Transactional emails are like opinions… everybody’s got them.

That’s how the saying goes, right?

If there’s one thing I’m certain of after dozens of ecommerce and SaaS clients it’s that most people think email marketing is one of two things:

a) Product updates

b) Transactional emails

While letter A up there could be it’s very own 2,500 word article (and, let’s face it, it likely will be) letter B, transactional emails, is where the money is.

Literally.

The ROI on email is still incredibly high. One study showed an increased ROI of 42:1, up from an ROI of 38:1 in years past. And I don’t know about you but if I can put $1 into the machine and get anywhere between $38 and $42 back, I’m putting all of my dollars into that machine.

And, sure, most of the ROI from email comes from emails that are actively selling.

Emails like:

• Onboarding sequences
• Win-back campaigns
• Webinar flows
• Feature release announcements
• End-of-year upgrade to annual plans

Transactional emails don’t often get credit for any of those $42 in email ROI. I mean, they’re the emails you send when a transaction has been made. They (ideally) communicate a clear message, share information a customer is either looking for or will need in the near future, and they’re almost always deleted once that task is completed.

The problem is: 

Transactional emails are often written off as nothing more than a receipt. 

They’re even typically in a completely separate system from traditional marketing emails. They’re also usually written when the product launches and then forgotten about.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten about your own transactional emails. 

In her cornerstone user experience book, Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra says 

“Don’t just upgrade your product, upgrade your users.”

Well consider the fact that every single email from your brand to the user’s inbox is a chance for an upgrade.

You’re taking time out of your customer’s day asking them to open and read / act on / reply to / file those transactional emails so why not make that time they’re spending with you more awesome?

And remember, in most cases, you don’t need expressed permission to send transactional emails, but you HAVE to get customer consent to send marketing emails. Customers can’t unsubscribe from transactional emails, but marketing emails always have to have that unsubscribe option. 

Plus, the transactional email experts over at Postmark point out that unlike promotional emails which are bulk distributions of the same marketing message to many recipients simultaneously, transactional emails are personalized and typically sent to individuals one at a time.

Which all means that transactional emails wield some pretty gnarly power over your relationship with your customers. Especially since their open rates tend to be a lot higher than the average marketing email open rates.

Now, if you aren’t as into facts or customer-led growth as I am, you might be thinking:

Why should I care about these little things? I don’t even have a solid email marketing program. Can’t I just program the standard emails in my How To Run a SaaS Company 101 handbook and move on with my day?

And to that I say:

There is no such handbook.

And here’s why transactional emails matter to SaaS founders:

When we provide delight in the little moments, we open up opportunities for connection and a deepening of trust between brands and customers.

Tony Hsieh said in his book Delivering Happiness: 

“Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).”

And transactional emails can provide all four of those things.

Of course, you can read this entire article and know what’s possible for you, your brand, and your customers and then just keep doing it the same way you’ve always done it. Most SaaS founders I talk to haven’t looked at their transactional emails in YEARS and really don’t plan to do much with them until I convince them otherwise.

Put another way:

“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” – Morpheus, The Matrix 

So consider this your complete / ultimate / masterclass / [insert hyped up term of the moment] guide in the art of making transactional emails awesome.

A place to learn how to take your emails from this:

To this:

Below, in no particular order, are 23 (!!!) transactional emails to consider and how you can truly make a difference with each and every one.

Want an easy to follow PDF version complete with navigation links in a handy table of contents so you can quickly hop from one email to the next?

Of course you do!

Now let’s dive in.

Online registration/welcome email

If this is our first time meeting, I’d like to introduce myself. Hi, I’m Val, and I’m really into onboarding emails. Like, I wrote a whole bunch email onboarding teardowns kinda into them.

So it may come as no surprise to see this email as #1 on my list of transactional emails. 

The welcome email.

They all come in different styles and formats but typically I see a lot of:

So why does this email matter so much? What’s wrong with this one?

Well, according to Experian, initial welcome emails have “four times the total open rates and five times the click rates” compared to other emails.

No need to worry about it then, right?

Wrong.

Every step of your onboarding experience matters. Why not kick it off on a high note? Customer success expert and sought-after consultant Lincoln Murphy says “Having a poor onboarding experience for your customers can pretty much kill your growth … if not your business.”

Yikes.

Let’s not kill your business before it even gets off the ground.

Seriously, go read the teardowns.

What should you do instead?

• Get to know your customers and let them get to know you. Tell a brief story about the history of the company, make a quick video and link to it, ask them to share their biggest problem related to your industry. 
• Have ONE clear call to action (asking them to hit reply is a great one to get their inbox knowing they want your emails, btw).
• Keep it simple! 

Sure, you can send account login details (like Harvest did) but keep that separate so they can log it away into whatever (dis)organization system they use. Do that. And you also need a true, stand-alone welcome email so you build a connection with your brand new customers. 

Password change/confirmation

When people are unfamiliar with what a transactional email is, this is the one I point to. We’ve all seen them and, if you run a SaaS platform, you’re sending them.

At the moment your customer is resetting their password, they’re likely very frustrated. You’ve been there, right?

Try password #1, fail. Try password #2, fail again. Try random password you never use but maybe did this time, fail. Try logging in with Gmail, fail. Try another password, fail. Get the red error text saying you’ll be locked out if you fail one more time. Panic. Click reset password link. Head to inbox and click refresh over and over until email arrives.

Then you see this:

While functional, this email gives you an opportunity to add a little something personal, to remind your customers that you care, and to reassure them that you have their back.

What if you take a moment to acknowledge how your customer feels right now?

If I were re-writing the email above, I’d go with something like this:

Hey Val,

Forgetting things is frustrating. Forgetting your password is the top of that list for us. You too?

It looks like you might have forgotten your password for [product]. But no worries, we’ve got your back.

Click the button below to change your password:

[button] Change My Password

If you didn’t forget your password but you’re getting this email, hit reply so we can figure out what went wrong.

Heads up: nothing will change unless you click that button.

Always here for you,

[Product] Team

It’s slightly different, a tiny bit longer, and full of support. 

One other thing to consider: password reset emails often say something like “if you didn’t request this change, please ignore this email”. IDK about you but if I think someone unauthorized is trying to reset my password on my account, I start to worry.

Head that worry off at the pass and ask your customers to let you know their account may be compromised so you can put their mind at ease. Plus this builds in a chance for your team to check in with your customer when they’re frustrated. Bonus points for you!

Account verification

Like a double opt-in on an email, getting an account verified is not only a good idea, it’s a hard one to get people to act on.

Of course, having a solid confirmation page when they activate their account helps. And most of us are pretty used to having to verify our accounts with our email addresses. 

But sometimes it slips through the cracks. 

Especially when it doesn’t feel urgent.

So let’s start with what gets the email opened: that subject line.

“Verify your email” has no sense of urgency. Like really bordering on “I’ll do that whenever I get to it” kinda vibes.

Build urgency into your subject lines with something like:

One more step: verify your account
Let’s get you access now
Action required: verify your email

Or even just:

Verify your email now

Point is, something urgent is better than nothing urgent when you want people to act… urgently.

Payment confirmation

Most of the payment confirmations in my inbox are the standard receipt style/message from Stripe. Like this:

But even the tiniest bit of customization takes the sting out of that monthly reminder that your bank account is a little bit lighter.

Like this:

See that message up top?

Adding the tiniest bit of text that a) matches your brand voice (you have one of those, yes?) and b) communicates an element of caring humanness (real word) helps your customers feel like they’re more than just a credit card on file.

And since most of you are sending the most basic of payment confirmation emails, let’s step this one up, shall we?

Reminder email for an upcoming renewal

Please, for the love of Grace Hopper, please send reminder emails for upcoming payments. You and I are not going to debate those monthly payments, but we will go to blows over your annual accounts.

Getting an email letting you know several hundred (or in some cases thousands of) dollars just got deducted from your bank account is a hard pill to swallow.

I don’t want to hear that ¼ of your revenue comes from inactive accounts who just auto-pay and never notice the expense and if you remind them they might cancel and then you’d lose all of that dough and you’d have to go find customers who I DUNNO actually use your product.

Don’t wanna hear it.

Because that’s more like a positioning problem and I am not a positioning person. I’m an email person.

And on that topic: let’s send those reminder emails. Like this:

This email gave me a full month’s notice that my auto-charge was coming.

The subject line was strong enough to get me to open the email – just in case I needed to do something – and then the body copy let me know the details of the upcoming renewal and that (surprise!) I don’t have to do a thing.

Isn’t it amazing when you get an email you actually like getting?

Let’s look at a few more ways you can create that experience for your customers.

Announcements of downtime or scheduled maintenance

Ooof these are rough ones to have to send. It shows up completely unexpectedly for your customers and it’s kiiiiinda a bummer. You’re telling people they can’t use your product – the one they pay you every month for – and that doesn’t typically land very well.

In the case of your downtime emails, I have a few suggestions:

• Be very clear about the length of time the app will be down. Tell them exactly when it will start and when you expect it to end.
• Share exactly what is going to happen during the downtime.
• If applicable, tell them that you’ll continue to collect/track/save their data during downtime.
• Let them know how they’ll find out the app is back up.

This one from Vero has everything but that last one and I LOVE it:

Pricing change

Technically this should be a series of emails, not a single email. So there’s that.

But what you need to know about pricing change emails is that ya gotta make it about them. The people who you’re charging more.

Dropbox did a few emails on their pricing change recently (a series of emails dripped out over ~3 weeks works best, imo) and it all wrapped up with this one:

That [Reminder] bit in the subject line is nice because it’s, um, reminding me that this isn’t the first time they let me know about this change.

Considering the fact that the average person gets ~150 emails per day (and that’s just one type of messaging to sort through!), it’s so easy to forget that you already knew something.

Then Dropbox gets it right in those bullet points by leading with what’s in it for me.

Sure, they could have said:

We’re giving you another entire terabyte of storage!

We upped our cloud power for all of your files!
We’re gonna store your historical data for up to 30 days now!

But that makes it about them.

Not me. 

So they flipped the script and led with those beautiful benefits I’m always preaching to you about. Lovely.

Affiliate payout

This one is really fun to customize and if you aren’t already go do this stat.

Your affiliates are a marketing channel for you and your job is to treat them like they’re part of the team. Give them resources to do their job well (that’s for another article) and then shower them with praise when they do.

Like this:

Let me tell you how much I smiled when I got that email. (it was a lot)

However, even good things can become great so here are two ways to improve on what Funnelytics has going on here:

1. Stop using noreply email addresses on your transactional emails. Going through my inbox of transactional emails it looks like way too many noreply email addresses. What do I do if I have a question? Who do I talk to? 
2. Check to be sure that your liquid text isn’t broken, especially when it contains the most important piece of the email. In the Funnelytics email above I have no idea what I’m getting paid. How much is “1”??? $1? $10? $10,000??? (I hope it’s that last one.)

Creating opportunities to add a human element come easily when you’re talking to your affiliates so make the most of this transactional email. 

Usage report

A usage report email can easily go from static and boring to lively and engaging with a few changes. Take this one from Databox:

I mean, “Scorecard for Apr 3” could be a more engaging subject line.

Take a look at your Apr 3 scorecard!

Here’s your Apr 3 scorecard

Your Apr 3 stats are inside

^^^ just some ideas.

And while the rest of the email is typically auto-filled with the data from the app, why not add a little intro or wrap up line based on usage?

For instance, if they are reporting zero data (but your system is setup to email them anyways), try having an if instance where a line encouraging them to reach out to customer support or check out a quick start guide if they aren’t reporting data yet.

Something like that.

The point here is that data is only meaningful if there’s context and action around it. How are you encouraging your customers to use/keep using your product?

Subscription cancelled

Just like a payment receipt, it’s a good idea to make sure your customers (well, in this case former customers) know that what they asked for was accomplished. And when someone wants to cancel their account, it’s best to just let them.

I mean, have you been through Audible’s cancellation process?

*shiver*

Two tips to make this email shine:

• Make it clear how they can reactivate their account, should they choose
• Get personal by signing this email from a person – ideally a head of customer success or the CEO/founder

And here’s a real pro tip:

Make this email the beginning of a short series of emails that drips out over a period of a few months. Why should you keep in touch with your cancelled customers? Isn’t that kinda crazy-ex status?

Nope. While in the world of dating, it’s typically easier to get a new beau than to try to win back an old one, in the world of software actual research has shown that it’s five times cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one.

Five times cheaper.

And cancelled customers fall much closer to existing customer than new customer.

After all, they were a customer at one time.

Treat them like you never forgot them and they just might come right on back.

Double opt-in

One of my favorite emails to customize (did I already say that about another transactional email? Probably), the double opt-in is the very first inbox impression your brand new email subscriber has of your company.

And since your new email list subscriber is a potential future customer, you want that impression to be a good one.

Here’s a bland version (from a copywriting company, no less):

:sad face:

And here are two options that are soooooo much better:

Legal update*

Can you get more boring than legal talk? I mean, maybe if you’re reading calculus problems in a slow and monotone voice. But, yeah, legal stuff is bo-ring.

Usually.

Sure, your lawyer’s gonna tell you that you have to use official legal speak in your actual legal documents but who says you have to repeat that same tone in your emails? 

Nobody, that’s who.

Typeform knows what’s up:

“We’re sure this will go straight to the top of your reading list.” <<< AMAZING

Legal changes happen (looking at you, GDPR) and you have to let your customers know when they do. But you don’t have to be boring about it.

*My lawyer wanted me to add this note/disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Completed task

It’s always good to know when something you’re waiting for is done. Washing machines have buzzers, dinner has a bell, and we SaaS companies have email.

When your software has collaborators, you’re likely sending a lot of transactional emails like this one: 

Now, IDK about you but I really love those tiny celebrations that happen inside some apps.

The unicorn jumping across the screen in Asana, the celebratory icons when a queue is cleared in HelpScout, and the ever-illusive “no more email!” notice when you get to Inbox Zero in Gmail. 

Let’s all pause for a moment of reflection on that last one. It’s such a beautiful thing.

…

Okay, that’s enough.

Back to business.

Celebrations can be in-app and in email! Think about adding one word to your completed task transactional emails:

Ta-da!

(Is that two words? Maybe??)

Imagine a little “ta-da!” or “congrats” or “yipee!” in the heading of that email above. 

Think about how you’d smile at an email that says something like “yipee”.

Are your customers ready to celebrate a task being completed? If it’s big enough to send an email about it, it’s big enough to celebrate. 

Outstanding task

When a customer doesn’t come to you, you have to go to them. Task management apps are great at this and the rest of us can sit up and take notes.

Now where are your customers when they aren’t in your app?

They’re staring at their phone while they walk down the street, that’s where!

And what’s on their phone?

Their inbox!

Sending gentle nudges that an incomplete task is waiting for them to check it off is a strong way to build momentum in your app, create new habit adoption, and build goodwill amongst team members.

Asana’s email here is rock solid. Are you taking notes?

Free trial ending

A crucial part of the free trial onboarding process is that moment when the trial ends. Depending on how much they have or have not used the app during their trial, you can customize the messaging and give them options. 

But promise me one thing:

Please promise that you won’t let the trial end without at least one heads up email.

K?

Like this one that I got 3 days out from the end of my Buffer trial:

Things to note in your free trial ending email:

• How many days until the trial ends
• What plan they’re currently on (what features they had access to on the trial)
• The cost of that plan moving forward
• What they need to do to keep their account active
• How they can get help if they need it

And see how Buffer has this email signed by a person?

That one trick tells the customer that there’s a real human waiting on the other end of this email, ready to help them. That Heather-Mae is there, sipping her tea, fingers at the ready to zip off a fast reply should they need it.

So comforting.

Here’s another variation on this theme that we wrote for Podia:

Dunning

Dunning emails are kinda the worst to get.

Your credit card isn’t working. Cue the panic.

I know my heart races when I find out a credit card isn’t working properly. And ever since the dunning gods figured out how to auto-update credit card expiration dates to the new date, they’re honestly pretty rare to encounter.

But when you’re at risk of losing access to your account (or, in this case, shipment) without a valid credit card on file, it can make your heart race a bit.

So tread lightly on language in dunning emails, m’kay?

Like Butcher Box does:

Or this one from Spotify:

A few copywriting tips to add compassion into your emails:

• Assume the fault is yours, not theirs. 
• Offer to help.
• Be patient. Let them know how long they have to fix the problem.
• Be human. Sign this email by a person, not “Team X”.

You can add the same elements into your subject line too. Lines like “Can you help us with your card on file?” or “We need your help: credit card issues” land a lot better than (what seems to be… standard?) “Urgent attention needed!”.

Don’t worry. The sense of urgency is there when you start talking cancelled accounts and credit card problems. Truuuuust me.

Refund

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Much like ol’ Cancellation Email, when a refund is owed to a customer, let’s make it as quick and painless as possible.

Refund emails come for all sorts of reasons so you want to be careful with any fancy wording on this one. But you can still have fun customizing those Stripe emails.

For instance, check out that notice at the bottom:

Your refund has been issued by Wordable. It may take about 5 to 10 days to appear on your statement, if it takes longer please contact your bank for assistance.

Basically: don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Now aside from that notice containing a giant run-on sentence, it also doesn’t offer much in the way of support.

No matter why a customer is getting a refund, they still deserve to feel like they matter to you and your brand (see also: Cancellation Emails).

Let me rewrite this one for Wordable:

We’ve just processed your refund here at Wordable HQ. The banks tell us that it can take anywhere from 5 to 10 days for that refund to appear on your statement. If it’s been 10 days and you still aren’t seeing it, email us at help@wordable.com and we’ll help sort things out.

Yes, of course they’re going to have to talk to their bank too.

And you can tell them that… when they reach out for help. Ya know what else happens when they email you for help?

You get another positive touch point with your customer! 

That, my friend, is what transactional emails are allllll about.

Invitation

Diving back into that collaborative SaaS world, it’s time to think about how your transactional emails that are going to non-customers (I like to call them not-yet-customers). 

When one of your customers needs to hear from someone else, they’ll trigger an invite email to be sent out. 

Sometimes they look like this:

Unfortunately, if the potential collaborator is not already using your product, this is their first impression of your brand.

Note: this particular transactional email matters a lot so pay attention.

First impressions matter, especially in SaaS. Double especially in email.

I mean, I use and love Notion but that email above? It does the platform zero justice if I had never used it before.

Think back to that welcome email and pull some of the elements from that message into this one. Yes, you want the invite to be clear but you also have to know that you’re potentially talking to a future customer here. So woo them. Woo. Them.

Future-pace them (a little conversion copywriting term meaning: show them what their life will look like when they, too, become a customer) and help them see what they can’t yet see.

Like this:

Ahhhh much better.

Social proof (likes and shares)

Another transactional email that kinda shows up out of nowhere (this seems to be a theme, no?), social proof emails are the FOMO queens of all transactional emails.

Do you wanna go bland?

Or bold?

If you’ve read this far, you can guess which one is my favorite of these two.

What’s interesting is both of these platforms (and really any platform doing social proof emails) are all about building community.

And what does a community want?

(Hint: it’s the same thing all humans want.)

Belonging!

And as a community leader you want engagement inside your community, yes?

YES!

Craft your social proof emails to a) encourage that engagement, b) create a sense of belonging, and c) keep that FOMO right on rolling and rolling.

Milestone

Let me tell you why I love this milestone email from Teachable.

Is it the Ron Swanson GIF? Maybe.

Is it the onomatopoeia in the very first word? Could be.

Is it that they proactively answer a big question most people have in the PS? Pretty likely.

Is it that it’s signed by, not only an actual person, but the founder? You’re onto something.

Or is it all of the above plus the conversational tone, details on what to expect next, and highlighted way to get even more out of the app?

Ding ding ding!!!

^^^ THIS ^^^ is a transactional email. Wanna tell me that transactional emails can’t look and feel like marketing emails? Ankur and I beg to differ.

Ticket received

Help me, help you. (Is 2 references to Jerry Macguire in a single article too many? I think not.)

Falling into that category of making your customers feel seen and heard, a ticket received email is a good idea for almost every company. It also happens to be a great place to add a punch of personality to your relationship with your customer.

Think about it: if a customer is sending in a ticket/help request, they are likely frustrated, confused, or generally in need of something. Wouldn’t you like to know that someone somewhere is listening (or will listen very soon) if you were in that position?

There are a few things that need to go into this email:

• Hours of operation for customer support
• Typical response timeline
• Link(s) to help docs and/or community forum

And a big ol’ digital smile to top it all off. 

I’d say Greetabl is knocking it out of the park above with the exception of that typical response time. “As quickly as possible” means different things to different people and if there’s one thing I know about people it’s that they like specifics. Give it to them.

Account update

When things change on a customer’s account, they deserve a digital record of that.

Transactional emails are that record.

Like this one:

(Related: per the email above, after using Klaviyo for some time we finally became official partners. Master Partners, to be specific. *applause* )

Now, you certainly want to be to-the-point with your messaging so it doesn’t get lost but there’s brevity and then there’s…. stuffy?

Hi {firstname.lastname} is just so formal. And, hey. Your customer already has an account. There’s no need for formalities. Ditch that last name and stick with a first name only field to take it down a notch.

You could also add in a message related to the account like a little “we’re so glad you’re here” or “we couldn’t do this without you” kinda thing. Ya know, connect with the person taking the time to read the email. I mean, you have them right there. Might as well use your inbox collateral wisely.

Reminder

How many notifications do you get in one day? 200? 700? 275,000,000??? 

We all can use friendly nudges and reminders to get things done and your customers are no different. 

Reminder emails are also often sent out to outside collaborators so you want to handle that interaction with grace. And please know that sending a reminder email when a task is left undone is not bugging your customer.

Let’s say that again, but together this time:

Sending a reminder email is not bugging your customer.

You are not “bothering them” or “being annoying” or any of the other excuses I hear about transactional emails. Well, not if you do it right.

Check out this stellar example(and note the lessons from the invite email tips in action here):

So don’t be shy: send reminders regularly until the task is done. 

Hey, I have one Slack workspace I was invited to and never joined and I still get periodic emails reminding me of the invite over a month later.

I’ll get to it… one day.

Plus…

If you’re in ecommerce or ship a physical product then there’s a world of other transactional emails you’ll need. I’m taking emails like:

• Cart abandonment
• Order confirmation
• Shipping confirmation
• Order received
• Order cancellation
• Post-purchase feedback
• And more!

But we’ll save those for another day.

For now, you have some work to do.

Remember:

Transactional emails aren’t just utilitarian. They give you an opportunity to engage with your customers and build trust with every click in their inbox. Adding personality and personalization isn’t just a good idea, it’s a must for a customer experience that leaves a strong first, middle, and final impression.

What transactional emails are you sending right now that need a fresh set of eyes on them?

We’re here to help!

To get in touch with our team to be those eyes, send an email to hello@fixmychurn.com. 

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Drop your name and email address in the form below and we’ll send it over to you right away.