Earn your place in your user’s inbox — 4 types of email communications
Over the years, email has been proclaimed dead many times by the inexperienced who tend to extrapolate trends to infinity and don’t realize patterns will stabilized and redistribute. In fact, there are numerous stats that indication email will be with us for some time:
- Over 4.037 billion email users. This figure is predicted to reach 4.481 billion by 2024 which is a growth of 3% yearly. — Radicati Group (2021)
- 96% of consumers check their email every day. — DMA Consumer Tracker (2021)
- Over 70% of Consumers believe email is the best channel for company contact, preferring it almost twice as much as any other channel: 46% compared to 26% for post, and 24% for text or face-to-face. DMA Consumer Tracker (2021)
Types of email sends
That’s not to say there aren’t any problems with email. We are inundated by email both professionally and personally. Remember this feeling/perspective and use it to guide your approach to emailing your users. Because we put a lot of effort into our emails we tend to assume… “of course the users want to get this email I sent them” but in reality there may only be a passing interest at best in most cases… and while there is light interest they are likely to prioritize an uncluttered inbox more than the possible value our communication might have in their eyes. This feeling of clutter is exacerbated because it is far too easy for bad actors to spam recipients even with authentication methods aimed to protect us like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, etc. We continue to get unwanted emails from illegitimate sources and often from legitimate senders. Meeting Privacy Laws (which we’ll touch on later) is the lowest bar. Earning a place in the user’s inbox as wanted mail is a much higher bar. To do that we have to talk about the receiver’s expectations and the types of email an organization has.
Transactional
Transactional emails are Emails that are sent to an individual recipient following a commercial transaction or specific action performed by that person, such as a purchase, a password reset request, or registration to your event. If there is more than one follow-up, it’s a best practice to set the expectation with the recipient and give them the option to unselect follow-up they may feel is extraneous, ahead of time (i.e. during registration allow the user to skips hotel recommendations and event reminders etc). Because this is anticipated and expected by the user and is a direct response to a transaction or action, an Opt-in is not required (though it might be a good idea to check their privacy status and ask for if they would like to update if they are not currently Opt’d in). These should be exempt from any email-sending frequency limits.
Operational
Operational emails are intended for sharing important information specific to a customer or based on a specific customer’s activity. This also applied to users of communities. Examples include product, service or community changes that the user should be made aware of as it affects their product/service and may need them to take action. These communications should avoid any obvious marketing/promotional content. While this isn’t anticipated they are expected to be informed of changes to product and service they have with you an Opt-in is not required (though it might be a good idea to check their privacy status and ask for if they would like to update if they are not currently Opt’d in). These should be exempt from any email sending frequency limits.
Subscriptions
These are often confused with Topics of interest but are very different things. A subscription is a communication user can sign up to receive. These typically will revolve around a topic and will often have a set cadence (i.e. monthly) and there an expectation there will be regular content generated under this communication. This is the main difference, while subscription centres may ask a person about topics of interest… there is no commitment to routinely communicate about that topic. It’s mere a way to test interest in topics. Because people Opt-in to subscriptions, these should be exempt from any email sending frequency limits. Inviting non-subscribers to join a subscription and sending them a sample should be treated as General Marketing.
General Marketing
The last category of marketing email sends is broad and includes a lot of types of content and formats. These are all of the emails sent that are not anticipated and don’t fall into one of the above categories. All of these need to follow Privacy Status requirements of the user’s country and your business’s email sending frequency limits. Let’s look at some common examples.
