SendGrid email experts Danny Randa and Tim Falls took us through the landscape of transactional email and presented tips on how to take advantage of this communication channel. Later, they answered some questions that they did not have the time to answer during the webinar here.

1. How to Get the Most Out Of
Transactional Email
Webcast Q&A With Danny and Tim

2. Last week, SendGrid email experts Danny
Randa and Tim Falls took us through the
landscape of transactional email and presented
tips on how to take advantage of this
communication channel. Later, they answered
some questions that they did not have the time to
answer during the webinar here.
You can also access the webinar here.

3. Q: Without following CAN-SPAM, what sort of open rate is normal
to expect?
A: With transactional emails, the CAN-SPAM regulations can be
removed from the equation. Normal open rates for transactional email
can vary, depending on the exact purpose of a specific email- e.g.
purchase receipts will likely earn much higher open rates than
firmed/follower notifications. When analyzing your transactional email
open rates, you should aim to achieve a 30-50% open rate. Depending
on the exact nature of each category of mail your app is sending you
may see rates lower or higher then this. For really important
emails, you could see open rates as high as 80-90%, or as low as 10-
20% for less important messages that may be filtered and/or deleted
before ever being opened.

4. Q: What’s the increase in deliverability from newsletter to
transactional? Percentage?
A: Once again, this is difficult to put a hard number on. If you are
following best practices and sending relevant, valuable content; both
types of emails can achieve high deliverability. However, you’re likely to
see much higher rates of unsubscribers, even if you have a strong opt-
in policy process. So, even the best newsletters are more likely to run
into deliverability problems than transactional emails simply because
they are more susceptible to user behavior that will negatively affect the
sender reputation.

5. Q: As someone who uses email to market our products, my
concern is that a company like Facebook will partner directly with
companies and pass messages through the Facebook system and
bypass the email inbox. Should this idea bother me?
A: I don’t see this as a strong possibility or a likely threat, especially
in the near term (i.e. the next 5-10 years). This really just comes back
to the argument as to whether or not email is dead, and it’s not. Social
networks and their built-in messaging will certainly have their place in
online communications, but the effect on email usage will be negligible.
Companies like Facebook use email heavily to market its own
products, for advertising, and for transactional email. Facebook loves
email and couldn’t live without it.

6. Q: How do you manage all of the out of office/auto reply bounces?
A: If you get auto-replies, such as the “out of the office” reply when
you send a transactional email, then you should just let that message
be. These are called “soft bounces”, and they’ll eventually get the email
when they get back to their inbox. If you notice that you get this reply
repeatedly when sending to a particular email address, it’s probably a
good idea to remove them from your list, or place them in a
suppression list, so as to not send to them anymore. Some people
recommend allowing 3-5 soft bounces before removing someone from
your list.

7. Q: How do you feel about HTML versus plain text emails for
transactional emails?
A: In most cases, you’d ideally include both variations (i.e. send
multi-part mime emails). Plain text emails should be the priority if you
are only going to send one version. Most people do not have their mail
set up to display all images. Assume that they won’t enable
images, and design your emails with this assumption firmly in place.
You can create your transactional emails in such a way that your
customer will see buttons and colors and such in plain-text versions-
you just have to do some homework and be smart about your design.
Look at some examples from other companies that are doing this well.
If you are including HTML, take advantage of its capabilities and create
an awesome experience for those customers who do enable images by
default or on a per-message basis.

8. Q: The deliverability guide you have mentioned doesn’t go into
exactly what a good ratio for words to images is. Does SendGrid
provide any kind of support or access to a test bed for standard
SPAM nets to see possible scores? Is there a way to see what the
potential for this email to be caught?
A: Great Question! We recommend IsNotSpam and
ProgrammersHeaven as great tools to double check the potential of an
email to b caught by a spam filter. At SendGrid, we do have a spam
checker app that uses SpamAssassin to assign a score to emails that
you request for us to send through your account. You can configure that
app to prevent emails from being sent that do not meet the minimum
spam score that you specify. The Drawback to this method is that it
doesn’t work for simply running your email through the test before
actually attempting to send to your customer, but we are hoping to see
some improvements to this feature in the not-too-distant future.

9. Q: How many emails can you send at one time before they will be
labeled as spam?
A: Sending a high volume of emails will not necessarily result in
any emails being flagged as spam. By following best practices outlines
on our blog, white papers, and webinars, you can achieve very high
deliverability rates consistently. Companies like Pintrest and
Foursquare send tons of transactional email and see great deliverability
because they do it right.

10. Danny Randa
daniel.randa@sendgrid.com
@dannyranda
Tim Falls
tim.falls@sendgrid.com
@timfalls