Transactional Email Best Practices

Internet marketing! The biggest evolving skin of marketing is tied all together through transactional email. There are basically two kinds of marketing email: direct email and transactional email. What’s transactional email?

Transactional email is an application-generated message triggered in response to an action a user has taken on your website, from an e-mail, or via another application. Basically, it is email sent to an individual based on some action. It could be:

1. an action they took directly
2. an action they were the target of
3. perhaps even inaction on their part

Did you ever sign up for a website? Yes? Oh, look, a welcoming mail. You just signed up for the “transaction”. An example of an action happening to a user might be the familiar; we all receive alerts we all receive from our favorite social networking sites. In these cases the action was taken by other users, but the recipient was the target of the action, so they receive a notification email letting them know something of interest happened. The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. Transactional emails are also referred as “triggered”, “automatic”, “real-time” or even “personalized”.

You may receive a transactional email when you: sign up for a service, site, or newsletter, forget your username or password, and request a new one, make a change to an account profile, have updates or notifications sent from an account, make a purchase or donation online…