Why transactional emails matter for your SaaS

In the world of email communication, everybody typically thinks first of marketing emails. But don't be too quick to put aside transactional emails as just a boring receipt. Neglecting transactional emails for your SaaS can be a missed opportunity for growth.

Transactional emails are essentials for any SaaS

Unless you've been living in a cave for the last 20 years, chances are that you've received many transactional emails. They are messages triggered by specific user actions or background processes of your application.

Unlike marketing emails, which are designed to promote or sell, transactional emails are primarily informational and functional.

Transactional emails don’t scream for your attention, but they serve important purposes for your application and business.

Typical use cases of transactional emails in the context of SaaS:

• Welcome emails, account creation confirmation, onboarding sequences
• Billing, invoicing emails
• Notifications & reminders to request the user to interact with your application.
• Account updates: notifications about changes to account settings or subscription plans.
• Password reset, verification code as part of an authentication process
• Reports of any kind. For example usage of the application, recent activities or critical actions required.
• Cancellation emails

Transactional emails are one of the most overlooked marketing opportunity

Most transactional emails get opened

Consider a type of message so important that users genuinely don't want to miss it and actually rely on it for critical information. That sounds like every marketer's dream, right?

The reasons behind this:

• Transactional emails are typically triggered by user actions;
• Many transactional emails are received at critical touch points along the customer journey, when users are highly engaged with the brand.
• They contain information that the recipient is actively seeking;
• They are usually personalized and sent to individuals one at a time rather than in mass like marketing emails;

Understanding the value of transactional emails for SaaS

Transactional emails are often created when the product launches and then forgotten about or just underutilized.

We have seen companies that had just one basic welcome email. Or founders who haven’t looked at their transactional emails in years and haven’t planned to do much with them. Their application may be amazing but they are missing out on opportunities to engage with their users.

Out of sight, out of mind: keep your users engaged

Transactional emails play a crucial role throughout the customer lifecycle, from onboarding new users to providing ongoing support, updates and notifications.

By delivering relevant information at each stage, SaaS businesses can nurture the relationships with their users and keep them engaged with the application. 

Remind your users to log back in to your application to check comments or recent activity.

Build trust and credibility with your users

When users receive timely notifications and updates regarding their transactions in professional looking emails, they are more likely to perceive the brand as trustworthy and dependable.

Emails like suspicious activity alerts, verification codes, etc, will show users that your business is on point about security.

On the other hand, a broken email or a transaction confirmation that never arrives will reflect badly on your brand.

Enhanced user experience and connection with users

As mentioned previously, transactional emails have a high open rate. As most users take time to open, read and possibly also act on your emails, this is an opportunity to enrich their experience with your brand.

Transactional emails don’t have to be boring. You can enhance the user experience with branded and personalized messages.

Whether it’s through humor or a friendly writing style, when brands provide delight in the little moments, they open up opportunities to connect with customers.

The challenges of transactional emails and how to overcome them

Transactional emails are a low-hanging fruit. Neglecting them is like leaving money on the table.

They're typically outside of the scope of opt-in consent regulations, they can enhance user experience, they help build customer relationships, and drive engagement.

Ultimately transactional emails fuel growth and retention. 

So where's the bottleneck? 

Developing HTML emails is a pain with a complex and error-prone setup process

Developers are allergic to sending emails.

For a good reason: developing emails that will render correctly in all email clients is notoriously a pain. Email development is its own speciality and developers will typically be more focused on solving bugs and creating features for their users rather than set up emails. As as any SaaS founder and developer knows: there’s always just so much other stuff to do! 

The email setup itself in the application is time-consuming and needs a lot of skills. Maintenance soon becomes an issue, especially if you have translated emails. 

Traditionally it's an annoying and lengthy process with often too many iterations between developer & project manager, designer, marketer to get the right content and design. 

Using the right tool to facilitate your email production process

Tools like Mailbindr supports you in the creation and management of transactional email templates. It guides your throught the whole process of visuall appearance, connecting your data and testing of email templates.

Using a tool like Mailbindr for the building of transactional emails will help you to focus on the tasks which matter and prevents headaches.