There are really three types of emails that companies send out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The primary benefit of transactional emails is that they enable you to keep customers informed about their interactions with your business in real time. Transactional emails can include confirmation emails for purchases, password reset emails, and other types of messages that provide value to the recipient. It’s important to avoid sending email that recipients could perceive as being spam or unwanted. If they flag your email as being spam, then there’s a danger your whole domain name could be permanently flagged as spam and being added to a list such as the Spamhaus<\/a> blacklist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By delivering transactional emails quickly and accurately, you can help build trust between you and your customers while providing them with a better user experience. Additionally, sending automated messages helps reduce the workload on customer service representatives who would otherwise have to manually respond to such inquiries from customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Transactional emails can be sent from a different domain name from your main corporate email domain. There are some good reasons why you might want to set up a different domain from which to send your transactional emails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Protecting your company domain name reputation is important. Your main company domain name is one of your brand’s most important assets. Getting your domain name flagged as a spammer is one of the worst things that can happen to your corporate digital footprint (getting your social media accounts hacked is another). Since transactional emails are important, putting them on their own domain, provides a ‘fast lane’ to the users inbox, so that password reset or ecommerce order confirmation email gets there quickly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Transactional email providers that provide these high-availablility email servers are separate from your corporate email provider such as Office 365. This requires a separate domain name or sub-domain to be used to send transactional emails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One way to improve the reputation of your domain when using transactional emails is to make sure that you are sending relevant and useful information to your recipients. This means the user is expecting to see, or is not surprised to see the email. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To further build trust of your domain, you can use authentication methods such as SPF and DKIM to help protect your domain from being used for spam. This can improve your domain reputation and increase the chances that your emails will be delivered successfully to your recipients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some email providers offer blazing fast delivery specifically for transactional email. Companies such as SendGrid<\/a> and Mailgun<\/a> offer free and low-cost solutions. In addition, they offer an API key that allows you to integrate their solution directly into your website programmatically to avoid login issues when a password is changed. Using these services that specialize in transactional email, ensures deliverability of your valuable emails from your website to your customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Website forms often use “noreply” email addresses to indicate to the recipient that they should not expect a response if they reply to the email. An example of a noreply email is an email address that does not actually exist on the company email server such as noreply@yourcompany.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a very good reason why a no-reply email should not be used. Email is a conversational medium. Users receiving an email, even if it is an expected transactional email such as an order confirmation, expect the ability to be able to hit ‘reply’ and send a response. Seeing their email go to a no-reply email is a frustrating user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To ensure your transactional email addresses are monitored for replies, a reply-to setting can be configured that will send any replies to a monitored email address on your corporate network, rather than the non-monitored transactional email address. Your sending email address may be orders@mailgun.yourcompany.com but your reply-to address could be customer-service@yourcompany.com <\/p>\n\n\n\n With technology changes, website updates, and server o\/s updates, your website forms may stop working without you realizing. It’s important to conduct manual tests regularly, and after any website update. In addition, it’s good practice to implement an alert system that montors when a website form fails to send an email. In addition, a backup copy of all website form submissions should be saved to a database, in case the email fails.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow to set up transactional email<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why not use noreply@ email addresses?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How do I know my website form emails are working?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n