Sometimes less is more

We just bought some new desks, to replace the old ones that date back to the days of CRT monitors.
The supplier we bought them from, Autonomous, did a nice set of triggered sends throughout the sales process – “we’ve received your order”, “we’ve shipped your order”, “your order has been delivered”.
That’s not rocket science – you plug your ordering system and your FedEx shipping API into your SendGrid API and you’re done.
I’d normally expect glossy, rich-text branded emails with logos and images, but Autonomous went in the opposite direction.
The mail is “From:” Mark@Autonomous, not a generic role account. It’s signed off by Mark, and has his contact info at the end of the email – but in a “I typed my email and phone number here for you” sort of way rather than a fancy signature block. It’s HTML, but it’s not using any images (other than a single tracking image) and is using the mail clients default font.
The first mail has an invoice attached, with a nice customized name (“Laura’s Order.pdf”).
 

The second one says that the warehouse manager, Eddie, has shipped the order and includes four fedex tracking numbers, all linked to the fedex tracking site, and a soft upsell for an assembly service.

The third links to a youtube video about how to put the desks together, and pulls in Justin, the customer experience manager.

It feels very small company and individual service. But looking at the way the emails are put together, and the times they were sent, I’m fairly sure it’s automatic, templated triggered sends. But I’m not entirely sure, and that’s part of the charm.
Sometimes less is more.