The document outlines best practices for transactional emails, emphasizing design, authentication, and user engagement. Key recommendations include using recognizable from names, avoiding no-reply addresses, and personalizing content for improved user experience. Additionally, it suggests monitoring email performance metrics to refine strategies and enhance delivery rates.

1. Transactional
Email Best
Practices

2. Think of transactional email as another
interface to your software, and give it all of
the attention that you’d give to designing
any other interaction.

3. From & No-reply
Addresses
1

4. Glossary📕
from address and name
The combination of the email address and name
that you’d see in your inbox. While a name is
optional, we recommend including one to aid
recognition.
ex.
Postmark Team <team@postmarkapp.com>
from name from address

5. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
For the From Name, use the product or
company name that will be most familiar
to the recipient.
1. A recognizable From Name can increase open rates.
2. Without an explicit name the email client will simply
display the email address or the initial portion of it.

6. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
“I’ve never heard of this company. Must be spam.”

7. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Avoid redundancy in the From name and
the subject line.
1. Redundancy wastes characters when good content can
dramatically improve open rates.

8. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
Wasted & Redundant Characters

9. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Keep names concise and human-friendly.
1. Longer names can be cut off in previews.
2. Human-friendly names can increase open rates.

10. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
“Who? What?”

11. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Be cautious using end user names as the
From Name for an email. Use “Jane via
Application” or “Jane (Application)” instead.
1. Many email clients will automatically add senders to the address
book if the recipient replies to an email. If the name is “Jane
Doe” they may end up with an entry like “Jane Doe
<support@application.com>" in their address book, and that
can lead to confusion down the road.
2. Since the email isn’t actually from that person, but only triggered
by that person, including the product name helps provide
valuable context.

12. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
If they reply to this message, chances are they’ll get a new contact added to their
address book, but it will be using the product’s email address rather than Jane’s.

13. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Pay attention to avatars associated with
your email address through Google,
Gravatar, etc.
1. Avatars can help aid recognition and increase open rates
with email clients that use them.
2. Avatars help validate the authenticity of the sender now
that Gmail is using avatars to display warning graphics for
unauthenticated email addresses.
3. People sometimes still have old irrelevant or inappropriate
avatars associated with email addresses.

14. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
Gmail will replace avatars with this symbol to
warn recipients when sender authentication fails.

15. Subject Lines
& Pre-headers
2

16. Glossary📕
preheader
A short text summary of the email included at
the beginning of the body so that it’s visible
in the email client’s preview.

17. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Ensure subject lines are uniquely
identifiable for each email.
1. Searching for a specific email is difficult when all subject
lines are exactly the same.
2. Unique subject lines help recipients more quickly identify
and understand the significance of an email against other
related emails.

18. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
Which order?

19. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Use pre-headers to complement subject
lines with additional context.
1. Searching for a specific email is difficult when all subject
lines are exactly the same.
2. Unique subject lines help recipients more quickly identify
and understand the significance of an email against other
related emails.

20. Do this…
Not this…
👍
👎
The subject and initial content are
redundant because there’s no pre-header.
Adding a barely noticeable pre-header
to the email improves the usefulness
of the preview content.

21. Recipients & Replies
3

22. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Use To for primary recipients and Cc for
secondary recipients.
1. Providers users more filtering options when organizing
their emails.
2. Helps people more quickly understand the context for the
notification.

23. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Avoid ‘no-reply’ addresses.
1. If people can’t reply, it decreases engagement which can
affect delivery.
2. Some data indicates that a ‘no-reply’ directly affects delivery
speed and treatment.
3. People may reply without noticing and expect a response of
some sort.
4. It’s simply not customer-friendly.

24. Unless your industry or business has legal or security reasons for
not allowing replies, noreply addresses should be avoided. Modern
transactional email providers can parse and process replies back
into your system so that replies won’t get lost in an inbox.
Learn more about the ease of processing inbound emails and
incorporating the replies into your system programatically.

25. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Design emails to accept replies via a
monitored reply-to address or inbound
email parsing and receiving.
1. Accepting replies can increase engagement and, as a
result, delivery rates and speeds.
2. Email notifications become a two-way interaction with
recipients and act as an extension of your application.
3. It’s more customer-friendly than a no-reply address.

26. Authentication & Domains
4

27. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Send transactional or application emails
from a different domain or subdomain
than bulk promotional emails.
1. Domain reputation is an increasingly important trust signal for
inbox providers. Bulk promotional emails tend to have lower
engagement and higher incidents of spam complaints. By using
a different domain or subdomain, you help ensure that your
company’s bulk promotional sending doesn’t affect the
reputation of your application emails.
2. Decoupling transactional and bulk sending makes it easier to
use different providers that specialize in one or the other.

28. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Authenticate with SPF
1. Helps inbox providers identify spoofed email.

29. Glossary📕
SPF
Sender Policy Framework
An open standard so that the owner of a domain
can provide a public list of approved senders.
Want to know more about SPF? We have a complete guide on
what it is and how it works:
SPF: Protect your domain from email spoofing

30. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Authenticate with DKIM
1. Ensures emails aren’t altered in transit between sending
and receiving mail servers.

31. Glossary📕
DKIM
DomainKeys Identified Mail
An email security standard designed to make
sure messages weren’t altered in transit
between the sending and recipient servers.
Want to know more about DKIM? We have a complete guide on
what it is and how it works:
DKIM: Protect your domain from email forging

32. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Authenticate with DMARC
1. Helps to fight phishing by enabling senders to explicitly
tell receiving mail servers how to handle un-aligned email
messages.

33. Glossary📕
DMARC
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting
& Conformance
A standard that prevents spammers from using
your domain to send email without your
permission — also known as spoofing.
Want to know more about DMARC? We have a complete guide on
what it is and how it works:
DMARC: Monitor & secure your email delivery

34. Design & Formatting
5

35. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Include plain-text equivalents with
emails.
1. Some inbox providers use the presence of a similar plain
text equivalent as a trust signal.
2. It increases accessibility and readability of emails.
3. Some recipients prefer plain text to minimize bandwidth.

36. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Ensure that the plain-text versions are
well-formatted and readable.
1. Separating long stretches of text into multiple paragraphs
enhances readability.
2. Using dividers and headers can help add hierarchy to the
email for increased readability.
3. Putting links on their own line can minimize the chances of
the links being broken or not working.

37. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Design for mobile.
1. 56% of email is opened on mobile devices now.
2. Different demographics may have different percentages,
but it’s unlikely that it’s safe to ignore mobile.
3. Designing emails for mobile clients is becoming less of a
hassle.

38. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Adjust design of emails based on
frequency and context of each email.
1. Frequent notifications should put content front-end-center
and keep branding to a minimum or only include branding
elements at the end.
2. System-based messages like password resets can be more
focused on branding, but the activity the user needs to
perform should always be the most important element.

39. Do this… Not this…👍 👎
For a comment notification,
branding is subtle and secondary
so the content is treated with
the most importance.
With this approach, the content is secondary
to the branding even through the branding
provides no value to the recipient.

40. Content & Purpose
6

41. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Always clearly identify the reason a
recipient is receiving the message.
1. The asynchronous nature of email
2. Relative dates can be used, but it’s helpful to include
absolute dates for easy reference.

42. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Use personalization where possible.
Personalization isn’t just about mail-merging their name into
the email.
1. Streamlining or otherwise improving emails based on user
information or context can drastically improve their
experience.
2. Information can be included in query strings to customize
the subsequent landing pages after following links from an
email.

43. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Use absolute dates and times.
1. There’s no guarantee when someone will receive or open an
email. Relative dates like “Yesterday” or “Next week” become
ambiguous when the email is read at a different time.
2. Relative dates can be used, but it’s helpful to include absolute
dates for easy reference.
3. Include dates and times sparingly when they’re redundant
with the email’s timestamp.

44. Subscription
Management
7

45. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Consider adding one-click unsubscribe
or “send fewer emails” to all non-
essential emails even if not required.
1. Managing emails can be tedious.The easier it is for a
recipient to adjust their delivery preferences, the less
likely it is that a message will be reported as spam.

46. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Include a direct link to manage
subscription and notification preferences
for all application emails.
1. Managing emails can be tedious.The easier it is for a
recipient to adjust their delivery preferences, the less
likely it is that a message will be reported as spam.
2. Proactively anticipating needs and offering alternatives
can reduce noise, decrease unopened emails, and increase
engagement. All of these can help improve reputation and
delivery rates and speeds.

47. Monitoring & Adjusting
8

48. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Pay attention to delivery and open rates
for groups of email.
1. If you notice that some categories of application email
aren’t being opened or have low engagement, you can
revisit the email to make improvements.

49. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Monitor open, click, bounce, and spam
rates.
1. Even small changes in the content or design of an email
can have unintended consequences. By staying on top of
your statistics, you can proactively work to address
problems before they become widespread.

50. Best Practice
Why does it matter?
☼
❓
Use open rates to improve From names
and address, subjects, and pre-headers.
1. Open rates are closely tied to the quality of your message
meta data. By monitoring open rates, you can identify easy
opportunities to improve your emails.

51. https://postmarkapp.com/guides/transactional-email-best-practices
Adapted from: