What is transactional email?
Transactional emails are automated emails sent to individual recipients that contain important information, typically about a transaction or account activity. Your customers will receive transactional emails even if they haven’t signed up to receive marketing emails from your brand.
Some examples of transactional emails include the following:
- Order confirmation
- Refund notifications
- Shipping notifications
With Attentive, you can send transactional emails to your customers if you’ve already set up an integration with one of the following partners:
You can also send transactional emails if you're set up with Attentive's custom events API.
See What are transactional journeys? for more information about transactional journeys for text messaging.
Note: If you have multiple region-based accounts (e.g., separate Attentive accounts for US, Canada, UK, etc.), you should only send transactional email from just one of those accounts. This prevents the possible sending of duplicate messages. Transactional emails sent from your US account, for example, will also be sent to CA and UK subscribers.
Differences between transactional emails and text messages
There are some important differences between sending transactional emails and text messages with the Attentive platform. These differences include the following:
- Transactional email copy doesn’t require review from Attentive. If you modify the default copy of text messages in your transactional journey, however, you must send them to Attentive for review in order to activate the journey. See Transactional vs. promotional text messages for more information.
- Unlike transactional text messages, transactional email messages are still sent during Quiet Hours and Smart Sending.
Collect transactional email subscribers
Subscribers are added to your transactional email list when they enter their email as part of their contact information when completing an order. Attentive collects these email addresses for you and adds them to a list of subscribers who should receive transactional email messages. If you’ve set up an integration between Attentive and one of the partners listed above, you don’t need to do anything to ensure that the Attentive platform collects these email addresses.
Keep in mind that subscribers can opt out of receiving marketing emails from your brand, and you can opt subscribers out of your brand’s marketing emails on the Subscribers page. However, if they provide their phone number in connection with a transaction, they'll continue to receive transactional emails from you.
For reporting and billing purposes, transactional emails aren’t included in your total count of active subscribers.
Send from a subdomain
You can also send emails from subdomains (e.g., shop.example.com, cart.example.com). Sending from subdomains can help preserve your sender reputation for corporate and transactional emails if your reputation for marketing emails drops.
You can view your subdomains on the Email Settings page (Settings > Email Settings).
See Email settings for more information about setting up domains and subdomains.
See Segmenting reputation by subdomain for more information about subdomain best practices.
Include offers in transactional emails
You can add offers to transactional emails that subscribers can apply to future purchases. When adding offers or promotional content to transactional email, we recommend following the 80/20 rule: no more than 20% of the email should be promotional. Balancing promotional and transactional content helps ensure your transactional messages stay valuable and engaging and avoids overwhelming your subscribers with promotions.