Email is still one of the fastest, most convenient ways to interact with your customer base, employees, or stakeholders.
Learn how to move deals forward, onboard staff or customers, and take payments faster with transactional emails.
Transactional Email Definition
What is a Transactional Email?
Marketing email
A marketing email will contain a commercial message intended to nurture leads or make a sale in some way.
This can include selling to prospects who aren’t yet customers or contacting existing customers for an upsell. Marketing emails are subject to many regulations, such as CAN-SPAM.
Transactional email
A transactional email is a communication your company sends to share information or complete a task. Because these messages are more straightforward and don’t involve promotions, compliance isn’t as strict.
You should still honor opt-in and opt-out rules and follow compliance regulations that apply to your business or industry.
The audiences for transactional emails can be wider than just customers. They may also include staff and other stakeholders.
Transactional Email Examples
Password reset emails
Order confirmations
Shipping Notifications
Invoice and receipt emails
Account details
Payment notifications
eSignature requests
What Can a Transactional Email Platform Do?
It’s important to consider your company’s needs when choosing the correct transactional email platform. Learn what a typical transactional email platform should be able to do.
- Send business communications: Ideally, the software you choose to send transactional emails will include SMS too. This way, you can communicate with customers whichever way is most convenient for them.
- Securely send documents: Companies need a way to send confidential contracts or include personal health information (PHI) in transactional emails. Look for a HIPAA compliant transactional email platform for secure documents.
- Request esignatures: If your company is looking for a transactional email platform, you probably need esignatures on contracts or other paperwork.
- Request photo and file uploads: Many companies require photos (ID, insurance card) or file uploads from customers or other stakeholders. Your transactional email platform should be able to request photo and file uploads from customers.
- Request payments and send payment reminders: Request a payment from customers, send a reminder about an upcoming payment, or send a receipt with a transactional email.
PDCflow’s All-In-One Communications, Documents, and Payments
PDCflow document, payment, and esignature software makes it simple to send all types of transactional emails to customers, so you can keep deals moving.
Our features come with all of the transactional email services you need with flexible options that make it a seamless, cost-effective solution.
PDCflow for transactional email and other secure communications
PDCflow offers secure communications through both email and SMS.
- We monitor email deliverability rates
- We manage opt ins/opt outs
- HIPAA compliant
- Reduces PCI compliance scope
Lots of deals require more than one recipient.
Use multi-recipient messages to send a contract to more than one signer.
Include a payment request for one or more people and choose the signing order if needed.
Onboarding clients, patients, or employees requires a lot of paperwork.
- PDCflow lets you send up to five documents at once.
- Create unlimited templates for all of your different document workflows.
Request legally binding esignatures.
PDCflow sends secure transactional emails and SMS esignature requests, so you can get signatures and authorizations in minutes.
Unlike competitors, PDCflow payments are built into our software.
- No plugins
- Customizable payment portals
- Recurring payments
- In-depth reporting
Request customer photo uploads.
Collect photo IDs, insurance cards, or other pictures in our secure, HIPAA compliant transactional email and SMS platform.
Use PDCflow’s transactional message service to send bulk messages to large lists of customers.
- Send to up to 5,000 contacts in one workflow.
- Easy spreadsheet upload.
Automated email reminders give your customers a second nudge to complete a request before it expires.
Set up reminders when you create a workflow, and our system automates the rest.
Create a professional, consistent look and feel to your transactional emails. WIth PDCflow custom branding, customize messages with:
- Your company’s logo
- Brand colors
- Brand statement (via custom text)
- Your company’s email domain
Monitor email delivery statuses:
- Know whether an email is delivered
- Know when an email is opened/clicked by the recipient
- Track recipient progress through the request, so you know when it has been completed
Examples of Transactional Emails
Settlement letters
Some companies want to send offers to customers to pay off an overdue bill at a discount or before a certain deadline.
Send settlement letters to customers through a transactional email to make it faster and easier to see your message.
To capture many payments at once, use bulk sends to send settlement offers to a large customer list with minimal effort.
Onboarding paperwork
Many HR teams have employee handbooks to send out, or company policies to sign during onboarding.
With PDCflow, companies can send up to five documents in one message, so you have all of your new hire documents accessible in one place.
Payment requests or reminders
One of the most common ways companies use transactional email is to take payments. Many companies that use PDCflow send email payment requests via our secure messaging.
These requests are faster and more convenient for customers than a bill in the mail or a phone call reminder from your staff.
eSignature authorizations
Many of our customers require signed paperwork to keep business moving forward. Some of these include:
- Business applications
- Recurring payment schedule authorizations
- Staff onboarding paperwork
- HIPAA policy documents
Contract and payment
Because our software makes it easy to do several tasks in one workflow, many companies choose PDCflow to send a contract for signature along with a payment request.
Some examples include:
- A general agreement with company terms and conditions, and the final bill a customer owes.
- A law office retainer agreement and payment
- A medical office HIPAA policy and a copay request
- An event planning agreement and deposit
- A contract for large ticket items and a down payment request
Maximizing Transactional Email Engagement
Use best practices for email engagement
If your customers aren’t opening emails, you’re not accomplishing your business goals.
Design transactional emails to encourage good open and completion rates. Best practices for email engagement:
- Use custom branding. Customers feel more secure with messages that contain brand markers like logo, brand colors, and your company’s email domain.
- Customize your text, so people have the information they need like customer support information and disclosures.
- Create reusable email templates, so messages contain everything you need and look uniform, no matter who sends them.
Improve Completion Rates with Custom Branded Transactional Emails & Flow Reminders
Compliance rules
A transactional email is not subject to strict marketing email compliance rules. However, your company should still honor customer communication preferences.
Increase engagement by following compliance and listening to customers.
- Do not email customers if they haven’t opted in to that channel in some way.
- Do not continue to email customers who have unsubscribed from that communication channel.
- For certain industries with lots of compliance concerns, necessary disclosures or compliance language in your message footers.
- Comply with security requirements, such as HIPAA, PCI compliance.
Do you want to send transactional emails and SMS messages to customers for faster esignatures, payments, and more?
Request a demo to see how PDCflow can help.
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- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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