Nowadays, marketers use digital marketing for their business. Apart from being cheaper, digital marketing strategies also save a lot of energy. With digital marketing, marketers can reach the target customers at a much lower cost.

There are two kinds of emails marketers use in digital marketing, namely email marketing and transactional email. A transactional email is an email that is sent from one sender to one recipient automatically, usually related to notifications, account activity, or commercial transactions.

Emails sent to recipients are not pre-scheduled and are triggered by user interactions with your website or app. For example, a user adds some items to the cart but doesn't make a purchase. Therefore, a cart abandonment email will be sent to recapture their attention.

Benefits of Using Transactional Email

Apart from being cheaper and easier, using a transactional email service certainly brings several benefits:

1. Transactional emails improve customer service as well as building customer’s trust in your company. Having transactional email also opens up opportunities for customers to contact you if they have questions or problems.
2. Increase sales of your brand products. Brand visibility is critical to retaining customers in a highly competitive market. When you tell customers in a timely manner about their journey with you, they will clearly see your brand logo, name, and efforts. This strengthens relationships and adds a sense of familiarity to your company. With transactional emails, you can expect customers to recommend you to their friends and family.
3. Customers may forget to visit your website, and marketing emails may go unnoticed. So, how can you win back customers who are starting to drift away?
4. Transactional emails help to engage customers with direct messages that seem tailor-made for them. For example, if a customer has several items on their wish list, you can send an email to remind them about it. You can also let them know when there are discounts on products they like. Such targeted messages convert inactive customers into repeat customers.
5. Transactional emails improve customer relationships for your customers and your business, they are an opportunity to introduce your products to target consumers. Even if customers don't click on the CTA (Call-to-action) or make a purchase, they will still be aware of your offer. So the next time they want to buy something, they will always remember your product or brand. This is also a great opportunity for you because you have succeeded in increasing brand awareness.

Criteria for Best Transactional Email

There are several aspects to consider when choosing the best transactional email, here are 6 things you should consider before making a decision:

• Price/performance ratio. Transactional email tools are a significant investment. It's important to get a feel for the app before purchasing. Therefore, the best transactional email apps not only have competitive prices, but also include  free trials that allow you to try out the features without any financial commitment.
• Easy setup. There's nothing more frustrating than signing up for a transactional email app, creating an account, and not knowing how to configure your domain. Whether you're a developer or not, your team should be able to  log into your app and set it up for use without any issues.
• Customer service. Even  experts may need help. Success with a transactional email app means receiving fast and reliable support, whether in the form of live chat, email, or phone. The best tools also have an extensive and up-to-date knowledge base, so you can solve it yourself whenever possible.
• Email analytics. Data needs vary from company to company, but aggregate numbers don't hurt anyone. The best transactional email apps take into account the basic criteria of  open rates, bounce rates, and spam complaint analysis, and go beyond that to provide delivery insights that can improve your emails.
• Deliverability. There's nothing worse than a customer receiving spam shipping status emails, or worse, not receiving  updates at all. The ideal transactional email app has great deliverability, ensuring that it reaches your customers' inboxes on time.

Best Transactional Email Services in 2023

Here are 5 best transactional email services you can use for your business:

1. Postmark

Postmark specializes in one service: transactional email, and they do it well. Let's go back to basics and focus on the core of email. Postmark features fast email delivery.

The goal is to deliver all emails within 10 seconds of pressing the send button (there is a separate message stream for transactional emails to ensure timely delivery to the primary inbox). I was able to confirm this during testing. The email I sent was delivered within 7-8 seconds of being sent.

The setup instructions are very easy to understand. Simply select the language or framework you want to use and we'll guide you through the setup. I decided to use the website WordPress plugin to set it up and it was done within 10 minutes. And we felt that their knowledge base was much more accessible than other apps on this list. Postmark also has several email templates that are useful for specific use cases, such as welcome emails and password reset emails.

The analysis is very simple and represents what Postmark is generally like. Unlike other apps on this list, it doesn't have many additional features. However, if you want a reliable service provider that prioritizes transactional email, Postmark is for you.

2. mailtarget

The email API that you can use to support your profession as a developer is the mailtarget service. This is an Email API Company that provides the most complete range of services and tools, including email API which supports the use of API, SMTP, and SDK. The email API that mailtarget offers is also supported by various programming languages and sandboxes to make it easier for developers to run tests.

Our email API services allow you to:

• Send transactional emails straight to the destination inbox. Our email API comes with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, so you can send emails of any size or time directly to your target's inbox.
• Strengthen your teamwork. Build more targeted communications with a structured coding style using email API features specifically designed for seamless collaboration.
• Experience high-level security protection. Our tools are designed to take your data protection seriously. Install multiple security and authentication layers to protect your domain and IP reputation.
• Report your delivery results neatly. Our email API lets you focus on your work. Create reports and analyses in easy-to-read formats.

Aside from email API, you can also try our SMTP relay service. Get reliable bulk emails delivered directly to recipients' inboxes without worrying about spam folders or lost messages and these following benefits too:

• The user-friendly interface makes setup quick and easy, so you can start using it right away.
• Customize email delivery with options such as authentication, encryption, and more.
• Stay on top of your email sending with detailed delivery reports including bounce notifications and delivery status.
• Our SMTP relay functionality is designed for large-scale email sending, ensuring reliability and scalability for your business.

3. Mailersend

MailerSend is a dream for non-technical teams and developers. The drag-and-drop email builder is very intuitive, but there's also a rich text editor and HTML for developers who want it. There are also multiple templates for transactional emails, so you don't have to create one from scratch. I opted for a drag-and-drop email builder and found 30 templates, ranging from simple shipping notifications to complex templates like "Pending Order."

The entire setup process was equally easy. There is also a domain verification step that appears as a chat box after setup is complete. This is particularly helpful as it has guides for various domain providers including GoDaddy, Wix, Namecheap, and more. This means users don't have to search for other resources outside of your app. However, if you run into any issues, the free plan offers 24/7 email support and the paid plan offers 24/7 chat support.

4. SendGrid

SendGrid is a bulk email service for sending marketing and transactional emails.  Sendgrid's free plan isn't as generous as other providers, as it's limited to 100 emails per day (learn more in our guide to Sendgrid alternatives). However,  paid plans start at an affordable price of $19.95 per month for 50,000 emails.

This bulk email sender features delivery optimization tools, a dynamic template editor, and analytics features. Unfortunately, you can't access email verification unless you pay $90 per month for the Pro plan.

5. Amazon SES

Amazon SES was once a great choice for users of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web services because it provides 62,000 free emails per month. However, in August 2023, the free tier changed to include only 3,000 emails per month for his first year.

Even if you don't qualify for these free emails, the price is very affordable at $0.10 per 1,000 emails. If you want a dedicated IP address, it costs $24.95 per month.

The downside is that everything related to AWS is incredibly complex. I'm not usually afraid to try new software services, but I found a partner in AWS. Recommended only if you already have experience using Amazon toolkits.

We hope this article solves your problem in choosing the best transactional email for business. Want to know more tips about email marketing? Or wanting to try our email marketing services? Register here!

(V.A)