The Ultimate Guide to Transactional Emails

6 - Learn what transactional emails are, why they matter, and how to make your transactional emails work harder.  

Watch the full episode here! 

You’ll Learn

• What transactional emails are and why they’re so important 
• The difference between transactional and marketing emails
• Examples of transactional emails that keep customers coming back 
• The essential elements of the best transactional emails

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

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Chapters

• 0:41 What's the episode about
• 0:51 What's new
• 4:24 Transactional emails stats
• 5:06 What are transactional emails?
• 8:26 Examples of transactional emails
• 9:38 The Guide to Transactional Emails
• 9:55 Order confirmation emails examples
• 24:24 Password confirmation emails
• 28:11 How to ensure your transactional emails don't end up in spam

Transcript

Vira: 0:41

Welcome back beautiful people of eCommerce to Email Einstein podcast. We're happy to have you here to discuss all all things transactional emails. But before we go there, Andriy, say hi. What's new and exciting with you? Hi Vera.

Andriy: 0:55

Hi all listeners and followers of our podcast. New and exciting? Not sure, like just working like lately. There's a lot of work in the company. Come on,

Vira: 1:07

you got yourself a new ring, Andriy. I think it's like worth bragging. No, it's like we're like Oura Bodies now. Yeah,

Andriy: 1:15

I brag about it before. By the way, I just got an idea. Maybe we should create a Slack channel at Florium. It have like Oura club and for people to choose to share their achievements.

Vira: 1:31

For those of you guys who don't know what Oura Ring is, first of all are you been living under the rock? Like everyone knows what Oura Ring is. But seriously, Oura ring is like a another tracker that helps you track your sleep score. So like the quality of the sleep and your health in general. But I love your heart pretty not the bounce is that it's called the bounce rate. It doesn't sound right, Andriy. It's like bounce rate of the heart. That's so I was

Andriy: 2:00

trying to relate it to email marketing. Please don't

Vira: 2:04

stressed me out. So anyways, I love how much gamification they added to this to to their app. So they like track all kinds of things. They track how much stress you had, they track how much recovery time you had. So I'm in like this little competition with my husband who has like better scores on on everything. So that it's been fun. It's been fun.

Andriy: 2:27

Cool. Are you signed up for their emails? I

Vira: 2:31

used to but I unsubscribed so. Why? Because I

Andriy: 2:35

love their onboarding emails. Like welcome flow.

Vira: 2:40

Oh yeah, yeah, I received that back in the day but then I got pro and I unsubscribed. I just

Andriy: 2:45

want to share because it's very cool from email marketing perspective. Especially when you have something similar user for shipping and actually it might be related to transactional email. So you see the timeline and the day number one. This is where I'm activated and I see the next milestone, day 15 and they are showing me where I am and day 30 and day 45. So when I receive this kind of email, you know like sometimes some brands say it's like oh, we hate sending too many emails. But when you give people this timeline, you kind of giving yourself a reason to send them email almost every day with update and maybe provide some additional information about your tool. And the cool feature that I just found out actually from you, this ring has a stress level monitor and it start working for me only just today. Yeah, it's like I think it's

Vira: 3:45

after the two weeks. Yeah, they're like collecting data about you. So like after two weeks you get all of this like cool features. And like when I first got oura ring it was like three years ago so I got the old one. So their features were not as advanced as now and their welcome sequence was very simple. So I'm almost like thinking of upgrading now and then I'm going to be able to get this like new cool email sequence. But thank you so much for sharing that. It actually kind of coincides with the topic of the of the podcast that we have today because today we will be talking about transactional emails. Transactional emails are basically the emails that make sure that your business runs smoothly. So Andriy will explain in a moment what it is. But basically for you to give you some stats turned out that transactional emails get four to eight more opens and clicks than regular marketing emails, which is expected kind of. I know I do open this emails all the time. And what is interesting, they do drive revenue as well, which was unexpected to me. And actually per recipient they drive six times more revenue than just like a regular email. Crazy, right? It's like to me it was insane to think that this emails are so powerful. But before we dive in Andriy, let's go to the basics. When we say like transactional emails, what exactly are we talking about?

Andriy: 5:06

So transactional emails are like automated emails triggered by users action or behavior which involves some kind of transaction. They are sent with the purpose of providing information specific to the user. Sorry, I'm taking back not to transaction but specific to the user. It can be password reset, you place an order and you receive receive a receipt. Your order is delayed. Let's say in the shipping process your order got cancelled, you got refund and stuff like that. Or maybe you got the. Actually it's another ordering example. So a friend gifted to me for my birthday this ring but the size was too small so I went through the process of exchanging online and I received that email confirmation that it's exchanged in process and now I need to ship it and they send me the label. So those are transactional emails. And one important thing, people cannot unsubscribe from transactional emails. And at the bottom there's no like unsubscribe link because it's the purpose of that email not to market to people. The purpose of the email to inform them about specific either transaction or action related based on their kind of request. But that's the beauty

Vira: 6:29

of this emails. First of all, they do get, as we already said, the highest engagement because like when I get the notification, like hey, your package has shipped or something, I will open this email. Like for sure I will open it and I can't unsubscribe from it. So it's kind of like a gray area. But a lot of brands use this transactional emails to market some aspects of their business as well. It's not necessarily marketing.

Andriy: 6:54

20%, I think 20% of the email only.

Vira: 6:58

And it's not even like marketing marketing like a direct marketing. It's more like an educational aspect. Like from my experience that's what I see like hey, like subscribe to like this app or like our app if they're like in some kind of fashion industry or something or yeah, I might. Be wrong, but you.

Andriy: 7:16

The marketing message cannot be bigger than 20% of the whole transactional email. So I'm not sure how they calculated. They probably like the real estate of the entire email. And 20% should not be bigger than 20%. So technically you can include some kind of banner. Also the interesting thing you just said that this kind of emails generate revenue. That's why I personally love when brands transition all the transactional emails to Klaviyo. Because in Klaviyo it's easy to analyze conversion, easy to analyze how much money that email brought versus keeping that in Shopify or your ecommerce platform. Because typically it's like some HTML or any other code and you are not able to see if that email bring you anything. Right? Right.

Vira: 8:11

Andriy, let's review some of the examples now of all of the emails that we have. And just like you said, when we talk about transactional emails, it's like anything shipment related, order confirmation, like password account related. So we picked some of the examples that are kind of cool and we think they're like things that we can learn from them. Email

Andriy: 8:33

from Headspace about email verification. Yeah, I do love their email are so funny and on brand and align with those cartoons they have in the app. Honestly, I did not use headspace probably for years. By the way, do you use Headspace or any other meditation app?

Vira: 8:52

I used to, but now I'm doing old school. I started doing transcendental meditation, which is like so much simpler. I like we can talk about it separately, but that's like the only meditation that I've been consistent with for like the last six months. And it's been amazing for me honestly. Started doing it within like the stressful time last year, like Q4 and everything, and stuck with that. But headspace is amazing and I do like how this like little cartoons they use explain like complex ideas. Right. It's like, how can you explain meditation in one image? Well, apparently you can, so that's pretty cool. Before

Andriy: 9:35

we go to the next set of transactional email examples, I just want to let you know that on our website we have the guide to transactional emails where we have much more email examples and we go there in the details about transactional emails and how you can use it and implement for your business. Cool.

Vira: 9:55

And the next kind of like group of emails that we'll be reviewing is the order confirmation emails. I might be wrong, but I think this type of emails, they do have like the highest, highest engagement ever. I know I do open them all the time. So the first two examples are from the brands. Andriy, do you know like, if they are like sister brands? They must be because they look so similar, like the Hims and hers. Like I. I've never used this brand but I do like their like marketing. So I posted like both of them to show you how like similar they can be and like different at the same time. So I specifically like this hims emails, the health check goals. Basically like the email that confirms like order details like the date, the payment method, all of that stuff. But also it kind of like promotes the features of that product and why you should be excited to be taking that product. Another cool thing about it is that in the footer they have the help spot. It's basically like, I think it's some kind of like FAQ app or FAQ section that can answer all of your questions. So they do send traffic there as well. This hers email is super similar too. Yeah, but

Andriy: 11:42

it's very interesting. You see how they tailoring their messages towards like males and female. Because the app section you see for guys they have helps always in the corner. So basically like saying, hey, we're here to help you, like contact us. And for ladies, it's more like A world of wellness, like providing like hey there, we have some kind of wellness video or stuff like that there. So it's like interesting how they tailoring different to different audience which makes total sense. Totally supported but just want to highlight it. The emails

Vira: 12:15

like the layouts are super similar but I feel like the first one, the hims message is more. I don't know how to say it, like logical. It explains why the product is like cool and provides the reason to be excited. And the second email, the Hearst one is more like about the vibe. It's hard to explain but I do like it. The next email, Patagonia. Gosh, they have to start paying me. Honestly I'm like featuring their emails on every podcast. But I do like them. And actually spoiler alert, we will be using them as an inspiration for one of the brands that we work with that we are rebranding right now. Doing the complete rebrand and that's the vibe we're going for. Once we do that, maybe I'll announce the name of the brand so you can subscribe to their amazing emails. From what I've seen, been insanely beautiful. So you were in for a treat. So this email, what do you think of Andriy? What do you think of this email, Andriy? I love first

Andriy: 13:17

of all how it starts Patagonia, it's outdoor brand and I love the image at the top. It's very inspirational. Maybe you will not be climbing that. That rock or I don't know how to call it like, but still it's like inspires you before you kind of scroll down. But the under the image, every layout is very clean. I love this block was all details, order number, order date, shipping payment. So it provides all the important information. And I like how they divide the shipping address and billing address. In this case it's the same but in many cases, like for example in my case sometimes my billing address might be different than my shipping address. So it's just always. It always give you information to kind of to confirm what you put in because sometimes we mistype things and yeah. I do like this email a

Vira: 14:18

lot. Especially this like little footer where they kind of talk again about their mission, about their like lifelong guarantee, 1% for the planet. Care and repair. They actually do have this like care and repair stations in their stores. Have you been to their like physical stores, Andriy? No. No. It's like super cool. Yeah. They do have this little station where you can bring your jacket from the 80s and be sure they will repair it for you. This is like insane. I Just love what this brand stands for. And even though I bought, I don't know, probably thousands dollars worth of Patagonia and now I don't even live close to the mountains, I don't do this adventurous things like a lot of them, but I just feel cool walking to the coffee shop in Patagonia, sending the. Message you

Andriy: 15:06

the city of Paddington. So like there's always raining so you need something. City of

Vira: 15:12

Paddington. Very obvious that you have two little ones. It's like super obvious. Andriy. I would never think of this of London as a city of Paddington anyways. But

Andriy: 15:25

before we go to the next one I do love, also at the bottom read Ivan's letter. I'm not sure who that guy is, but also it's like kind of very mini promotion but still I love it. I would personally click on it just because I'm curious what it is.

Vira: 15:47

Yeah, I'm like googling it now who Yvonne is because I need to know. Okay, okay. So apparently I think it's just like their founder. That's amazing. Like wow. Founder of Patagonia. And they have this like amazing page called A letter from Yvonne. I can't pronounce his name because he's probably like French last name or whatever, but it's just like talks about like how he found the business, what are the values. And this is like one of those businesses that the values are at the core of the, at the core of the brand. I'm like obsessed with you Patagonia. Send me some free stuff. I'll be promoting you to the end of my days. Anyways, enough about Patagonia. Let's review this next one. I do have quite a few order confirmation emails just because they are the essence of transactional emails. If you could only do one transactional email, do this one. I really like this Home Alive Pets thing. I don't even know what they sell. Some kind of food for dogs or whatever. But it's just so fun. And you can also. They have this very sweet thank you messages and it's just like a nice gesture to make your emails work for you and use that real estate not just for the confirmation but also to connect with your customers on the level of values and promote your products and ask them to reach out to your service team or. Or promote your faq. I love this email, it's beautiful.

Andriy: 17:33

Agree. That's it?

Vira: 17:35

You're not going to say anything else about this? Cute emails full of puppies and. Never mind. Let's move to the next Patagonia email.

Andriy: 17:48

I told You. I'm off Instagram, so maybe my feelings for cuteness are down.

Vira: 17:55

Yeah, you're like one of those LinkedIn people. You know how they, how they always post things. Like today I wrote a bus and these are the five lessons it taught me or whatever. They have like five lessons about everything. Like I today I went to the coffee shop and these are the things that I learned and I love it. I'm here for there. But I'm also like an Instagram girl. The

Andriy: 18:20

funny thing is that sometimes I use LinkedIn like other Instagram, which might not be extremely cool. I think it's like

Vira: 18:29

LinkedIn is like moving towards that thing. It used to be like a professional thing. Now you know when someone had a kid or when their team won the super bowl and the five lessons they learned from it. I love it. I love it. It's pretty. I had the kids.

Andriy: 18:45

This is five lessons I learned about it. There is like

Vira: 18:48

literally image videos like this on Instagram. So anyways, it's like we haven't had one of those Patagonia emails in a while. I feel like. So let's go to the shipping and delivery notific notification Patagonia email. I just really think this is a cool email. Okay. This is

Andriy: 19:03

perfect. Perfect. This is like cracks me, right? So

Vira: 19:08

this email, obviously it has everything that the shipping and delivery email should have. It have the estimated date of delivery out for delivery. But it has like a super funny hero image. And I like how they never have any like header text on the images. It's just like the cleanness. I love it because they are all about the lifestyle and they have this guy carrying way too many. It's called the black hole bags. Yeah, like carrying it on the bicycle, which is like very on theme for this email. So they do have this section obviously for transactional section. They have the products that you should be excited to receive very soon and you can check your order status. But also they have this little icons that again communicate the value. Like they are guarantee and like keep your gear in play and like everything. So I think this is like a perfect example of the, of how you can have fun with this emails and still deliver the value. Agreed. Andriy. Because that's Agree. Agree.

Andriy: 20:16

I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm reading the next one. So I would like to love the. Dynamic on this podcast

Vira: 20:22

today. Love it.

Andriy: 20:24

Are you still here? Are you still here? I am.

Vira: 20:29

So recess email. What do you think, Henry, about this one?

Andriy: 20:33

That's why I was spaced out because I was reading this paragraph and it's extremely cool play on the copy here. I personally believe. I mean it's transactional emails, but still they. Can you please read it? Because you better reading the news. I was about to ask

Vira: 20:47

you to do that. But anyway. Hi. Smile Davis. Whoever it is you might be asking yourself, can a pigeon really carry a package? Don't they just deliver notes and stuff? Well, smiles Davis, we feed our pigeons recess so they are extra strong and fast. Rest assured your order will arrive soon. In case you place this order in a huge state, you can find all of your order information below. I love it. What is Fuse? I don't know. I don't know. I. I can google it. But like out of context, it's like probably something like when you were unaware that you've placed it or something like that. But

Andriy: 21:27

at the end it says love the humans that make Reese's. What is a Reese's brand? What do they sell? There are so many

Vira: 21:35

brands called recess, but whatever. Yeah, it sounds like like chocolate different. Yeah, but it's like a different like drinks and. How do you call it this like powders that you're like adding to your. To your drinks and kind of like a healthy. Healthy drinks. Like healthy sodas and different Adds ons to your drinks. Really cool website, by the way. I've never been to their website. It's really nice. And the last one, Andriy, this one is very cheeky. Literally because it sells like the underwear. So. Talking about cheeky,

Andriy: 22:16

my wife yesterday bought me a T shirt. Kind of this color scheme. Close enough. Even like more colorful. Full. When I wear it, I like. No, no, no. I. We are returning that. I'm not.

Vira: 22:30

I feel like pink is your color.

Andriy: 22:32

No, no, I. I do have pink. Solid pink shirts, but not when it's like so many colors on one shirts with waves and stuff like that. It's like.

Vira: 22:47

Yolo. You only live once, Andriy You can rock it to like a Sunday service in church. I don't know like what people are doing when they have like families, but I'm sure you can rock it. Give yourself some credit. I like this one. It's another chipping confirmation, but they actually wrote a haiku. Do you know what haiku is?

Andriy: 23:11

No. It's like a. It's like

Vira: 23:13

a Japanese art of very short poems. Like they should be like certain number of syllables, certain number of lines. It's only like three lines long. So it's like science of. Science of words, you know? And they actually rode a hike through lonely mail. I travel in search of you so we can be one. It's funny because it's like literally the underwear brand. I think this is like, very, very funny. Obviously they do have like track your order and yeah, it's a very solid email.

Andriy: 23:48

I love also at the bottom in the photo, they have 14 million happy bots and going strong.

Vira: 23:54

Love it, love it. Cheek Squad. Their team is called the Cheek Squad. That's like super funny. Like, everything they did was amazing. I don't want to go after this fun section. We're going to the password confirmation emails. But anyways, we should have changed the order. So anyways, password confirmation email, you can have fun with them too. But not like too, too much fun. It's like people are literally waiting for the password. So yeah, this first email, very straightforward. I do like that they have, I don't know, like a little cartoony thing there. Like a glass with spilled water.

Andriy: 24:38

It's like accident happened.

Vira: 24:39

Yeah, like the accident happened. Like forgot your password. That's okay. It happens. Click to the button below to reset your password. Very straightforward. I have not much. I don't have much to say about this, but I think very clean. I think

Andriy: 24:52

there's not much you can do in this. It's not like time to sell to people. It's again, each email is email marketing transactional. Email needs to convey like there needs to be specific goal. So if it's about reset password, listen, you don't want to pitch people anything else because it would be useless. In the previous podcast we spoke about sunset flow emails, how to clean up your list and we discussed. Vera discussed that we don't want to go crazy with designing those emails because the goal of for that email not to convert people. The goal of that email for people to open. So we make those the email simple. But make sure people open that email. Same thing here. It's simple.

Vira: 25:39

And there is nothing worse than requesting a password and then sitting there waiting for the email. Email. And the email is being delivered to like promotion or spam. So like, the simpler you do it, the better. Of course it like comes down to a little bit deliberate. Anyways, it's like it's a Friday afternoon, okay. It comes down to how healthy your account is and like, what are you doing with those emails. But the simpler the better in this case because you want to make sure they are ending up in the in inbox of your husband of your husband's in the inbox of your emails. Anyways, it's like it's been a long. Day, you know,

Andriy: 26:21

like how they do in the movies. Like the shirts like, like fun pieces they cut out from the movies and they put it at the end. We should probably do the same. Not the teasers, like the kind of screws. Oh, the bloopers. The bloopers,

Vira: 26:38

yeah. Oh, it's called bloopers. Yeah. I, I always stay until the end of the movie to see the bloopers. So cool. Yeah. So just like another example to to. Yeah, lingo and

Andriy: 26:51

outdoorsy. But they are straight, straightforward. But one thing that I want to point out on outdoorsy, listen, like we know transactional email is important, but it's all technology and things might not work. So I like how outdoorsy has a ph for people to call or I would recommend either to add, maybe link to your chat or link email so people can reach out to you because sometimes you don't even know that reset link does not work properly. Right. And I would

Vira: 27:27

honestly probably like opt in for like a simple plain text email so you know that everyone will see it. Everyone will like get it to their inbox. Even if they don't have like images enabled in their like inboxes or if you are doing images, at least do the alt text. Well, you should always do the alt text, but the simpler the better. So these are all of the emails. Of course there are like tons more of the transactional emails that you can, you can send. It's like all of this like shipment delays and like shipment notification and everything. But really quickly, Andriy, like how to make sure, like we briefly talked about like the spam already, but how to make sure that your transactional emails don't end up in spam. Like what are the good practices to make sure that they actually end up in your inboxes? It's a

Andriy: 28:17

challenging question. I mean so as far as I know, whatever ESP you use, let's say let's talk about Klaviyo because we use Klaviyo in most cases transactional emails needs to be approved by Klaviy team and they approved manually one by one like with real people. And those transactional email goes to different server so they use totally different servers to send those emails. And the deliverability through those like IPs and service are much higher. So I don't think there's a way for you kind of to control it or to improve it. Just kind of follow the best practices. And in case of klaviyo, if there are some red flags, they will probably not turn it not convert your emails to transactional emails. Right?

Vira: 29:10

Yeah, they're very thorough about it. But basically like a general rule of thumb, first of all you have to use a very clean from email address. But that's just like the requirement for like all of the emails these days. But for transactional emails it's important. While you don't have to have the unsubscribe link there, you still have to be familiar with the gdpr, CCPA and other regulations. So just like we discussed before, the focus of your email has to be the transactional information. You can use some real estate for like other purposes, but the goal like keep that hierarchy. The top message is the most important one, the transactional email. And yeah, and you have to provide the value to the customer. So that's the bottom line basically. If you want to learn more,

Andriy: 30:01

strongly recommend to check the guide to transactional emails that we have on our website. We invested a lot of like resources there. We shared a lot of information examples. So just read it. There's also a few videos you can watch. But yeah, that resource is for you if you're interested to learn more about transactional emails and implement in your business. Yeah, another great

Vira: 30:24

resource for you is to, is to watch this like Transactional Email Essentials YouTube video video that we'll be also sharing. So all of these links that we mentioned, we will share them in this podcast, in the description box to this podcast. So there you have it. Transactional emails, you guys, if you have any questions about it, do reach out to us. Just like send us an email or send us a pigeon with a, with a mail.

Andriy: 30:51

And send us that poem, short poem. Hero. Yes, the

Vira: 30:55

haiku. The haiku please. We really appreciate your haiku. Yes, thank you so much. It was, it was fun and I learned a lot. So thank you so much.

Andriy: 31:08

Me too. You had something to say. I'm going

Vira: 31:10

to say it. Me too. Me too. Great. Thank you guys. We'll see you next month. Bye. Thanks for listening to email. Einstein. Can you feel that your marketing brain just got a little bit bigger? We ask that you please use it wisely. Lastly, you've got all the theory you need to get out there and start boosting your sales because great emails equals revenue squad.