transactional email vs marketing email

Did the emails you send to your customers go straight to the spam folder every single time? Especially for emails that contain important information?

Knowing the distinction between marketing and transactional emails is essential because you don’t wish to abuse your digital marketing efforts.

Whether you have an eCommerce business, a store, or a SaaS company, sending out these e-mail messages will boost the potential customer and build trustiness with your target market.

Before we reach to differences, let’s specify this two kind of emails and what kinds of e-mail you should send out .

Introducing Transactional Email powered by Twilio SendGrid. A tool designed for businesses to send only transactional emails to their customers, giving you an extremely high open rate.

What is a Transactional Email?

A transactional email is used to confirm a transaction between you and your customers. This means that the company does not require consent from the customers to send a transactional email.

Instead, the customers are now expecting an email from the company.

Transactional emails could be purchase receipts, password resets, reactivation emails, account verifications, alerts, surveys, and more.

What is a Marketing Email?

Marketing Email is making use of e-mail to promote services or products while developing connections with potential clients or customers.

Email advertising is still ranked as one of the most successful marketing channel, vanquishing social media sites, Search engine optimization (SEO), as well as affiliate advertising.

It can also be a softer sell to inform your audience on the value of your brand or keep them involved between purchases.

Email marketing could be one section of digital marketing, which includes internet marketing through sites, social networks, blogs, and also extra.

Transactional vs. Marketing Email

What is the 4 biggest difference between marketing email and transactional e-mail?

1. Email Content & Purposes

There is a big difference between the content and purpose of these two.

Transactional Emails:

Types

  • Purchase Receipts
  • Password Resets
  • Reactivation Emails
  • Account Verifications
  • Alerts
  • Surveys

Purpose

  • Provides the information the customer is looking for after an action (purchase, reservation, opt in, etc) is made on the website.

Marketing Emails:

Types

  • Promotional email campaigns
  • Automations
  • Newsletters

Purpose

  • Create templates and content
  • Analyse what and why emails are opened, clicked, unsubscribed, and more
  • Perform A/B testing on various message templates
  • Segment email lists to target a specific segment
  • Email scheduling

2. Personalisation

Comparing between transactional and marketing emails, transactional e-mails provide a higher level of personalisation since the emails sent are one-to-one (while marketing emails are one-to-many).

3. Open Rates & Click Rates

Transactional emails are expected to have an extremely high click rate and open rate compared with marketing emails. This is because customers are looking forward to the content in a transactional email.

4. Revenue Generation Effectiveness

Both transactional and marketing emails can help businesses generate more revenue.

However, both are using different approaches to do so. With transactional emails, you can generate sales by adding a section below your purchase receipt email, suggesting to the customers that those who purchase Product A might also find Product B, C and D useful for them.

While for marketing emails, newsletters and email automations will be the source of revenue.  

The verdict? Transactional emails are definitely more effective in revenue generation.