Email is an incredibly important tool for the marketer, however, transactional email (password resets, shipping confirmations, etc.) often go ignored, even though these emails have an open rate that is eight times higher than non-transactional marketing messages.
We take a closer look at how to make the most of transactional email:
Separate transaction mail from marketing mail
Send transactional emails from a different IP address than the marketing emails, as both consumers and the law react very differently to the two types of mail.
Transactional emails are not subject to the same requirements as commercial mail. For example, they are not required to have an unsubscribe link so long as the are sent in response to an action that was initiated by the recipient, and the sender is also not required to have a physical mailing address in the body of the message (as set out in CAN-SPAM).
Transactional emails are very valuable to customers, and so separating them by a different IP address means that these emails can continue to be useful and valued by the customer rather than being degraded by other types of email.
Email recipients block marketing messages for all sorts of reasons, but you don’t want all of your transactional mail to end up in the spam folder if it can be avoided (plus by separating the email streams it becomes possible to have better data on your email strategy).
Transactional means transactional
The Federal Trade Commission has created rules around the combining of commercial copy into a transactional email, which states that the,
“primary purpose of the message is the deciding factor.”
As this is rather ambiguous, the rule of thumb has become an 80-20 or 70-30 split between transactional and commercial content.
Ensure that the transactional content remains front-and-centre, otherwise the message could be deemed to be commercial, and as such, different rules will apply.
Transactional messages that share many of the same links and sites as your commercial messages may get marked as spam, so make sure to be cautious when combining marketing or commercial messages with your transactional mail.
Remain on-brand
Transactional mail has high open rates, and so it is important that these messages are on-brand and that they look and feel the same as your other messages and channels.
If your marketing messages are sent in HTML and are colourful and well-designed, then do the same for your transactional messages – as even the most humble of transactional emails is a chance to reconnect with a customer.
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