Transactional emails are automated emails sent to the customer as a direct result of an action they took. For example, a password reset email or a purchase confirmation email.

Transactional emails typically have a high engagement rate because a customer expected the email and is waiting for it. For example, they asked to reset their password, so when you email them the password reset email, they'll immediately open it to use the link to reset their password and log in to their account.

In Performance Insights, you can create a transactional email report to understand your transactional emails and make sure they are performing as you expect.

Use case

You recently updated your password reset email for your users. The new email started going out last week and you want to see how it's performing. You know that a typical transactional email has a high open rate, and you're expecting an open rate between 80-85%.

You create your transactional email report and select "Password reset 2020" as the email name to narrow it down to only that email.

When you create the report, you notice that the open rate is much lower than expected, only 40%. This is extremely low for transactional emails, so you decide to investigate further. When you go back to your email, you realize the subject line for the email has a typo in it -- and because of that, your email looks like it could be spam. You immediately fix the typo and moving forward you know the email will look perfect.

The next week, you refresh the report for just the last week worth of data. You see that the open rate is up to 82%, which is exactly what you expect.

Create a transactional report

Note: If your organization sends only transactional emails, your report is already going to show only transactional emails. Creating this report is only necessary if you send different email types within your organization, such as autoresponder or A/B test emails.