Email best practices
The debate played out daily across Slack channels and meeting rooms of today’s fastest-growing technology companies. In the red corner, the marketing team, celebrating a successful campaign, driving engagement with a feature-rich platform designed for beautiful newsletters and sophisticated email automation.
In the blue corner, the development team, diligently maintaining the application’s core transactional email, sending critical notifications like password resets and welcome messages using a powerful but separate email API for marketing and transactional sends.
Often these two essential functions operate in parallel universes. While they both serve the same customer, their tools, workflows, and data can be completely disconnected. This separation is a strategic liability that introduces significant and costly separate marketing and transactional email problems.
And for too long, businesses have felt forced to make an impossible choice: Do you invest in a platform that empowers your marketers to create rich experiences, or the one that gives your developers the raw power and reliability they need?
The answer is, and must be, neither. Instead, product-led growth (PLG) teams must seek out an all-in-one email platform that serves both needs.
Running two disparate email systems might seem manageable on the surface, but the hidden costs accumulate quitely in the backgroung, sabotaging your growth, brand, and efficiency from within. These pains are felt most acutely by the very teams tasked with driving the business forward, creating friction where there should be flow.
Your customers don’t see departments, they see one brand. They don’t care if one email is “marketing” and another is “transactional.” To them, it’s all a single conversation with your company. When your email strategy is divided, that conversation becomes disconnected and the experience detoriates rapidly.
Imagine a prospective user, impressed by a sophisticated marketing email showcasing your product’s elegant UI. Intrigued, they sign up for a trial but mistyped their password on the second login. They click the “Forgot Password” link and are met with a plain-text, unbranded email that looks like it was sent from a 1990s server. The trust and excitement built by the marketing team instantly evaporate, replaced by confusion and a subtle sense of disappointment.
This is where brand trust dies a death by a thousand cuts. Every inconsistent touchpoint, whether that be a stark payment receipt, a generic shipping notification or an unhelpful error message, widens the crack in your customer journey mapping. Achieving a truly consistent brand experience email becomes impossible. In the user’s mind, if a company can’t even get its own emails to look the same, can they really trust the product to be seamless and reliable? The simple act to combine transactional and marketing email under one brand identity is a foundational step that siloed systems make impossible to execute.
In a competitive, PLG world, speed and the ability to iterate are paramount. Your product’s communication strategy is a key lever for growth, guiding users toward activation and engagement. For the Product or Growth Lead, however, a divided email strategy is a constant source of friction, encapsulated by the dreaded developer bottleneck email creates.
Consider a Growth Manager who, after analyzing user behavior, devises a brilliant five-part automated sequence for user onboarding. The goal is to guide new users through key activation steps within their first week. The copy is compelling, the email designs are engaging, but the project hits a wall. The welcome emails are hard-coded into the application and sent via a basic transactional service that the marketing team can’t touch.
The request goes into the development backlog, where it sits for weeks, waiting to be prioritized against critical bug fixes and new feature builds. When it finally gets addressed, it’s often a watered-down version of the original vision. The opportunity to quickly A/B test email subject lines or dynamically change content based on user actions is lost. The SaaS email platform that should be a growth accelerator instead becomes a brake, preventing the very experiments that could dramatically improve activation rates and reduce churn.
Pain point #3: Governance nightmares and compliance risks
For any leader overseeing operations, security, or finance, email governance and compliance are non-negotiable, top-tier priorities. A divided email strategy, with its duplicate data stores and lack of a central command center, is a ticking time bomb of operational and legal risk.
With data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA carrying severe financial penalties, a lack of centralized email management is a risk no business can afford. When a user in Europe exercises their “right to be forgotten,” can you confidently ensure their data has been scrubbed from both your marketing platform and your transactional service’s logs? When a customer unsubscribes from a newsletter, are you certain they won’t receive another promotional email triggered from the “transactional” system, leading to a compliance violation and damaging your sender reputation?
Furthermore, this division impacts your core email deliverability. If your transactional system has poor list hygiene, for example, and keeps sending emails to invalid addresses, it can harm your domain’s reputation. Because both systems likely send from the same domain, the marketing team’s carefully crafted campaigns may start landing in spam folders through no fault of their own.
The solution to this strategic chaos is not a better compromise; it’s a new, fundamental model. A unified email platform is built on the simple but powerful principle that all emails are part of the same customer conversation. By bringing them together, you unlock profound, business-altering benefits.
When all your company’s emails originate from a single, centralized platform, you can finally deliver the cohesive and professional brand experience that builds trust and delight. Every touchpoint, from the first marketing welcome to the final invoice, speaks with one voice, looks the part, and reinforces your brand identity.
This is made possible through effective email template management designed for modern, collaborative teams. With Mailjet’s collaborative tools, for instance, teams can build and maintain a shared template gallery. Marketers can design beautiful, on-brand, and mobile-responsive templates for every conceivable scenario – password resets, feature announcements, usage alerts, and payment receipts.
Developers can then pull from this gallery via a simple API call, confident that every email they trigger is polished and perfectly on-brand. The endless debate over transactional vs marketing email branding is settled once and for all.
A unified platform breaks down the wall between product and marketing, permanently eliminating the developer bottleneck.
In this new model, the workflow is reoptimized. Growth Managers can now independently design and launch a complete email automation for a SaaS onboarding sequence using a visual workflow builder. They can A/B test email subject lines for a welcome series or optimize open rates, or test different calls-to-action on a trial expiration nudge to maximize conversions.
The developer’s role becomes more strategic. Instead of being bogged down with requests to code HTML emails, they focus on building a great product. Their responsibility shifts to enabling this new workflow by making simple, clean API calls from the application to trigger the right template at the right time. This API-first approach means innovation cycles shrink from months and weeks to mere hours and days.
For Platform Owners and Operations leaders, a unified platform provides the holy grail – a single pane of glass for the entire email infrastructure. From one central dashboard, you can monitor deliverability metrics across the board, manage user permissions with role-based access control, and maintain a single, global suppression list that guarantees compliance.
This model provides both autonomy and control. Leading platforms are architected for this exact need. Mailjet’s Sub-accounts feature, for example, allows a central administrator to create distinct, sandboxed accounts for different teams, brands, or environments (e.g., development, staging, production). Each team can operate independently with its own templates and sender lists, but the master account owner retains ultimate visibility and control over billing, security, and global compliance rules. This is centralized email management without stifling team agility.
The long-standing debate over transactional vs marketing email platforms is (hopefully after reading this post) a relic of a bygone era. Because unified email platforms flip the script. The strategic advantage they provide in that fostering customer relationships, accelerating product innovation and providing the robust, centralized governance required to scale with unwavering confidence cannot be underestimated.
So, are you ready to break down your email silos and combine transactional and marketing email effectively? See how Mailjet’s all-in-one email platform helps leading SaaS companies deliver a seamless email experience, from the first marketing touchpoint to the last critical notification.
