There are two types of email service providers. Bulk email services deliver emails to many people at once. Transactional email services send specific messages to a single person. Most businesses and organisations benefit from using both transactional and bulk email.

In this article, you will learn about transactional email and how you can use it.

Definitions

Bulk email
Emails sent from one sender to multiple recipients, usually for marketing purposes.

Transactional email
Email sent by the sender to one recipient, usually related to account activity or a commercial transaction. Examples include password reminder emails, purchase confirmations and personalised product notifications.

Non-subscribed contacts
These are the contacts in your audience Sparrow Mailing who have interacted with your shop but never signed up to receive your bulk email. They can receive transactional emails such as purchase confirmations and receipts, as well as ads and greeting cards.

Automation
A tool that lets you create an email or a series of emails triggered by a sending event.

Order notifications
Automatic transactional emails triggered by purchase activity in your connected shop.

Abandoned cart email
Automatic transactional emails triggered when someone adds products to their online cart without completing the purchase.

Mandrill
A delivery API for sending transactional emails from a website and various applications. Mandrill is offered as an add-on on top of monthly plans.

How transactional emails work

Transactional emails let you provide information that is relevant only to the recipient. These emails can provide requested information or remind someone that an action is needed, for example if items were placed in a cart but the purchase was not completed.

Transactional emails generally use an API or SMTP integration to send emails. To do this, developers set up a system that sends coded templates to certain recipients based on a specific action. In Sparrow Mailing , however, transactional emails can be created as easily as any other email campaign. You can send these emails to almost any type of contact in your audience.

What you can do with transactional emails

Transactional emails let you provide information that is relevant only to the recipient. These emails can provide requested information or remind someone that an action is needed, for example if items were placed in a cart but the purchase was not completed.

If you use Sparrow Mailing eand want to send transactional emails, you can add our powerful delivery service, Mandrill, to your account Sparrow Mailing. Mandrill can be used for personalised one-to-one e-commerce emails, as well as personalised transactional emails such as password resets, order confirmations and welcome messages.