I bet you have read this kind of article over and over again. The same email marketing spill you probably read over the internet.

But hey, this is a crucial information for email marketing. As cliche as it sounds but you gotta know the best transactional email practices.

First thing first, let's refresh our memory and differentiate between Transactional Emails and Promotional email.


Promotional emails are usually broadcast, offering discounts and other incentives to purchase a product or service, or to subscribe, register or download or perform some action or other action intended to drive revenue for the vendor.

Transactional emails are also known as triggered emails because they include any email that is triggered by a user’s interaction with the web app. It has essentially become a business critical for application based businesses. It’s like the vessel by which they communicate with their subscribers, grow their customer base and drive revenue.

For those who are non-techie, you might have heard about transactional email.

What comes up in your head when you hear this?

What’s the difference with the normal email?

Here at Taximail, we would like to share a simple explanation that everyone would understand what this means.

For example, you have an online shop and you want to use transactional email in your business.

Transactional email is an email that is sent in the process of transactions and this can be:

•Order confirmation

•Login/Registration

•Ownership/Forgot Password

•Notifications and others

The above mentioned are examples of a transactional email that is based on triggers. This is an action that the customer took directly.

If you choose Taximail, you will be able to take advantage of this feature and lets you send your transactional email fast.

You should reckon transactional email as just another interface of your software, and it should receive the attention that you give to designing any other customer interaction.

So pay attention to this guide and techniques that you can apply to your transactional emails and ensure that they’re valuable to the recipients.

You don’t want to bore your customers with small talks and chit chats in your transactional email.

What is the first thing that your customers see when they receive your email?

Let’s craft the best transactional emails to your customers with the following best practices.

Meta information

What is meta information?

It is basically about the information. Say, if you have a document it is considered as information, its title, location, subject are examples of meta information.

The meta information is as important as your content. They will influence whether recipients will open or read your messages. We are well aware of email clients handles preview and displays of senders information differently. You want to be sure that you are conveying the most useful information within the limited space.

You don’t want you emails showing the example below.

This might be minor details but when you think of hundreds of emails like this, the inconvenience from your customers will multiply.

As a good email marketer, we have to avoid these mistakes and add value to your email.

From & reply-to address

This is a very important part of the email. This is introducing your company. Make sure that this is nicely formatted, “From” address is absolutely the key.

It is good to use the formal name of the company or the person within the company. Some instance from address should appear to be a person from the company to make it feel more personal.

The biggest no is using the “no reply” email address This kind of discouraging replies can lower your overall engagement. It sounds as though you don’t want to hear from your customers.

We should reply that the customers can reply and monitored on the inbox. “From” reply is the touch point for people to filter and organize their emails. By sending invoices or receipts from “billing@example.com”, account notifications from “account@example.com”, and comment notifications from “comments@example.com”, you can provide your customers with built-in hooks for organizing their inbox. If you need your “From” address to be different from the reply address, you can use the “reply-to” header value to route replies to a different location. This way you can be sure that replies will be delivered to a monitored inbox like your support email.

Subject and pre-header

This is a tricky part of your email. You want this to be as relevant as possible. About your Subject Line, fifty characters or fewer is a good guideline of the length. When it comes to transactional emails simple and direct appeals more than catchy.

It is the goal to convey all the relevant information in your email’s subject so that recipients. You want to win the needs of the customers first. For example, a shipping notification could say “ Your order has been shipped today”, this builds anticipation from your customer to receive the goods from you.

To, Cc and BCC

Do you use Cc or Bcc when sending an email to your customer? It can be tempting to simply include all recipients in the “To” field of your email but this is not attractive at all.

You want to make your customer feel that they are important. It’s like talking one on one. It will make them feel that you gave so much effort to write an email.

Email authentication and markup

Since transactional emails are important, you want to make sure your brand is protected and ensures email deliverability. This is where SPF, DKIM, and DMARC comes in. By setting ups this protocols you are sending additional trust signals to email inbox providers, protecting your domain from being spoofed and building a reputation for your domain.

Design, content, and formatting

From the design standpoint, emails are limited, so it is tedious to make the design. This has to be given attention like the “Welcome email” to make a good impression. You should make an attractive and relevant Email Design.

Mobile

We are in the modern day era where mobile is the trends of going everything. You have to make sure that your email is mobile-friendly. Fortunately, most of today’s popular mobile Email Client support media queries, and you can modify your emails to look great on mobile

Personalize all the things

It's been said over and over again “personalized”, everyone is unique with different needs. We all want to feel important so personalizing your reach to your customers is a “must do” for all kinds of email.

Alternatively, if someone has yet to even log in or hasn’t actually done anything in the application, skip sending them a blank activity summary or send them a “Can we help?” email instead. By taking advantage of a deeper understanding of your recipients, emails can be smarter and more useful for recipients.

To wrap things up, transactional emails are complex. It can be tedious but reaping the fruit of your labor with the best practices of transactional email is worthwhile. In fact, it can be pretty much rewarding knowing, in the end, you will engage with many customers and gaining new ones.

You have to stand out in the maddening crowd and build brand loyalty and improve the deliverability of your emails.