Triggered and transactional emails

triggeredvstransactoinalEarlier this week I was talking on IRC with some colleagues. There was some kvetching about senders that think transactional emails are the same as triggered emails. This led to discussion about whether transactional and triggered emails are the same. I don’t think they are, but it took a while for me to come up with why I don’t think they’re the same. It took even longer to come up with definitions I liked.
Transactional Emails: Emails sent in response to direct request by the recipient. Transactional emails are usually one-off emails. Transactional emails probably don’t need an unsubscribe link, although it may be a good idea to include one just to make people feel comfortable receiving them. Examples: password reset emails, receipts, tickets.
Triggered Emails: Emails sent in response to an action by a recipient. Triggered emails can be one-off, but can also be series of emails. Triggered emails should have an unsubscribe link, so people can stop the emails if needed. Examples: cart abandonment emails, after purchase surveys, followups to software installation.
The key difference is that in a transactional email, the recipient has asked for that particular email. In a triggered email, the recipient may very well want and respond to the email, but they didn’t ask for it.
There are, as always, some grey areas here. Is a welcome message transactional or triggered? Probably transactional, but they should always have an unsubscribe link.
What about software installation followups? We’ve been looking at some alternatives to our current time tracking software which involved me setting up accounts at multiple different SaaS providers. A couple of them had triggered welcome series. These emails let me know things I could do with the software, things I still needed to set up, and led me through the process of trying out their system.
This was mostly good, but not completely. One of the series didn’t have an opt-out link, though. That was somewhat annoying because I’d already decided the tracker didn’t do what we needed. I couldn’t make the mail stop. I think if there is one thing I’d say about mail is that senders should never force someone to receive their mail.
It’s tempting for senders to define all triggered emails as transactional. Since it’s a user action that caused the mail to be sent, it must be a transactional email. But a lot of triggered emails are triggered by actions the user doesn’t know will trigger an email. Cart abandonment emails are a good example of this, not every retailer has them and so users aren’t yet expecting to get an email if they drop stuff in their carts and then leave the site.
Overall, both transactional and triggered emails have their place in a healthy email program. But they shouldn’t be confused for one another and should be treated as separate mail streams.

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Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts.

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Letting people stop transactional mail

The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions.
A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it.
Other people argued that the recipient should always be able to stop mail and that an unsub link was important, even in transactional mail.
A third group pointed out that under CASL transactional mail to Canadian residents may have to have an unsub link, even if the sender doesn’t want to add one in.
As with most questions, I don’t think there is necessarily a single answer for every mailer or sender.
There are absolutely cases where transactional messages should have an unsubscribe. Twitter notifications and Facebook notifications are just some of the examples of mail a lot of people just want to stop.
But should companies allow recipients to unsubscribe from receipts? Some people feel very, very strongly that recipients should never be allowed to unsubscribe from receipts.
The problem with that stance is it ignores the fact that people don’t always correctly type their email addresses and end up giving the address of another person as part of a purchase. Al found a report at the Consumerist where someone is getting flooded with receipts for Nook books she’s never purchased.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, not by a long shot. In fact, in the past year I negotiated a Spamhaus delisting for a very large company that wasn’t confirming email addresses of their customers. This company sells a service that sends email alerts triggered when certain actions happen. Because they were not confirming their customer’s email addresses, they ended up sending alerts to spamtraps. The alerts triggered a SBL listing.
I don’t think that the Nook owner or the alert purchaser are actually malicious or that they purposely gave the wrong email address to their vendors. But it happens, and it happens not infrequently.
What do I recommend?
Transactional mail that is only ever a single event and where that address is not associated with an account don’t need to have an unsubscribe link. If it’s a one-time email, then it’s OK to not have an opt-out link. It’s OK to have an opt-out link, but not necessary.
Transactional mail that’s associated with some sort of account should have a process in place to make sure that mail is going to the right person and if it’s not, that the wrong person can make the mis-directed mail stop. There are multiple ways to do this. One is to confirm the email address associated with the account during the account creation process. Or you can allow anyone receiving the mail to click on a link and opt-out of receiving mail.
Whatever it is, it needs to be effective and protect everyone involved. Requiring the victim recipient to hand over a bunch of personal information, like Virgin Mobile does, helps no one. Continuing to send purchase receipts to an unrelated third party is poor business practice, particularly when you’ve been informed that this is the wrong person.

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Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

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