivery. This content will focus on techniques and strategies to take your delivery to the next level.
Expert
Intro To Transactional Email
Whether we’ve realized it or not, everyone with an email account has received a transactional email, otherwise known as the alert that Bob accepted your friend request, the receipt for the days-of-the-week socks you just bought online, or even a welcome email for signing up for that new deal of the day website.
Transactional emails are triggered based on actions that we take as consumers when we interact with a company online, whether it be through their newsletter or website.
Although they are incredibly overlooked, transactional emails are unique to an occasion and recipient, and may be one of the best ways for you to connect with your customers.
Are you utilizing
transactional
emails to their full
potential?
Transactional vs. Bulk Email
Before we get into the nitty gritty of transactional emails, we should explain the difference between transactional and bulk email (sometimes referred to as commercial email).
We most commonly know bulk email as newsletters or marketing campaigns that we receive from our favorite brands. These HTML-heavy emails are created with a broad audience in mind and are usually sent out to large lists of thousands at a time. Transactional emails, conversely, are designed for an individual recipient.
Granted, while multiple people can receive the same base transactional message, there is specific user-based dynamic content within the message that changes based on the actions that the customer has taken. It could be a reference to a recent purchase, password change, or anything specific to that person’s experience with your site.
Some transactional emails that we all know very well are social media notifications. On Facebook, when someone writes on your wall or sends you a private message, you can elect to receive a notification to your personal email account. Twitter gives the option to get follower notifications, retweets, mentions, etc.
When you think of bulk versus transactional email,
think push versus pull.
Bulk email pushes messages to their recipients. A recipient of a bulk message has not made any action to trigger the email they received (other than staying actively subscribed to their newsletter).
Bulk mail receivers also generally do not know when they will be receiving messages. Some senders may tell their customers they will receive a newsletter monthly, weekly, etc., but the recipient has no definitive way of knowing when or what that content will be.
Transactional emails tend to be expected (or even anticipated) by their recipients. When a consumer signs up for a service or makes a purchase, they are not alarmed when an acceptance notification or receipt is sent to them.
TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL EXAMPLES BULK EMAIL EXAMPLES
Order confirmation Account notification Receipts & Invoices Shipping notification Error alert
Order status
Service request received New account setup
Account balance information Updated information
Expired subscription Email address confirmation Password reset
Abandoned items in cart Subscription feed
Newsletters Promotions
Product Announcements Campaigns
=
+
?
Spam accounts
for about 70%
of emails sent
today.
securelist.comWhy Is Transactional Email
Important?
While your customers sometimes receive bulk email begrudgingly, transactional email tends to be welcomed and even expected. A delay in a welcome email or failure to send a shipment notification can result in lowering customer confidence in the brand or, in some cases, a loss in revenue from potential upsells or offers that the customer never received.
Although we commonly think of transactional emails as strictly an email sent after a transaction, they have the potential to be very useful in helping to engage your customers.. For example, if you never send a welcome email to someone who signed up for your website, they may never be prompted for a return visit. Similarly, if a customer does return to your site and forgets their login information, a prompt and easy-to-follow password or username reminder email is crucial in keeping them engaged.
Failure at transactional email communication can result in lost revenue for your company. If your company is based on transactional email communication (think job board or message relay service), hitting the spam folder can drastically affect your company’s reputation, especially because these types of messages are sent on others’ behalves.
If a company is using you to get the word out about open positions and they notice that your messages get filtered out of the inbox, it becomes a much easier decision to switch to a different service.
Oh
No!
What Are The Downfalls?
Despite the importance of transactional emails, they are commonly not viewed as a priority within many companies. Frequently, transactional emails are set up through IT departments and are never optimized by marketing or anyone who normally communicates with the customers.
Lack of attention to deliverability and best practices may cause these transactional emails to land in the spam folder of your recipient, losing a potential customer. Building the right Internet infrastructure or using an outsourced provider is a key detail in ensuring these emails hit the inbox.
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How To Make It Better
Transactional emails have the most consistent open rates and click-through rates among emails sent. If you’re sending messages without paying attention to your deliverability infrastructure, or sending confusing or boring emails, you could be missing out on a great deal of customer engagement or potential revenue.
The following areas should receive special TLC when you’re setting up your transactional email program:
Your IP Address
Ensure your email delivery infrastructure is set up for success as a great email sending reputation relates back to the domain and IP addresses you are sending from. To ensure success, have an experienced email IT staff ensure that you’re set up to collect bounces and complaints for your email streams.
Mailbox Providers
Did you know that each mailbox provider (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, etc.) receives email in a unique way? Each of these providers has different mail delivery settings for the rate of delivery. If these are not configured correctly, you could encounter email delivery issues where mail is delayed or lost.
Each mailbox provider also returns a unique set of bounce codes for their mail streams. To ensure you’re taking the optimal action for deliverability optimization and retaining the most customers for your business, you’ll need to have custom configurations on how you treat each of these mailbox provider’s bounce codes.
Message Content
Engagement starts before an email is opened. If your transactional email has a strange ‘sent from’ address or a cryptic subject line, chances are it could go straight to junk or the dreaded black hole of email. Not only can ‘sent from’ addresses be ominous (service@ somesoftware.com doesn’t translate into a password reset from my favorite shoe brand), they can also just be straight up rude (DO_NOT_ [email protected]).
It is best to keep the ‘sent from’ addresses simple and easily decipherable. Some great examples: [email protected] and [email protected]. It’s easy to see whom the messages are from and what they’re about without having to even look at the subject line.
An appealing ‘sent from’ address and subject line are great if you hit the inbox, but what if your emails are being filtered as spam? If your transactional emails are being marked as spam by ESPs, customer confidence in your brand can drop significantly as it may seem that your company is sending out harmful, fraud messages. Keeping an eye on your spam complaints can help you eradicate any problem you may have before it drastically decreases your reputation.
A GUIDE TO TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL
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On average, transactional
email brings in 288% more
revenue than bulk mail.
HTML - POST 2011
PLAIN TEXT - PRE 2011
The Difference A Year
Can Make
The following images are two transactional emails sent from Amazon a year apart. Both have generally the same content, but are presented in very different ways. The email delivered in 2011 is a basic message designed in plain text and the important information (expected delivery and tracking URL) can be difficult to find.
The email from a year later has been revamped and is now in HTML. There is a specific callout to track your package as well as when you should expect it to be delivered. Additional elements have also been added to the message (navigation for the Kindle Store, Your Orders, and Amazon.com), as well as links and images to the items purchased, paired with buttons to share the items on social media sites.
While most of these links were in the email from 2011, they were hidden within the text and were difficult to locate. The most recent email is visually appealing and enables customers to easily find the information they want, while potentially drawing them back to the site to make another purchase (without shoving it in their faces).
Missed Opportunities
Since transactional emails get the most face time with your customers, why not use them as a platform to share more information with them? No, we’re not saying to turn a simple password request into a love letter about how awesome the service you offer is and why customers should be paying more for it. Actually, those kinds of shenanigans can get you in trouble with spam legislation. Instead, focus on relaying relevant and potentially much-appreciated information to your customer. For example, if you send them a receipt for their new purple running shoes, it might be a good idea to also show them links to purchase purple running socks or running shorts. Similarly, if you are sending monthly invoices to a customer getting slammed with overage fees, it would be beneficial to them (and you) to give them information about a plan that would better suit their needs.
In the Amazon email examples, they boosted the marketing content of their transactional emails without the additional content being overwhelming. The addition of the navigation header drives customers back to Amazon.com and the social sharing buttons prompt customers to engage more with Amazon. The bottom of the email could have been improved; I had purchased items relating to a smartphone so callouts to toys or books may have not been as valuable as links to my phone’s accessories.
Running Short
(Purple) Size M
$24.95
Item Subtotal: $56.89
Shipping & Handling: $0.00
Shipment Total: $56.89
Thank you for
your purchase!
#8349352342 Sneakers (Size 9W) $56.89
You might also be interested in:
MP3 Player
(Purple)
$49.95
Deliverability
Monitoring
Simple Switch
Text to HTML
Engagement
Creative
The Key Takeaways
If you only take away one thing from this paper, let it be the fact that you could probably be doing more with your transactional emails. Whether it be ensuring your infrastructure is set up correctly and you have deliverability monitoring, or the simple switch from text-based to HTML, or by thinking of other creative ways to engage your customers, improvements can be made and aren’t as hard as you think.
Just be sure, whatever route you take, to keep the message focused on the main transaction that triggered the send.
A GUIDE TO TRANSACTIONAL EMAIL
/ 10
If you only take away
one thing from this
More About Dyn
Dyn solutions are at the core of Internet Performance. Through traffic management, message management, and performance assurance, Dyn is connecting people through the Internet and ensuring information gets where it needs to go, faster and more reliably than ever before. Incorporated in 2001, Dyn’s global presence services more than four million enterprise, small business and personal customers. Visit dyn. com to learn more about how Dyn delivers.
Dyn’s Email Delivery Products
With a dedicated team that has spent years in the email delivery business, Dyn has built relationships and technology that result in complete inbox success. We are constantly working on improving our email infrastructure to guarantee best-in-class delivery rates with experts on call to consult with our customers. Why spend tens of thousands of dollars and years building your own infrastructure when we’ve already done it for you?
STARTUPS
Pick from one of two plans, starting at as little as $3/month, a perfect starter plan for businesses beginning to ramp up their email programs.
GROWING BUSINESSES
Send up to 750,000 emails a month? No problem. Get Advanced Delivery Support on top of Dyn’s basic email offerings in one of four plans starting at $75/month.
ENTERPRISE
With unlimited sends and advanced features, get the most out of your email program. Plans start at $200/month, and we can work with you to construct a plan that fits your needs.
Have questions in regards to your email delivery
infrastructure? Drop us a line or give us a call.
+1 888 840 3258 [email protected] http://dyn.com
