- Types of email services
- Common email providers
- Marketing email providers
- Transactional email providers
- Using business email service for bulk emails
- Understanding email service types
- Pros and cons of using business email service
- Disadvantages
- Advantages
- Consequences of using a business email services for transactional emails
- How do I pick the right service?
- Choosing your transactional email service
- Wrapping up
When we hear "email," our mind automatically goes to our personal email addresses that we use to send emails to friends and family. This is the one that often ends with a provider name like @zohomail.com, @gmail.com, or @outlook.com. But if you're a business owner, "email" is something more than that.
For a business, there are different types of emails that take care of different aspects of the business. To ensure the best handling of each of these email categories, different types of email services have been built and evolved over time.
Types of email services
Let's break down the different types of email services that a business needs.
Common email providers
These are standard email providers that are built to send and receive professional and personal communications. Email providers like Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo fall under this category. They are designed to handle one-on-one or one-to-many communications. The email addresses provided by these services can be divided into two:
- Personal email address: These belong to the common domain of the service. For example, nathan@gmail.com, fiona@zohomail.com, rohan@yahoo.com, etc.
- Business email address: These are custom email addresses that belong to your business domain hosted with the service. For example, if your business domain is zylker.com, email addresses can be raven@zylker.com.
Marketing email providers
These are providers that are built to handle mass communication, specifically for marketing and promotional purposes. They often come with tools that can create a good marketing email and analytics that inform you of the performance of the emails. It helps you personalize emails even in bulk communications. For example, a sale announcement email or offer email are marketing emails.
Transactional email providers
Transactional email providers are built to send high volume emails, too, but unlike marketing emails, these transactional emails are triggered by user action on your business website or application. They are automated and are sent with the intention to convey information rather than to promote or sell a product. For example, order confirmation emails, password reset emails, or invoice emails are all transactional emails.
Each of these services are built differently according to the type of email they are meant to send and handle.
Should you use business email providers for bulk emails?
Now, to the question we are trying to answer: Can you send transactional emails using common email providers like Zoho Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo? In short, yes, you CAN. But SHOULD you send transactional emails using common email providers? The short and long answer is no.
Understanding email service types
A toothbrush helps keep your teeth clean and healthy, and you're familiar with it because you use it every day. But would you use the same toothbrush to brush your hair because you already have it and know how to use it? Probably not. Why? Because a toothbrush and a comb each have their own purpose. Each tool was built to fulfill its specific purpose well. So you wouldn't (or shouldn’t) use a toothbrush to brush your hair just because you possess it, know how to use it, and it would save you money.
Then why should you use a common business email service to send out transactional emails just because you already have one?
These services are built with features that handle different emails and with different goals. Standard business email providers like Zoho Mail, Outlook, or Gmail are designed for day-to-day communications. While they have the basic features and elements required for one-to-one emailing, they lack the advanced features of automation and analytics that bulk emails require.
On the other hand, while marketing email and transactional email services are both meant for bulk emails, they too come with different goals. Marketing email delivery is optimized for maximum engagement, while transactional email delivery is optimized for speed.
Since the basic functionality for all these services is to deliver emails, it is easy to overlook the need for each of these email service types, but picking the right one for the right email is crucial for every business.
Pros and cons of using business email service for transactional emails
Disadvantages of using business email providers
The reasons why you shouldn't use business email providers for transactional email sending go beyond the performance and purpose of each tool. Good transactional email sending requires features that are not provided by business email services. This leaves you with many disadvantages if you choose to use a service like Google or Outlook for transactional email sending.
Account could be blocked
Business email services aren’t built for sending high volumes of emails. Actions your users take on your website trigger transactional emails, placing them in the high-volume category. Most business email providers have a daily limit on the number of emails you can send. Using them to send transactional emails can raise red flags and lead to the email service provider (ESP) blocking your account.
Difficulty scaling to higher volumes
The sending limit also makes it difficult for your business to scale. Using your business email service for high-volume emails like transactional emails might work at the early stages of your business, but as your business grows and you see more interactions on your website or application, the email volume will also grow. Business email service is not built to handle that. You will be forced to move to a dedicated service after having spent time and effort automating your business email service.
Lack of isolation
Every business sends multiple types of emails, like business communication, transactional emails, marketing emails, and more. Isolating each type will prevent the deliverability of one type from being affected by delivery issues in another. You can't do this with your business email provider.
Not meant for automation
Your personal or business email accounts aren’t built with automation in mind. Most tasks, including sending email, are manual. You hit the “Send” button, and an email is sent out. In the case of transactional emails, the user’s action has to trigger the email. Using a transactional email service is much more productive than getting your business email to automate this process.
A feedback loop isn’t a top priority
Feedback loops are in place for the recipient server to inform the sender's server when an email has been marked as spam and why. One-on-one business messages are rarely considered spam. The occurrence of a direct email being marked as spam is rare, so most business email providers don’t have a comprehensive feedback loop tracking process. Even if they do, they may not provide you with the features required to take immediate action.
Domain authentication is optional
While most business email services have domain authentication, like SPF and DKIM, they are more often than not, optional. Your business emails might reach your recipient's inbox even without SPF and DKIM but the standards are different for high volume transactional emails. Lack of SPF and DKIM authentication is a sure-fire way to get your emails marked as spam.
Not built for the right regulations
Depending on what region your business is hosted in, your email sending has to comply with certain email regulations. It is no longer an option for businesses to be compliant as the consequence of noncompliance can be hefty. These regulations will vary for different types of emails. While a standard email service like Google or Outlook might be in the business of email sending, they might not be built with marketing or transactional email regulations in mind. On the other hand, marketing email or transactional email service is built with compliance for these specific types of emails.
Complete lack of analytics
One of the biggest disadvantages of using business email services to send transactional emails is the complete lack of performance analytics available. This leaves you with no insights to improve the performance of your email. You need to know how your emails are performing and how users are interacting with them. All of this data, such as bounces, delivered, opens, clicks, the browsers used, and more, is easily available with a transactional email service, but not available with your business email service.
No segmentation
There are many types of transactional emails, and sometimes you might be sending them from multiple businesses. Without segmentation of emails, the logs and analytics data of all emails are cluttered together in one place. On top of that, a deliverability issue in one email type can affect the deliverability of other emails without email sending segmentation. Using a business email service will leave you unable to segment how these emails are sent, as well as other data of the different types of transactional emails.
Limited design support
Most business communication happens in plain text, where you type out your message and then send the email out. This is the use case that business email providers were built for. Though they have a template feature, it’s meant mostly for you to save plain-text templates. When it comes to transactional emails, prebuilt HTML templates for each type of email, like welcome emails, order confirmations, invoices, and OTPs, can both save a lot of time and leave a better impression with the customer.
Lack of personalization
Because transactional emails are triggered by a user’s action and often carry information unique to each user, it’s key to personalize these emails. In transactional email services, this is a basic functionality. Whereas in a business email service, you would have to spend hours to get the personalization right because they’re not meant for a high volume of personalized emails.
No proper list management
Spam complaints via feedback loops or frequent bounces are detrimental to your sender reputation. Business email services have contacts, but they don’t have the features to maintain suppression lists. Transactional email services do have these features to reduce bounces and spam complaints.
Dependent on internet connection
Sending emails from business email accounts requires an internet connection. The emails will be sent only when the inbox is connected to the internet. This will simply not work for automated emails like transactional emails that need to be sent in real time as the action happens. Transactional email services are built to send directly from the server immediately on receiving the trigger—irrespective of whether the account is connected to the internet or not.
More opportunity for mishaps
When it comes to transactional email services, the email sending and associated activities are mostly automated. This leaves little room for errors or mistakes to happen. In a business email account, it all comes down to you being able to manually carry out the activity without making any mistakes. No matter how careful you are, things could slip through the cracks and could lead to issues in your email delivery or worse, customer data.
Advantages of using a business email service
To be fair in our assessment, let’s see what the advantages of using business email service are and if they really stack up against the cons. We'll also see if there is an alternative.
Familiar interface
You’re familiar with how your business email account works, so there’s no learning curve.
Alternative: Find a transactional emails service that is user-friendly and has an intuitive customer experience.
Low cost or no extra cost
If you use your business email account to send transactional emails, too, you won’t have to pay extra for another service.
Alternative: While this is true, a good tool with good deliverability doesn't always have to come with hefty price tags. You can find a service like Zoho ZeptoMail that has affordable pricing and a pay-as-you-go payment model.
Already set up and ready to use
You can avoid the additional work of having to set up a transactional email service by using your existing business email setup.
Alternative: Most transactional email services provide multiple setup options that are fast and easy. For example, with ZeptoMail, you can use the SMTP configuration for a quick setup. It’s as easy as copying and pasting credentials.
Now that you've seen both the pros and cons, it’s evident that the disadvantages of using a business email service for transactional email sending outweigh the minimal advantages by a large margin.
Consequences of using a business email account for sending transactional email
Even after reading about the disadvantages, you might say, "But it’s been working for me." This might be true now, but it might not continue to be true. One wrong turn or mishap can be enough to bring it all down. The consequences are merely a cascading effect that could lead to you losing customers. Here is a series of events that could occur.
Negative impact on sender reputation
Say you use business email services for transactional email sending. With no automated monitoring of the feedback loop and a lack of features to take immediate action to rectify it—like suppression lists—the reputation of the domain and the IP used for sending will be negatively impacted. In turn, it will lead to you acquiring a bad sender reputation.
Poor deliverability
A bad sender reputation will lead to poor deliverability of both your transactional emails and your business emails. Not only will you be unable to deliver important information to your customers, but even a message to a client could end up in a spam folder, leaving you unable to communicate efficiently.
Loss of customer trust
No one likes waiting for their OTP emails or password reset emails, and they want immediate confirmation of the transaction they’ve placed. No one trusts a business that’s unable to deliver these critical emails to their customers’ inboxes. Poor delivery of transactional emails could lead to your customers losing trust in your business or being skeptical of the authenticity of your business. This will directly lead to your brand reputation taking a hit.
Difficulty in customer retention
Once the customer has lost trust in your brand, there’s no reason why they would come back to your business. Poor email delivery and loss of trust will lead to you losing customers eventually. Delivering transactional emails immediately and accurately can make or break your customer retention strategy.
Blocking of business emails
As previously mentioned, receiving bulk or high-volume emails from business email service IPs can be considered suspicious. This, in combination with regularly exceeding the sending limit set by your provider, can disrupt not only your transactional email sending, but also your essential business communication with customers and colleagues.
Blacklisting
Along with being treated as suspicious, high volume emails from business email service IPs can also be perceived as dangerous by some recipient servers. It could lead to you being blacklisted by recipient services, and this brings all your emailing to a halt.
How do I pick the right service?
For high-volume emails like marketing and transactional emails, it is best to pick services that have been built for these specific emails. When it comes to transactional emails, especially, it is advisable to keep them isolated even from other bulk emails like marketing emails.
While both marketing email services and transactional email services can handle high-volume emails, marketing emails are more likely to be marked as spam or trigger spam filters. When a marketing email gets classified as spam, more often than not, transactional emails sent from the same service or sender will be treated as spam too. With transactional emails carrying crucial information that the user is expecting, delays or poor delivery is simply not an option. Picking a dedicated transactional email service can help avoid this risk and ensure good deliverability for your important transactional emails.
Choosing your transactional email service
A good transactional email service has to tick four boxes, mainly:
- Inbox placement
- Fast delivery
- Security-first approach
- Affordable pricing
Inbox placement
Imagine having to ask your customer to look for important transactional emails like a password reset email in the spam folder. This can make the customer question your business's professionalism and trustworthiness. So while picking a transactional email service, it is essential to choose one that can help with delivering your emails to inboxes and not spam folders. This can be achieved by picking a dedicated transactional email service over a service that handles both marketing and transactional emails.
For example, Zoho ZeptoMail does not allow marketing emails to be sent from our service. By eliminating marketing emails that could be marked as spam, we ensure a great sender reputation and good inbox placement for your emails.
Fast delivery
Unlike all other emails, your customers are waiting to receive their transactional emails since these emails are user triggered. Making them wait for their time-sensitive and important emails or delivering an OTP email after time expires can frustrate the customer and lead to poor customer experiences and high attrition. So pick a transactional email service that has good delivery speed.
At Zoho ZeptoMail, since our sole focus has been transactional email sending, our delivery is optimized for speed, unlike other services that also send marketing emails whose delivery is optimized for maximum engagement.
Security-first approach
Transactional emails carry crucial and confidential information to the customers. The security and privacy of these emails are of the utmost importance. Ensure that the email service you pick has a security-first approach and has multiple security measures in place to protect your emails.
Affordable pricing
The best pricing is the one that works for your business. A transactional email service with good deliverability should not mean hefty monthly plans and add-ons. At ZeptoMail, you get to tick all these boxes for a very reasonable price and a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing plan. We work on a credit system where you buy credits only when you want to, which means you're not locked into monthly plans and email blocks.
Wrapping up
Transactional emails are crucial for a business, and accurate delivery of these emails can be the difference between growing your business or losing your customers. The best way to ensure it’s handled well is to employ a transactional email service that’s optimized and built specifically for this.
Zoho ZeptoMail is an email service handcrafted for transactional email sending. Unlike most of our competitors, we don’t allow marketing emails to be sent from our platform. This exclusive focus on transactional emails allows us to ensure great inbox placement and delivery without any delays.