Transactional emails vs. marketing emails: What’s the difference?

Transactional emails differ from malaysia whatsapp number data
marketing emails in their purpose and content. Whereas transactional emails are personalized to one person to communicate essential information like order confirmations or password resets, marketing emails are sent to many people to promote products and encourage recipients to take a specific action.

As a rule of thumb, a trigger-based email that communicates essential information to the customer, rather than attempting to generate sales, is a transactional email. Triggered emails that aren’t transactional emails include:

Welcome email series
Abandoned cart emails
Product recommendation or cross-sell emails
Browse abandonment emails
Surveys or quizzes
Requests for ecommerce reviews

If your customers are in the US, the public is strategically guided
you’ll need to consider federal vs. state legislation—which can sometimes look different, especially as more states pass their own consumer data privacy regulations. As of this writing, 20 states have comprehensive data privacy laws, and even more have narrow regulations that cover only certain things.

As it stands now, the federal CAN-SPAM Act offers more leeway for transactional emails. If the “primary purpose” of your email is transactional, then your subject line needs to reflect this—but you have some freedom to promote your brand in other ways.

The CAN-SPAM act allows for light overlap between transactional emails and marketing emails. The industry standard for CAN SPAM is the 80/20 rule: if 80% of your message is transactional, including essential information only, then the other 20% can be marketing messaging. If the primary purpose of an email is transactional.

Choose a marketing automation platform

A quality marketing automation egypt data platform makes creating, scheduling, and managing transactional emails easier and faster. The right tool should offer options such as:

  • Templates: Pre-made templates simplify creating transactional emails, making it easy to start sending them as soon as possible.
  • Drag-and-drop flow builders: Quality marketing automation platforms have drag-and-drop automation builders to give you absolute control over your transactional emails’ triggers and contents.
  • AI writing assistance: The right platform should assist you in creating subject lines and copy for your transactional emails to simplify the process. As B2C brands grow, their transactional messages need to scale—and AI assistance is one of the best ways to handle additional volume.
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