Does anyone have helpful articles or case studies that describe the difference between marketing, operational and transactional emails? I'm currently helping define this for my company as we migrate to Braze from other platforms and decide what should/shouldn't live in Braze - would be really helpful to get an example of how others have defined this for their company.
Hey juliettec1230 - the way I think about these 3 is:
Marketing: Used to send promotions and special offers - usually sent en masse to customers.
*Operational: Used to communicate critical information to your customers - can be sent to individuals or en masse.
*Transactional: Used to communication information that relates to a purchase/transaction - sent to individuals.
*In practice I group operational and transactional together as they both bypass subscription preferences, whereas marketing requires explicit consent/opt-in.
ConorIrvine is bang-on with my logic as well.
The biggest distinction is often asking yourself "Does the user REALLY need to see this to have a functional experience?" For payment, downtime, and password reset, yes, but for most other things, likely not. As marketers, we run the risk of wanting to say yes way more than is required. We love to think people want to see everything 😆.
Out of curiosity, you noted that you are deciding what should and shouldn't live in Braze. Is there a reason it can't all live in Braze or are you using a separate transactional platform? I have been in businesses that have them split and others that have been all in Braze, but I have had no issue having all emails in Braze if that helps.
DavidO Thank you for your answer and for that question. We actually have been discussing this more internally and I think we are now realizing that everything CAN live in Braze - we just have so many transactional emails, it's a beast to wrap our heads around how our small team can support it! Plus, I myself have not used API-triggered campaigns, which seems key for setting up a lot of our transactional sends. Have you built any API-triggered?
Hi juliettec1230 ,
I saw your other post on API/API-Triggered Emails. A very short answer is that all emails, transactional or not, can be set up using the action-based delivery, and I actually recommend it that way.
API-Triggered is definitely possible, but it will require your engineers to be involved to set up and launch those campaigns.
This is a great topic that causes lots of confusion; I'm happy to write some more thoughts and send them your way!
I would appreciate it! The main reason we're exploring it is to be cognizant of using too many data points for high volume transactional emails (like reminder emails for an upcoming event someone RSVP'd to). if you have any POV on this, let me know!
