Transactional vs Marketing Emails

In this post we explore the differences between the two. There are significant differences, and there are reasons why you should understand both. Especially as a wordpress developer or administrator. There are even laws and regulations around Marketing emails and unsubscribes that do not apply to Transactional Emails. I’ll do my best to share with you what I learned over the years. As a note, sometimes transactional emails are also referred to as operational emails.

What are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are those sent by your wordpress platform that are related (usually) to the users’ account, or to a purchase, or to some type of interaction that the user has with their account on your platform. They need to get through to the user – or the user cannot login (for example – sending them a password reset, or new account login details, or purchase invoice).

What are Marketing Emails?

Marketing emails are customer touch points – announcements, news, discount coupons, offers, and so on. These types of emails offer discounts, make announcements, provide offers, introduce services and products, etc… Marketing emails are subject to rules and laws such as the CAN-SPAM act. Bounce rates affect your ability to send marketing emails. Customers should use a double-opt-in format to let you know they will accept marketing emails, and each marketing email you send should contain an unsubscribe link (usually required by law).

If you do not follow these rules carefully, it can easily destroy your ability to reach customers via email. Some businesses today consider the fact that reaching customers via marketing email is no longer necessary, and instead focus on social channels. That’s ok too, but from my experience, marketing emails are a good way to build and keep a loyal base of customers that really want to hear from you through an email channel.

Why should I care?

It is important to split the two types of emails and send them from different sources. Transactional emails should be sent directly from the wordpress platform (I personally like sending from wordpress direct to MailGun, and we use WP MAIL SMTP PRO for activities like that, you can also use GoSMTP for example. Marketing Emails can and should be sent from a CRM platform / CRM email address. Why? because CRM’s often provide email templates which include (automatically) all the right information at the bottom of the email like unsubscribe links and business addresses to meet CAN-SPAM acts. CRM’s also (usually) manage bounces and bounce rates, tagging people appropriately with hard-bounce, and unsubscribes – removing their records from automations, campaigns, and workflow lists.

That said, some articles say you should send transactional email and marketing email from different IP addresses. I am not so sure that’s necessary as it is to send transactional emails from one email address, and marketing emails from a different email address.

What does this have to do with Managing Inactive Users?

Sending email to inactive users from your CRM may actually cause a ton of bounce rates. If you have high bounce rates or low engagement scores or both on a regular basis, your marketing email / subdomain can become blacklisted (marked as a spammer on global lists). If you don’t want this to happen, we strongly suggest that you send transactional based emails to inactive users in an attempt to get them to re-engage. This is why, we wrote Manage inactive users plugin / add-on, so that it’s not a CRM activity and so that it’s NOT sitting in a CRM workflow.

Why Should Managing Inactive Users be Transactional Emails?

• The user may be inactive because they changed jobs, changed emails and can’t receive their old emails anymore. Then, the email may bounce. Putting this in a transactional mode, allows you to detect the bounce and cancel the account without harming your marketing email reputation score.
• If all you want is to ask them to update their account, or log back in, then it should be transactional in nature. This allows you to send email without an unsubscribe option (because it is not a marketing email).
• The goal (in our opinion) is to get the user to come back, log in, and update their account info (ie: be more active with your site), at the lowest possible cost of retention. Therefore, again, we recommend you do NOT market to them in this context, but rather politely ask them to return.

Why should Managing Inactive Users be Marketing Emails?

• You may want to offer them a discount coupon for returning to activity with your site.
• You may want to offer them to resubscribe to a newsletter.
• You may want to offer them a survey as to why they are inactive.

In either case, you should truly use an EMAIL SCORING service or platform, to see what your email content score’s in terms of marketing score / transactional score, and spam score. This will also help reduce spam-filter bounces, and corporate email firewall filters “automatically” throwing away your transactional or marketing emails. IF you choose to send marketing emails, then put all your automation in your CRM. If you choose to send transactional emails, then put your emails in sends directly from your WordPress platform without using a CRM to do it.

Some CRM’s have the ability to send transactional emails, but even those options still send the email from the marketing subdomain email address – which can cause you problems with CAN-SPAM regulations and other email service providers. We choose transactional emails for handling inactive users, because we find it brings a higher level of re-engagement, and builds trust (because we are simply trying to get the person to come back and log in). We don’t try to sell to inactive users because we also find it helps with customer loyalty.

Where can I read more?

• Sendgrid has a wonderful article
• Hubspot has another here
• Postmark App has a good one too
• We use Mailgun – which has a great article here
• EMAIL SPAM SCORING SERVICE: just search this in google.

Just google search for transactional vs marketing email to find a host of articles to find your own articles as well, or email spam scoring service. We hope you found our article interesting and insightful. Leave us a comment and let us know.