The First Transactional Email Audit
How I tracked down 150 emails with 20 million monthly sends that no one maintained or measured and organized them in one place
Snapshot
Company: Intuit Mailchimp
Role: Principal Marketing Manager, Lifecycle: Customer Notifications
Scope: Inventoried every platform-triggered transactional email, documented content and metadata across multiple internal systems, analyzed (very limited) performance; classified and mapped key emails to the customer lifecycle; and translated the findings into a strategic vision for the future of non-promotional email
By the numbers:
~150 platform-triggered transactional emails inventoried
1 transactional journey map to layer on top of the lifecycle marketing map to show key emails that commonly sent in a 30-day period
1 engineering priority shifted: measuring clicks
1 strategic vision deck for the future of non-promotional emails
The Challenge: Make the Invisible Visible
Transactional emails are the messages a company sends automatically, like password resets, billing receipts, and account warnings. At Mailchimp, about 150 of them had accumulated in the codebase over nearly two decades built by product or engineering teams on an as-needed basis.
Only a few engineers had ever seen them in one place. The emails lived in Mailchimp’s codebase, nearly inaccessible to anyone outside of engineering.
This mattered because transactional emails are part of the customer experience. If a customer isn’t opted in to receive marketing emails, transactional emails make up their brand experience outside of the app.
Collectively these emails reached customers about 20 million times a month, without any of the strategy, standards, or measurement marketing programs get.
I decided to document these emails, initially as a passion project to get a better understanding of the customer experience.
The Work
Building the inventory, email by email
There was no easy export button for the emails. Assembling the audit meant cross-referencing multiple internal systems and reconciling emails that existed in one system but not another.
The audit included lots of data, including subject line, copy, open rates, and delivery metrics for easy reference.
Classifying the customer experience
I tagged every email by category and by tone.
Then I mapped key emails to the customer lifecycle, producing the company's first complete view of the main emails a customer may receive in a 30-day period—from signup confirmation through daily activity notifications, billing estimates, and account warnings.
Lifecycle marketing emails had always been reviewed in isolation; this was the first time anyone could see the full experience.
What the audit surfaced
The primary finding is that there was no obvious strategy to these emails. Tonally, we sounded way more dire and robotic than we should at some very stressful moments for customers. But, more telling, some of the largest-volume emails had never been considered as customer touch points and had been left untouched for years. (This inspired the Weekly Insights Email project in this portfolio.)
Plus, click tracking—which is a better indicator of engagement than open rate—wasn’t tracked at all.
Turning findings into an engineering priority
The lack of click tracking became one of the audit's most immediate wins, especially at a time when open rates were becoming inflated. I made the case to engineering to prioritize click tracking for transactional email and they did. That added information would help create data-informed decisions when prioritizing which transactional emails to optimize.
From Audit to Strategy
The audit became the base for a vision I authored for non-promotional email as a strategic channel. My argument: these emails reach customers regardless of marketing opt-in, are often the only touch point outside the product, and can include marketing messaging in some cases. My vision was to unify the tools we used for marketing and transactional emails, create templates that could be updated without engineers, include as much personalization and marketing content as was legally allowed, and add in actual performance insight (like click-through rates).
I presented my vision to marketing and communications leaders, and worked with our creative team to identify which emails to tackle first. Unfortunately, Mailchimp became less of a focus for the company, and we weren’t able to launch any of this work before I left the company. Nevertheless, I’ll die on the hill that companies should give more love and attention to their transactional emails!