Why it’s important to separate transactional and promotional emails

In the world of fast communication and messenger apps, emails may seem to be getting a bit neglected. However, various data proves otherwise. The number of emails sent and received per day is growing, and it's estimated to reach 376.4 billion by 2025.

Considering how many emails users receive every day, reaching a decent and pretty high email deliverability may not be the easiest task to do. There are some emails that simply must be delivered, and users wait for them with more impatience than others. We are referring to transactional emails here.

Let's first define what promotional and transactional emails are and why they should be kept apart for better email deliverability. Buckle up, we're going to start right now!

Promotional vs. transactional emails - what’s the difference?

Let's briefly introduce both types of emails before we move on to the list of reasons why sending such emails should be split.

Promotional emails

This is a message that is sent to a group of people without altering the content. Promotional emails are also called bulk emails, which reflects their nature even more. Each message sent to your audience that doesn't correlate with a special event can be called this way.

Examples of such messages are

• newsletters,

• sales information,

• news about upcoming launches or

• monthly/weekly updates

Basically, promotional emails are your marketing campaigns.

Such email requires users' permission to be sent, and it's also necessary to allow them an easy way to unsubscribe to your mailing list. One crucial issue about this type of messages is that the average open rates for such email are between 18% and 26%, depending on the industry, so getting your message delivered and opened is rather a challenge. It's also a difficult task to catch the users' attention from the plethora of interesting titles.

Transactional emails

This type of email varies according to the business you run, but in general, transactional emails are triggered by some sort of action. Examples of such emails can be a welcome email after signing up or an email with instructions on how to reset your password after clicking on the “Forget the password” button. Transactional emails are also sent after successful purchases and transactions. As you can see, they are very important for user experience and your brand image. In this case, delivery time is crucial, and it's measured in seconds.

It's also worth mentioning that such messages are often tagged by various inboxes as a “high-priority”.

Why is it important to separate transactional and promotional messages?

You can greatly benefit from separating these two types of messages. It seems logical to treat promotional and transactional messages separately since marketing should handle promotional messages and IT should handle transactional messages, but there are other reasons to treat them separately.

1) Increasing deliverability

As the title of this article suggests, separating these two categories of email may increase deliverability. There is no doubt that this indicator is crucial, especially for sensitive data messages like new passwords or confirmation of registration.

If you want your transactional emails to be taken as a “high priority” you should take care of a few aspects first. Thanks to separating these both types, you help inbox providers with this process. If the registration email would be perceived the same as, e.g., newsletters, your customer may have problems with finding it. Moreover, if you use one system to deliver both types of messages some providers will consider all of them as bulk messages and this will result in a decent decrease in the deliverability for both categories. This when separation comes in handy.

2) Reducing queries

Fast and effective delivery helps reduce the number of customer service requests. If the email with the new password or message with order confirmation is missed in the sea of other emails, it may cause some problems and people may start to be concerned. It's understandable that they want to know whether the order was placed successfully or what to type in the password box. Moreover, these types of emails are also sent in situations when people are expecting and waiting for the information.

Let’s assume that a customer wants to buy a birthday present for a friend. The perfect item is found, and now it's time to log in and finalise the purchase. There is only one snag about this - a forgotten password. This is why the resetting password option was created. The client sends a request, but the message is missed; the clock is ticking, and the present is waiting to be bought, but the email with the link to set a new password has blended in the crowd of other emails and doesn't receive a tag “high-priority”. As a result, the client didn’t notice the message and decided to reach customer service and email them asking what to do in such a situation. This is the query that could have been avoided.

3) Building trust and loyalty

As we already established, transactional emails contain data that are extremely important and sensitive for your customers. These make such emails crucial for establishing a bond and building trust among your recipients. It's also a straight shot to losing them if you won’t take care of this aspect properly.

Let’s stay with the example of buying a birthday present for a friend. The customer sends a request, but the email is gone. Now let’s assume that the birthday party is in a few days and every minute is worth its weight in gold. The customer plans to pay more for express delivery as well. But how to log in without a password? There is no time to send an email or call the customer service, so the customer decides to search for the present elsewhere and set up a new account in this store. This way, you’ve just lost a client.

By separating transaction emails from promotional emails, the firsts are delivered quickly and are tagged appropriately to help avoid omitting them. Short delivery time indicates also that you take care of your customers and do your best to provide the highest quality of service.

4) Helping you to grow

Customer feedback emails are also considered transactional emails. By separating them from promotional, you would increase the chances to open your feedback request and fill up the survey. Thanks to this, you will gain more information, and you will be able to implement the changes that customers suggested. As a result, you will raise the service standard and your customers will be even more satisfied with it. Isn't it a win-win situation?

As you can see, there are solid benefits of separating promotional and transactional emails. Moreover, each of them relies on the assumption of increasing deliverability. When you improve in these areas, you can see there is a snowball effect, which can lead to very impressive results like building trust among your customer or increasing the quality of your service.

How to separate promotional and transactional emails?

Now it's time for the star attraction, i.e. how to separate these types of messages. In practice, separating these two means varying some stages of the delivery process. Which aspect can you differentiate?

• Email addresses - it's not the best option, but if you want to start with small steps, this might work. Since the emails come from various departments, it shouldn’t be a problem to differentiate the addresses. Unfortunately, it may not be enough for inbox providers like Gmail that suggest IP addresses variation.

• IP addresses - as we mentioned above, it's another option, and it's recommended by e.g. Gmail. With this method, you will need to set up a dedicated IP address, which very often means an additional cost. What should be mentioned is that for some inbox providers even this way is not enough, and they don't tag properly such emails even if they are sent from dedicated IP addresses. It may be caused by spammers' practices that are more likely to handle switching IP addresses than, e.g. a domain.

• Infrastructure - it sounds like a lot of effort, but in practice, it's quite the opposite. With Coresender you can do it very easily. Our tool prioritizes transactional email and thus uses separate infrastructure to do so. You can use transactional sending accounts to be sure that this important information will be delivered as soon as possible, and you will be sure that the recipient will see your email in the inbox. No need to say that this way is the most effective and may give the highest chances for successful email delivery.

If you decide on a third way, you should get to know Coresender better. With this tool, the chances of landing in SPAM are lowered. Emails you send will automatically be authenticated with SPF and DKIM with little or no user configuration required. As you may see, our tool is a straight line to better deliverability. Moreover, if you don't want to start by going all the way and try switching IP addresses only, there is also such a possibility with Coresender!

Thanks to the SMTP service, the integration will take you minutes, and you will be able to use Coresender’s whole power immediately. P.S. You can try it for free!

Conclusion

When it comes to emails, deliverability is very important. After all, you send the messages to be read. Keeping separate promotional and transactional emails may be a key to success. Don’t you agree?

We have shown you why this issue is so important and how to handle this aspect like a pro. If you want to dig deeper into email marketing and get to know more about using this channel effectively, take a closer look at our blog. You will find here many useful pieces regarding emails!