Future Steps Creative Podcast – Episode #92
Listen or view below:
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about transactional emails and what they are.
Also, we’ll talk about some tools or services that you can use to get this setup.
Main Takeaways/Overview
*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.
Transcript
*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.
So for example, if you are collecting leads on your website and you’re delivering content and you’re even doing transactions, this is all part of a platform that is delivering a service or a resource. Right? So you need a way to be able to send notifications out, for example, when a purchase takes place or when someone, submits a contact form, you wanna get that notification come through to you for sure as the business owner, and you would normally do that via email. Also, you may also want to give, send out a notification to the, person who submitted that form, so they know that you’ve received their form and to tell them what the next steps are going to be. So it’s all about communicating and delivering that experience, that user experience that’s going to be seamless and, pleasant. So you need these transactional emails, just to keep an open line of communication. Now it’s different to a, say a brand email that you have that people can communicate with you in your inbox. Right? This is not the same as you setting up an, like an info at email address and then sending an email out from that and then receiving that back into your inbox when someone replies. This is these emails are specifically designed or these types of emails that we talk about are designed to work just on your website or platform.
Marlon McPherson00:02:20 – 00:03:38
There are some services that are dedicated to delivering these types of emails. And what they do is they have a setup different to your standard email communication type emails, where they’re designed to handle bulk emails and designed to handle certain things that are quite technical to do with systems and, tools and other other software that you might have installed on your website. So it’s a little bit complicated or technical to explain, But essentially, you will have your normal email at your domain name that you’re using for your inbox, but you would then need to have a separate service provider that is going to connect with your website in order to deliver those notification emails. Normally on a WordPress website, which is what I primarily use, you would have what’s called an SMTP plug in that will need to connect to one of these transactional email service providers. Now these are generally paid services that you would need to subscribe to and have like, a monthly bill for. However, you can start for free. There’s a one option that I have here that I’m gonna run through. The free option to start with transactional emails is one called Brevo, b r e v o.
Marlon McPherson00:03:39 – 00:04:12
I think it’s brevo.com, you can get to the website there. They’re formerly known as Sendinblue. I’ve had an account with them for a while, and now if you sign up for free, you get 300, daily emails. Okay. You get free up to 300 emails that you can get sent out from your website. So if you’re not doing loads and loads of, transactions on a daily basis, then this should be absolutely fine for you. But they do have some paid plans that you can upgrade to if you need more. All you need to do is go over there, sign up for your free account, but then you’ll need to connect it with your domain name.
Marlon McPherson00:04:12 – 00:05:06
And they have instructions on that is from your business or brand. Now with Breville, as again you can start for free. I’ve not used their paid services, but I have used them to test out with, certain projects that I’ve got or even to get started with some of my clients. What I’ve used or what I use in my business is Amazon SES, which is short for Simple Email Service. Now this is a one of the cheapest ways you can actually do transactional emails. The setup is quite technical and it it might be quite daunting if you’re quite new to this. So I don’t recommend it if you’re a DIYer type of person who’s looking to do it yourself, but it is an option. There are videos online that show you how to set set up Amazon SES.
Marlon McPherson00:05:07 – 00:05:50
Right. And it’s part of the AWS suite, the Amazon Web Services Suite. One that I do recommend, I think would be a bit more user friendly for someone that’s starting out that is not quite technical, is to use Elastic Email. They’re quite competitive with their pricing as well and they give you an easier way to connect to their system. You don’t have to do a lot the technical stuff that you would normally have to do in Amazon to get that set up. So those are my, recommendations I have for you. There are, of course, tons of other ones that you could look into if you search transactional email service provider. You will see, essentially loads loads that you can choose from and it’s just a matter of what you’re looking for in terms of any additional services.
Marlon McPherson00:05:51 – 00:06:23
For example, Breville, they do email marketing as well. So if you you’re looking to try them out for that, then that’s fine. I don’t use it for that. I’ve never used it for email marketing. I use my own solution. So yeah, pretty much that’s what you need to get started. Now it’s worth saying that if you set up a WordPress website depending on the hosting that you’re on, you may be able to send out emails, as in transactional emails from the website without getting one of these services that I’ve mentioned connected. However, it’s not recommended to do that because the hosting servers are not designed for emails.
Marlon McPherson00:06:23 – 00:07:10
And as a result of that, they are unreliable when it comes on to emails. Sometimes they may send, other times they might not or they might not even land in the inbox of your potential customer or your client. So just to have things more reliably running and to provide the best user experience, it’s best to have a transactional email service provider set up with your website. That’s the quick tip or set of tips that I’ve got for you in today’s episode. Feel free to subscribe and follow me on the social media platforms and share this out to anyone that you think may find it useful. If you need some help and some other resources, head over to marlonmacpherson.com, and you will see exactly, some next steps as to what you can do depending on what you’re looking for. Thank you. Have a great day, and I’ll speak to you in the next one.
Marlon McPherson00:07:10 – 00:07:11
Take care.