Transactional email management

Automated transactional emails are off-platform messages triggered by common system events based on user activity. These include five broad categories: 

• Registration, e.g. welcome emails, email address confirmation 
• Confirmation, e.g. order, booking or sales confirmation 
• Notification, e.g. shipping status, password resets 
• Feedback, e.g. product review requests
• Re-engagement, e.g. abandoned cart reminders

Your users are three times more likely to open transactional emails than other marketing emails due to their:

• deliverability (less likely to land up in spam folders)
• user anticipation (a buyer expects to receive an order confirmation email) 
• actionability (a newly registered user knows they need to verify their email address)

This represents a huge opportunity to push engagement rates and provide a more reliable, consistent shopping experience. There are some key factors that make a transactional email system truly effective. 

For starters, administrators should be able to customise email templates, whether it’s the content, layout, triggers, or brand identity. It should include a reporting function to, for example, test which subject lines and calls-to-action work best. The system should also apply appropriate email routing to prevent high volume senders landing up in spam folders. 

Our client, Affordable Art Fair, had to manage more than forty transactional email types. We solved this by combining Mailchimp’s email marketing platform with its transactional mail service (formerly known as Mandrill). This allows administrators to easily manage the parameters (e.g. buyer location), triggers, as well as the content and layout of templates. The system is also able to pull data from multiple external sources such as customer databases.