Transactional emails are underated opportunities — increase revenue, retention, usage...

Transactional emails are beautiful things. They happen as a result of what a user does and therefore, the user expects to receive them — making open rates way higher. We're talking 40-50%. And click-through rates are often 10-20%.

Those high open rates are a very good thing, because your transactional emails include important content and you want your users to read them. But they're also important for other, less obvious, reasons — like, oh I don't know… increasing your revenue.

Here's how to do transactional emails right, while capitalizing on some lesser-known opportunities.

Transaction emails

Real quick, for those who don't know, transactional emails are automated emails that are sent to individual users, when triggered by specific actions. They can be loosely categorized into four types:

• Welcome emails: This is when you trigger a welcome/thank you email.
• Confirmation emails: This is when you ask the user to confirm something (like their email address), or it can also be when you confirm something they did, like confirmation of payment.
• Notification emails: This is when you notify a user about, well, just about anything. It includes important account-specific happenings, password resets, usage digests/reports, etc. These are highly dependent upon the functionality of your product.
• Reminder emails: This is when you send a reminder about things like subscription renewals, incomplete account verification, etc.

Enough said about that, moving on…

General best practices

Here are the basics of sending a stellar transactional email. These tips will make the most of every email that you (automatically) send.

Set your sender up right

I'll start with an unpopular opinion. Conventional wisdom is to send your marketing emails and transactional emails from different email addresses. Some people even say to send them from different domains or subdomains. The logic being that marketing emails often get flagged as spam and you don't want that to affect your transactional emails.

That's good advice for most. But indie hackers have a rare opportunity to have a direct line of contact from founder to customer, and I don't think that should be passed up. IMO, it's best to send both types of emails from your own business email (or a slightly different one like [first.last] instead of [first]). Follow conventional wisdom later, when you start outsourcing support.

Now that I've made my argument, here are some other "sender" tips:

• Regardless of whether you agree with what I just said, never use a "no-reply". It's best to give your users a direct line of communication — after all, it's important to hear what they have to say. You can use something like "support" but like I said, I think personal is best.
• Make sure it uses your business domain (no personal Gmail accounts, please).
• As far as the display name, go with your '[name] at [business]".
• Don't forget your avatar/profile image. It can increase opens by as much as 25%. Do this by implementing BIMI so that your brand’s logo displays — here’s how to do it. Alternatively, set up your own avatar through Google and Gravatar. As you might have guessed, I'd personally opt for a personal photo over the logo in the beginning.

Writing good copy

Good copy is make-or-break. Let's start with the subject line:

• Keep the subject line short (<60 characters) and less cutesy, more direct — save the cutesy stuff for the body of the email.
• But include every crucial detail, like the purpose of the email and details related to it (e.g. amount charged, etc.).

And the preview is almost as important:

• Either apply specific preview text or make sure the first 40-140 characters of the email are perfect as the preview (that will be what displays automatically).
• Include only the need-to-know info and hints at why they might want to open the email.

Then comes the body of the email:

• Keep it concise and direct.
• Identify the purpose of the email clearly and prominently.
• Identify any action items clearly and prominently too.
• Related to the above, use typography and design to your advantage so that recipients get the gist of the email at a glance.
• Personalize the content with their first name, business name, and anything else that might be relevant.
• Maintain your brand voice. If it's a casual voice, then add some delight with humor.
• Write like a human, not a robot.
• Let the recipient know what to do if they need help — ideally this is just clicking "reply".
• If there are action items, use a strong CTA that harks back to the value they receive from doing what you want them to do.
• Don't use friction words.
• Avoid spam trigger words.

And a few general pointers:

• Design for mobile first. Super important. Nearly half of email opens happen on mobile these days, and it's easier to start with mobile and expand it from there than it is to start with desktop and cut back. Of course, you'll probably be using a template that already has this covered, but make sure you test it.
• Use visuals that explain the email (or make the email more appealing) when possible.
• Send the email right away when it is triggered. The exception here is reminders and the like, which should obviously be spaced apart.
• Don't over-send. Send only when it is necessary and valuable to the user.
• Keep an eye on your deliverability rate.
• Make sure the email loads quickly. Include a well-formatted, plain-text version just in case.
• Consider using a double opt-in so that your emails bounce less.
• Have a preference center so that users can choose what emails they get. Just FYI, if you do any kind of promotion in the transactional email (which I'll touch on below), you may need an "unsubscribe" button. The rule of thumb is that if the subject line indicates that the email is promotional, or if promotion is the primary focus, then you need to include it. Otherwise, you don't need it (but a preference center is still a good idea, IMO).
• Test the emails across multiple devices and operating systems

Opportunities for transactional emails

Ok, so that's how to generally send a good transactional email. Here are some opportunities that are often missed.

Increasing revenue

Since transactional emails get such great engagement, they're a perfect opportunity for promotion. Maybe that means upgrades to new tiers, upsells to new features, or cross-sells to other products. Or maybe it's something else entirely. The point is that you can put in some promotional content, and a higher percentage of recipients will probably read it.

But you've got to be careful with this one. Don't overdo it. A good rule of thumb is 80/20 — make sure 20% or less is promotional. After all, the primary content of your transactional email is usually pretty important, so diluting (or distracting from) it is a bad idea — particularly for confirmation emails. Plus, this way you don't need to add an unsubscribe button (but a preference center is still a good idea, per above).

While we're on the topic of increasing revenue, payment failure emails are a good idea too, as often this type of churn is unintentional and you can recapture some of that revenue if you're proactive. The same goes for end-of-trial reminders.

Increasing followings

I'd be willing to bet that most of your users are not following you on social media. Include links to your socials and encourage people to get involved and stay up to date by following you. It's good for your following and it'll translate to higher retention too.

And this can be done without adding much to your email, so it's ideal for the transactional emails that are too important to dilute.

Boosting brand recognition

By always using the same voice, colors, logos, and so forth, you can cement your brand in the minds of your email recipients.

Reminding recipients of the value your provide

Hopefully, your users are well aware of how much value you're providing, but it doesn't hurt to remind them. Show them stats about their usage and what they've achieved. Talk about the benefits of your product and your value proposition. Link to case studies. Include social proof. Show off your product, and your newest features.

This is particularly important when confirming receipt of payments. It's good to let users know that you've received a payment, but while you're at it, remind them of why they're paying you in the first place.

It's also helpful in welcome emails, as it can encourage users to explore the product further.

Improving retention

Include links to FAQs, documentation, and support — if people are having difficulty, they'll churn, so this is a good way to increase retention. It's particularly useful to include these in transactional emails that are triggered by low usage metrics.

A lot of the things I mentioned above, like reminding people of the value provided by your product, will also help with retention.

Getting feedback

While most of the items above are things to add to transactional emails, this one usually requires an email of its own. Send a feedback email a couple of weeks after a user signs up and learn from your users.

Reactivating users

And here's another transactional email to add. Send an email to inactive users with the hope of reactivating them. You can do this by reminding them of the product's value, giving them a special offer, providing personalized tips on how to get more out of the product, or simply asking them why they stopped using it and then helping them personally.

Tools

The email delivery service you use is important, as it can affect the deliverability of your emails (not to mention your wallet). Here are some options I've seen recommended a lot here on IH. Most have a free plan or trial, but I'll include their cheapest paid tiers below for comparison.

• Mailgun: $35/mo
• Sendgrid: $19.95/mo
• Postmark: $15/mo. Here's what @richardesigns had to say: Sendgrid but also Postmark. Postmark is better for your rich content and their delivery speeds are amazing. Sendgrid has good stack trace for figuring out why a particular email may not have arrived.
• Sidemail: $14.25/mo and it's made by a fellow indie hacker, @pkrupar
• Waypoint: $20/mo
• Sendinblue: $25/mo
• Amazon SES $0.10 per 1000 emails + $0.12 per GB of attachments. Cheap, but I saw a lot of indie hackers complaining about using it. Here's what @delicado had to say: I use SES. The deliverability isn't the very best but it's very cheap (less than a dollar a month - I'm using it for registration confirmation and verification/reminder emails).
• Mailchimp: $13/mo and they do include transactional emails.

Here are a few templates to get you started if you aren't going with a tool that offers templates. And here's some inspo.

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