Transactional Emails

[S_D1]

We are a B2B company.

I would like to know how other large B2B companies manage transactional emails for product announcements and operational updates. Is it through Marketo or companies are using other automation tools?

Thanks!

[Darshil_Shah1]

I work for a fortune 500 company in managing their Marketo Instance, they Prefer housing and managing operational emails in the marketo only like other marketing emails, we use a naming convention across the instance to not to confuse the operational emails with marketing emails. (EM-OPER  for operational emails and EM-MKT for normal marketing  emails). IMO keeping operational emails in some other platform is really gonna make things difficult to maintain.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I differ with Darshil here because there isn't one broad answer: it depends on the subtype of "operational" email.

If you're sending platform downtime announcements to app users, for example, I would definitely not send those via Marketo. You can't have those emails rejected or lost in spam folders.

If you're sending upcoming platform updates to developers, those would be comparatively safe.

New product announcements may be marketing emails that happen to be sent to customers only (as opposed to operational), or they might be more mission-critical.

Perhaps you can tell us more about the distinct content of those emails.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Thanks for the broader perspective! I would definitely  keep this in mind next time I’m working on an operational email! 🙂

As Sanford said if you can help us with your use-case/content type of your operational email we can help you suggesting the optimum platform for your operational email.

[S_D1]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman ,

We are evaluating Marketo only for transactional emails. I read following blog and was wondering how we can implement this. Do we need to get in touch with Marketo admin or our assigned Marketo's Customer Success Manager.

https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Marketo-Whisperer-Blogs/Sending-Transactional-Emails-with-the-Marketo-...

[Phillip_Wild]

We use SendGrid (populating templates via API) for our transactional sends related to bookings (we are a travel company).

I think regardless of whether you send via Marketo for both or not, you would want to strongly consider using two different IPs. Those transactional messages are critical for us to ensure that our passengers turn up in the right city for the right trip at the right time, so they must reach the inbox 🙂

[S_D1]

Hi @Phillip_Wild ,

Could you please explain why your company is using SendGrid over other automation tools? 

What do you mean by "populating templates via API"?

[Phillip_Wild]

It wasn't a decision that explicitly I was involved in, but SendGrid (now owned by Twilio) basically runs a business which is heavily based on transactional email.

This means that they have good support for functionality such as - dynamic templates populated via API. So we build out a template in SendGrid with lots of placeholders, and then populate it via their API for each customer, and send the email. Sure, Marketo can do this, but it's not quite as simple as it is with SendGrid.

This also makes it easier to separate transctional emails from marketing emails, since they come from different systems. You can still push the send activities into Marketo / your CRM for visibility.