Transactional emails are an essential part of online commerce. They are the type of messages that facilitate a commercial activity between the sender and the recipient. For example, if you run an online store, you’ll need to send order and shipping confirmations to your customers. If you run a social media platform, you’ll need to send signup notifications to users, etc.
Every business must learn how to use this type of message if they want to stay on top of their game. Without them, you’d find it harder to build trust with customers. They are essential for brand recognition and credibility and a vital part of customer service, which is necessary to attract and retain customers.
A transactional email is a type of email sent to a recipient following a commercial transaction or another type of action they initiated. It contains relevant information about the transaction. They are unique and usually automated messages triggered by specific actions of the recipient.
Examples of this type of message include subscription and order confirmations, purchase receipts, and legal updates. It may be an automated welcome message sent to every new subscriber or a receipt when a customer purchases an item from your store. There may be countless examples, but these ones should give you a clue.
You’d need a transactional email service such as UniOne if you want to send this type of message with ease. UniOne ensures that your messages are delivered to the recipient, and you can track the statistics using a dedicated analytics dashboard.
Deliverability refers to the percentage of your messages that successfully deliver to recipients’ mailboxes. It’s important to keep this rate as high as possible. This is why it is a good reason to use a transactional email service provider (ESP).
Messages may be rejected or get into the recipient’s spam folder due to many reasons, e.g, the IP address of the sender being untrustworthy or marked for previous spam violations. ESPs set up infrastructure across the globe and have close relationships with email platforms like Gmail or Yahoo. Hence, their messages are much more likely to get to the recipient’s inbox.
Transactional email platforms regularly monitor their network for spam activity and block the perpetrators. Therefore, your sender address is less likely to be unfairly marked for spam activity, which improves your deliverability. For even better performance, ESPs may offer you a dedicated IP address for your exclusive use.
Lastly, ESPs act as a bridge between your website and your recipients. For instance, if a certain domain is having issues receiving messages, the ESP will queue the message and deliver it when the service is back up, whereas you may not be able to do that from a personal mail server.
The transactional email life cycle doesn’t end at ensuring your message gets to the intended recipients. It’s also crucial to monitor how the recipients are responding to your messages. Ensure you make adjustments if you’re not getting the results you want.
Transactional email service providers let you measure the performance of your campaigns objectively. Apart from the current status of each message, ESPs let you overview critical metrics about your messages in total. This includes the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, etc. Thus, if the metrics aren't as good as you want, you can adjust your strategy and check for improvements.
Transactional messages are an inseparable part of business-to-customer interaction. You must learn how to send them properly if you want to build trust and credibility with your customers. There are many good reasons to use their full potential, like building connections with customers and improving your overall deliverability.
The good thing is that there are many platforms that make it easy to send this type of email from your website or application, like UniOne, which are reliable, affordable, and easy to integrate.
