Most firms say transactional email is a priority. But their actions don’t always reflect it, according to
Transactional Email Benchmark Report 2018, a study released on Wednesday by SparkPost.
Of 1,800 firms surveyed, 38.5% have received email delivery complaints. Worse, 41% of those who see
transactional email as “very important” have received them.
They can only blame themselves. Of those who report delivery problems, for example, 23% do not use email authentication.
And 46% fail to use dedicated IP addresses for these emails.
In a broader way, 72.5% do not conduct A/B testing of their transactional emails.
The term “transactional
email” used to mean automated emails that dealt mostly with utilitarian issues — i.e., ecommerce, receipt and shipment notification. But it now covers a broader range of interactions.
And companies seem to recognize this — 82% see this practice as important to customer engagement, 80% see it as important to retention and 72% to conversion.
Of those studied,
45.9% cite operational functions as the business purpose of transactional emails, while 32.1% cite user onboarding and setup as the goal and 21.4% list ongoing education.
As for actual
practices, they send these types of transactional emails:
- New user welcome messages — 77.8%
- Application notifications — 69.6%
- Password resets —
68.9%
- Onboarding — 40.7%
- Education — 35.8%
But the messages don’t always get through, although some industries are worse than others. Among the
industries that have received complaints:
- Software and technology — 43.3%
- Retail and ecommerce — 38.8%
- Financial services and insurance —
38.5%
- Media and publishing — 30.7%
As indicated, this may be attributable to internal practices and staffing. Of the firms polled, 42% dump transactional email
copywriting — an activity requiring skilled writers — on engineering, IT or operations teams.
At the same time, 37% of the large senders use DIY processes or marketing
infrastructure. Here are the sectors that rely on in-house teams or so-called marketing tools:
- Financial services — 33.3%
- Media and publishing — 29.7%
- Retail and ecommerce — 29.5%
- Software and technology — 16.6%
How do brands know if their emails are working? The respondents measure opens (65.5%), click
(69.7%), delivery (48.4%) and time to delivery/latency (19.5%).