Transactional email is a special kind of email for making financial transactions or an email that is sent across by an e-commerce website. But, this is not true. Basically, the answer to the question of What Is Transactional Email has a much broader perspective.
A transactional email is defined as an email that gets generated in response to a user action on your application, website, or any other service. This is the reason these emails are also considered as notification emails.
The Purpose Of Transactional Email
We have understood the transactional email as an email that is in response to some action. This may include an action that the user took directly or an action he was targeted for or even inaction. The most important purpose of sending across transactional emails is to create a “pull” mechanism.
This is because the actions of other users will pull the recipients back to your website, in addition to this, the recipients will also experience a pulling effect if the content is quite relevant or if they have been away from the site for a long time.
Transactional email will open new avenues for you to increase user retention without having the need to spam their mails. The simplest and widely used example for this is that of Facebook which keeps sending the users transactional emails for every notification.
The Challenges Of Transactional Email
Since, we have understood the definition of transactional email all about, the biggest challenge associated with it comes in the fact creating a well written and well defined email. This is because this email will be important in creating an impression on your users as well as polishing their experience of making use of your web pages.
Hence, a transactional email that has been painstakingly created by making use of lovely templates and optimizing the page load time is bound to attract the attention of your users.
Is E-Commerce Transactional?
Talking about the transactional email definition, many people consider e-commerce emails to be transactional. But, this is not necessarily the case. This is because a transactional email has nothing to do with the financial aspect as it does not involve making purchases or making payments in any form from inside the email.
However, e-commerce applications do send across some transactional emails like the confirmation email after your sign up. So, the thing worth remembering is that a transactional email does not have to be e-commerce in nature.
Sources Of Transactional Emails
The discussion on what is transactional email can never be completed without going through some of its worthy sources. Some of these important sources are:
Password resets
Email address confirmations
Receipts for the purchases made
Support requests
Auto responders
Updates about account balance
Monthly invoices
Weekly manifests
Automated re-engagement
Above are the examples of sources of transactional emails that have been approved by the marketer and so on.