Transactional emails can be a gamechanger for your SaaS. What exactly are they and when should you use them?

Outside of the handful of Lifecycle Automation emails highlighted in the last chapter are another type of automatic emails called Transactional Emails. 

Transactional emails and lifecycle automation emails are similar but slightly different. They can also be used in tandem to maximize the results of your emails!

What Are Transactional Emails?

An email is considered transactional when it is a communication that the recipient has already agreed to via their ongoing relationship with your company.

A transactional email is an email that is automatically sent to your customer following a specific action (transaction) that they perform within your app.

These emails typically include critical information pertaining to the use of your product that the recipient is already a customer of.

Previously, these emails were an afterthought for most companies (and still are for some - use this to your advantage!). With incredibly high open rates, these emails now offer another chance for you to build brand awareness, improve relationships, and increase revenue.

Transactional Email Examples

Some of the most common transactional emails that you have likely seen before and should implement into your product are:

• Free trial invite

• Account verification

• Forgot password reset

• Subscription confirmation

• Order confirmation

• Account upgrade confirmation

• Account downgrade confirmation

• Account activity (comment from team member, new likes on your post, etc)

• 2FA

When thinking about a SaaS specifically, you should immediately see why transactional emails are so powerful. 

Manually responding to every request for a new password, upgrading or downgrading an account, or sending confirmation emails would take you more hours than there are in a day. You would never get any actual work done!

Putting transactional emails to work will essentially put a large — and important — aspect of your SaaS on autopilot.

Transactional Email Best Practices

There are several best practices to consider when sending transactional emails in order to use them to their fullest potential. 

These emails typically need to be sent immediately after the specific action is taken. The urgency behind these emails adds increased importance to both the customer and the company sending them. For example, if a customer has forgotten their password and has requested to reset it, any delay in this email will result in them closing the browser tab and forgetting about the issue (and possibly your product) altogether.

Timely and accurate transactional emails help build trust with the customer as they are receiving the most needed information at the exact moment they request it or need it.

You should also personalize your transactional emails if possible. Reassure your customer that they are receiving this email because you know who they are and that they need this email right now. 

Your transactional emails should also be optimized for mobile. They likely don’t need crazy formatting that may distract the recipient from the overall message. If a user of your product is on their mobile phone and requests a password reset and your transactional email isn’t formatted in a way that makes taking immediate action easy, they may forget about the issue and leave.

Finally, please test these emails before sending (much like how you’d send a campaign email preview to yourself before sending to all of your subscribers). You’d hate to think everything is good to go only to have your support lines hammered when the emails aren’t providing the necessary information to the correct user.

Following these transactional email best practices will allow you to have peace of mind while these emails are automatically sent to your users, guiding them through the most important aspects of your product.

Transactional Emails vs Marketing Emails

As you’ve now begun your email marketing journey you have seen plenty of different terms that are ultimately describing the same thing — email.

Let’s take a quick look at what some of the major differences between transactional emails and marketing emails that we discussed earlier in this guide are so that you can use each of them properly.

In the simplest terms, a transactional email is an email that is sent to one specific recipient immediately following an action that they have taken or requested within your product.

A marketing email is a one-to-many email for more promotional purposes. These are your newsletters, product update emails, promotion offers, or sales campaigns. 

Just because a marketing email is a marketing email, that doesn’t mean it also can’t or shouldn’t be personalized like a transactional email. Most email sending providers like Loops will offer the ability to include merge tags where you can personalize one-to-many marketing emails.

Transactional Emails and CAN-SPAM

It is important to note that Transactional Emails are exempt from the majority of the stipulations around the CAN-SPAM act.

This means that you do not need to include things like unsubscribe options within these messages like you would need to for marketing emails.

We will dive into this further in an upcoming chapter of this guide.

Get Started With Transactional Emails

It’s likely apparent that your SaaS should be utilizing transactional emails if it isn’t already. 

To get started, simply look through your product for places where you think an email should be sent. These could be bottlenecks that your support team is currently getting requests for, places where you’d typically expect an email when using another product, or simply a nice to have such as a confirmation after signing up for a free trial.

If done correctly, transactional emails should quietly hum along in the background while improving the user experience for your customers and reducing the support burden for your employees.