Email marketing is extremely important to the growth and success of your ecommerce shop, in some cases it’s outperforming both search and social. While it can be pretty simple to use and setup for your online store, sending transaction (or event) triggered emails can make things a little trickier.

What’s the Difference?

I got a  question the other day from a client asking about the difference between transactional email and your typical marketing email and I figured this is something a lot of people struggle with (and often have the wrong idea about).

First, let’s talk about your regular ol’ marketing emails. Here we have your newsletters or promotional emails that you send manually from your email dashboard. They can be used for anything but typically they are sent to inform about product updates or maintain relationships with past customers.  Basically any email messaging sent to the bulk of your audience.

Transactional email is often thought just to relate to transactions that take place on your website (i.e. if someone makes a purchase… you send an email) but it’s really much more than that.

Taking Action

Think of the word action in transactional – specifically referring to user action on your site. Transactional email is triggered email that is sent to a specific individual or subset of your audience once they perform a desired (or in some cases undesired) action.

Here are a few examples of transactional emails:

• product purchase notification
• abandon checkout reminder
• add to cart reminder
• “thank you” email
• monthly invoices
• password resets
• other confirmations

These emails are sent in real-time to your customers based on the triggers you’ve set up in advance and when you’ve set these specific emails to be sent. They are designed and setup ahead of time so that customers have a seamless experience.

Questions? Ask below in the comments…