Transactional Email: 5 Common Examples and 9 Best Practices

Let’s get started!

To send transactional emails, you’ll need to integrate with a transactional email service provider.

This ensures that the emails are sent over a dedicated SMTP server or a transactional email API to improve your email deliverability.

With systeme.io, transactional emails are sent with dedicated IP addresses to ensure that the emails get received.

When a lead or customer takes a specific action on your website, they’re waiting for the relevant information to proceed in their customer journey.

This is why transactional emails typically see higher customer or user engagement click rates — 8x that of standard marketing emails.

Here’s what you risk by not providing a transactional email with what they need in these critical moments:

When it comes to the legality of including marketing content in your transactional email, this depends on your local laws:

Emails triggered by abandoned carts are also only sent to the individual.

This might sound like it fits the requirements for a transactional email, but some laws consider it a marketing message.

Before you send these kinds of emails, be sure to read up on the relevant laws as we mentioned in the previous section.

These are the 5 most commonly used transactional emails that we’ll be exploring:

A confirmation email can include:

A customer should never be left unsure about the status of their transaction.

Order confirmation notification emails are one of the most popular transactional emails that are sent.

In these emails, you can expect to see the following 7 elements:

Here’s an example of a confirmation email that includes the above, plus a few extras:

Company — Casper

Subject line — Thank you for your order (#R650000650)

Besides a clear subject line, you can expect to see the following:

If there are delays or cancellations, these should be acknowledged and communicated to the customer immediately.

Shipping notification emails like the one from Feals use all the elements listed above to create a successful transactional email:

Company — Feals

Subject line — Feals Shipment Notification #65000050

To build trust with your customers, you should ensure that they’re notified of matters related to their account activity, some examples include:

The most common of these are account creation emails and password reset emails.

Account creation notifications can be used to:

A double opt-in process helps to ensure that a valid email address was used which reduces your hard bounces and improves your email deliverability.

Here’s an example of an account creation confirmation email that acts as a double opt-in and a welcome email:

Company — Discord

Subject line — Verify Email

As stated in the subject line, the purpose of this transactional email is to get the user to verify their email — it starts with a welcome message:

If a user can’t gain access to their account promptly, this will impact your customer satisfaction and the trust you’ve built with them.

Password reset emails are short and they provide clear reset instructions — usually with a single CTA button as the focal point, or a link (sometimes both).

For password resets, it’s best practice to ensure that:

Here’s an example:

Company — Trello

Subject line — Trello Password Reset

Communication is key to providing positive customer experiences — whether it’s responding to a support request or requesting feedback.

Even an automated email acknowledging support requests or feedback will go a long way in terms of your customer support satisfaction.

Sending a transactional email requesting feedback from a customer who has recently bought something from you, will allow you to:

These emails tend to include:

As we can see with the example below, the email isn’t smothered with irrelevant content and CTAs:

Company — Lyft

Subject line — Your recent experience with Lyft

Let’s get into 9 practices that successful transactional emails have in common before we unveil the perfect all-in-one email marketing tool.

As with your marketing emails, your transactional email messages should be personalized, informative, and engaging.

Etc.

Plus, our email marketing tool also allows you to:

Plus you’ll get:

And more!

For an in-depth look at what our platform has to offer on each of our 4 plans, click here.

Sending a transactional email when your customer needs it is crucial to building strong customer relationships.

Partnering with a platform like systeme.io that allows you to send automated emails is a no-brainer.

Make sure you never miss another customer communication opportunity — and see what more systeme.io can do for you by signing up today.