Optimizing Email Communication: From Marketing to Transactional Emails
Who would have thought that after 50 years of email history, it would remain such a powerful tool for communication?
Today, emails are an indispensable part of business communication for B2C and B2B companies. They are used to communicate the message to customers whether it has a promotional goal, educational, or management purpose. Emails help to increase engagement, improve customer experience, and as a result, lead to more sales and sign-ups.
In this piece, we’ll explore two main types of emails: marketing and transactional messages. We’ll define the key differences between them and share practical tips on how to optimize each type. You’ll discover how to take your email communication to the next level with:
- Setting up SMART goals
- Creating your marketing campaign from A to Z
- Learning the secrets of effective subject lines and content
- Optimizing your efforts with automation tools
- Ensuring high deliverability of your transactional emails
- Staying ahead of the curve with future trends
Shall we start?
Understanding the Basics of Email Communication
Regarding email communication, we can divide emails into two types: marketing and transactional. These two types of emails have distinct purposes and require different approaches when implemented.
Let’s have a quick peek at the most vivid differences first. And then we’ll dig deeper into how to get the most out of each email strategy.
Marketing Emails vs. Transactional Emails
Marketing emails:
Marketing emails communicate a promotional message to a customer. While the means to communicate this message can differ, as it can be an educational guide, an informative newsletter, or a personalized offer, the core goal is to entice your customers to take a particular action — to interact with your service or product.
Transactional emails:
Transactional emails, on the contrary, guide customers after they’ve taken some action like completing a purchase, asking to reset their password, making a customer inquiry, etc. A particular action on a website or app triggers an automated personalized transactional email.
Such emails focus on managing the one-on-one interaction between your customer and your brand. And most importantly, a transactional email contains uniquely relevant information to a customer. For example, a payment fails and a user receives a transactional email with details relevant only to this user.
In summary:
Both types of emails are essential for building trusting relationships with customers as well as helping to drive conversions. Marketing emails help to foster engaged connections by providing educational content and personalized offers, showing that your brand understands the customer’s needs.
Whereas, transactional emails create a sense of safety, by delivering vital messages on time like password reset or purchase receipts. With transactional emails, customers feel guided throughout each stage of their customer journey. And the more engaged and safe your customer feels, the more likely they will convert.
Optimizing Marketing Emails
To create a well-timed and effective email marketing campaign you need to know a few key strategies. From defining your marketing goals to segmenting your audience, from crafting compelling content to building a strong email sequence — here are the most vital steps you should consider:
1. The Purpose and Goals of Email Marketing
Email marketing is used as a communication channel to reach the target audience with a specific promotional or educational message. This message should encourage your existing or prospective customers to interact with your product or service.
However, each email marketing campaign has a narrower goal specific to the current needs of a brand. Say, one campaign will focus on engaging regular clients with newsletters to build stronger relationships and boost brand loyalty.
Another campaign will aim at improving retention by re-engaging customers with special offers or exclusive content.
So before crafting an email marketing campaign, you need to set clear objectives you want to achieve. Your campaign needs to be SMART:
- Specific: For example, decrease cart abandonment rate.
- Measurable: You need to know how you’re going to track the results: open rates, click-through rates, brand mentions, the number of leads, etc.
- Achievable: It’s better to craft a small but achievable campaign.
- Relevant: The goal of your email marketing strategy should coincide with the current goals of your brand.
- Time-Bound: Always set a time limit for your campaigns. Say, increase open rates by 10% in three months.Always set a time limit for your campaigns. Say, increase open rates by 10% in three months.
2. The Email Marketing Campaign Process
An email marketing campaign process can be divided into 5 vital steps:
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Research & segment your target audience
Investigate your target audience by examining their age, gender, location, purchasing patterns, interests, stage of customer journey, etc. Then organize your customers into groups to send emails specifically aimed at a particular segment.
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Choose the right email marketing tool
An email marketing tool is your key to boosting marketing efforts with automation, custom templates, personalization, and other game-changing features.
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Craft email content
When creating engaging content, always think about your audience. Make it speak to your customers, and address their current needs and pain points. Brand your emails, so your recipients will instantly associate the message with your company. Use branded colors, logos, brand slang, etc.
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Set up a sending schedule
An effective email campaign is timely and consistent. Organize a sending schedule to reach your target audience at the right time.
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Measure your results
Tracking your results will help you make data-driven decisions and adapt your email campaign. Commonly, an email marketing tool allows you to monitor such metrics as bounce rate, open rate, CTR, conversion rate, and ROI.
3. Crafting Effective Email Subject Lines and Content
Here are a few tips to create an engaging email:
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Leverage personalization
Include the recipient’s name in subject lines and offer personally tailored content to increase the value of email for a higher open rate and engagement.
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Be specific
Don’t beat around the bush. Offer a bite-size copy that directly addresses your customers’ needs. A subject line that can quickly summarize the gist of an email sets clear expectations for your audience.
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Employ FOMO
Subject lines with ‘limited time offer’ and email copy with a countdown clock for a discount still do a trick.
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Branded email
Your email should stand out in the overloaded inbox. Your email needs to have a distinctive voice of your brand: whether it’s the choice of vocabulary, visuals, or brand colors.
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Optimize and run spam checks
Use analytics to understand what works the best. Benefit from AI tools that can optimize your email strategy. Always use an email content spam checker to ensure your email won’t end up in a spam folder, just because your perfectly written email includes words that are considered spam.
The Role of Technology in Email Marketing
To keep up with the rising demand for personalized content you need to leverage various tools and software if you want to increase your email marketing efforts.
Email Automation and Personalization
Automation is the key to crafting a customized message for various segments. The automated email software uses data on every customer to help you deliver a unique message relevant to the user’s needs, preferences, stage of the customer journey, etc.
Webhooks in Email Marketing
Another technology that can help you boost your email marketing efforts is webhooks. But what are webhooks and how to use them? In brief, webhooks send a triggered message when the user performs some actions like opening the link, subscribing or unsubscribing, etc.
This enables you to quickly send an automated email uniquely tailored following the customer’s actions. For example, a webhook informs about a subscriber clicking on a specific product link and then this subscriber automatically receives a targeted promotion.
Automation enables a brand to scale personalization as one can reach a larger audience and still keep the message as personalized as possible — all thanks to the invaluable data used in automated email workflows.
Most email platforms enable you to create webhooks to monitor such actions as:
- opened
- clicked
- spam complaints
- subscribed/unsubscribed
- hard/soft bounced
- delivered/not delivered
You can integrate webhooks with various third-party software like your app, CRM system, e-commerce tool, etc. Webhooks will serve as a digital messenger between two tools. Say, you have a new client in your CRM system.
The data about this client is exchanged with your email software and as a result, a new customer receives a targeted email.
Optimizing Transactional Emails
We’ve already covered strategies for effective email marketing and now it’s high time to distinguish transactional emails from it.
What Are Transactional Emails?
By definition, transactional emails are messages sent to a recipient after a specific action performed by this user, e.g. request for password reset, a confirmation of a successful online purchase, etc.
The essential difference between marketing and transactional emails lies in the purpose of these two types of emails. While the former delivers a promotional message, the latter focuses on sending crucial and transaction-centric information based on the user’s actions.
Among the most common transactional emails, we may mention order confirmation, password reset, order receipt, subscription confirmation, and shipping details.
While a marketing email is often personalized to engage a recipient to open and interact with promotional content, the personalization of transactional emails is of different value. This is highly personalized data that fully meets customer’s needs and expectations.
The risks of frustrating your user with a transactional email should be taken way more seriously than with a marketing email. Imagine your customer not receiving a password confirmation or order receipt on time, this will strongly influence trust and jeopardize your brand’s reputation.
Best Practices for Transactional Emails
First and foremost, make sure that your transactional emails have a recognizable sender name. Transactional emails are about trust, so a strange sender’s name might look suspicious. Secondly, transactional emails should be automated to guarantee instant delivery.
Thirdly, the subject line and content should be clear and concise. The subject line should summarize the main idea, for example, ‘Your order will be shipped on Monday, March 2nd’. Finally, you need to choose the right transactional email API service to avoid deliverability issues.
And that leads us to the next part.
Choosing the Right Transactional Email API
Transactional emails must reach the right inbox at the right time. Deliverability is the main criterion when choosing a transactional email API you can trust. That is why pick a service with two sending streams: one for your marketing emails and the other for transactional ones.
The reason why it’s important to have separate streams is that your marketing sending stream won’t jeopardize the reputation of your transactional stream. Say some of your marketing emails were marked as spam.
In case you have one stream, it may result in your transactional emails also ending up in a spam folder. And while it’s bad for a marketing email to get into a spam folder, it’s a disaster for a transactional email.
Another criterion for choosing a transactional email service is integration features, making it easier to connect your app with an email platform. This way a particular action on your app will trigger a specific transactional email.
Plus, a good transactional email API provides DNS records to verify your domain. Again, it’s needed to ensure high deliverability.
Future Trends in Email Communication
From hyper-personalization to AI and ML integrating basically into each workflow of email communication — new technologies will keep changing email strategies. Here are the key changes you need to be aware of.
AI and Machine Learning in Email Communication
AI and ML are the future that is already shaping the way we see email communication. Both AI and ML have immense capability to gather and analyze tons of data to tailor highly personalized email content for a recipient. Machine learning can also help with predictive analytics to discover the optimal time to send a message to a customer.
Another area that will be significantly affected by AI and ML is automation. Segmentation, content creation, A/B testing, analytics — everything will keep on being optimized and automated thanks to the AI tech evolving. What can be automated will be automated creating a new area for complex email campaigns with a plethora of triggers.
Real-Time Personalization and Data-Driven Emails
Hyper-personalization is the trend that already penetrated email communication. Real-time data enables a brand to deliver highly relevant and targeted messages instantly, e.g. an immediate welcome email, a special offer after an item is in the cart for an hour, etc.
Data-driven emails learn and adapt an email strategy each time a customer interacts with a brand. This enables companies to tailor ultra-individual content for customers relevant to their current needs.
Wrapping up
Even though there are many communication channels these days, email is still among the most effective ways to reach customers and build loyal relationships with them. From promoting your product or service to ensuring smooth transaction-centric communication — emails help to create an engaging and safe experience at each stage of a customer journey.
Crafting an effective email campaign isn’t a walk in the park, however, with the right knowledge and robust tools you can create a campaign that will drive the results. It’s important to set SMART goals, research your audience, and invest time in creating a compelling email copy.
Don’t hesitate to explore various tools and resources and discover what works best for your email strategy. Experiment with webhooks, separate your sending streams, optimize your personalization efforts with AI, and leverage automation.