Timing Matters: When to Send Transactional Emails

Figuring out the right time to send transactional emails seems like a no-brainer: after the user’s transactional action.

But the further you get away from the transaction itself, the more unclear the right timing is for sending a transactional email.

Today, we’ll cover four examples of when to send transactional emails:

• order confirmation emails
• password reset emails
• dunning emails

Let’s dig in.

Transactional Timing Cases: ASAP

You know you don’t want to leave someone waiting for more than a few minutes to get a password reset email — or wondering where their order confirmation is. The timing for sending these transactional emails is very straightforward — triggered upon your customer’s purchase or request.

Timing suggestion: Immediately upon trigger

Order confirmation email timing

After completing a purchase, the customer needs an order confirmation email ASAP. Most people expect this email to come through within minutes.

Here’s an example from outdoor gear outlet Huckberry:

Starting out with a prominent “Thanks”, this email confirms all the basic information about the order. Extra details, like a delivery window, and setting up expectations for the shipping confirmation to follow, are a nice touch to the whole Huckberry purchase experience.

The confirmation email is your opportunity to provide your customer with personal confidence about the transaction that just occurred — and build a nugget of trust in your brand. That all relies on the email coming through, right after purchase.

Password reset email timing

Your password reset email also needs to go out immediately. Otherwise, your customers can’t log in right when they want to.

Forgetting a password is already annoying and disruptive, and any delay in getting back on track will increase a customer’s frustration. For the business, this event is make-or-break in terms of losing meaningful engagement and trust in your product. Plus, forgetting passwords happens often (the average customer has 37 password reset emails in their inbox at any time, according to research from Dashlane).

It’s one of the most important transactional emails people receive as well as the most straightforward. Send immediately with a simple, clear call to action. Here’s a great password reset email example from Slack — it’s branded and arrives immediately upon requesting a reset:

You can send these emails in Customer.io by setting up an Event Triggered Campaign to send out a single message that’s triggered upon a reset request by the user.

Transactional Timing Cases: It Depends

Dunning email timing

Dunning emails ensure you’ll be paid for the products or services that you provided and also significantly reduce customer churn. These emails are especially relevant to recurring revenue businesses.

The most basic dunning email you can send is a simple notification and request to update billing information, triggered by a failed credit card charge.

Beyond this, the timing of pre-dunning and dunning messages can depend on many factors, including:

• whether your payment platforms already automatically updates expiration dates on card
• how your payments platform retries a card
• how many messages you want to send
• the cost to your business of a delinquent customer
• your billing cycles

First, let’s talk about payment platforms. According to Churnbuster, many payments providers have automatic card updates, which are “already effective for over 70% of cards that look like they’re going to expire.” Also the timing of automatic retries can vary depending on your setup — you might specify the rules or use features like Stripe’s Smart Retries.

Why does all that matter? These details can determine whether you should send pre-dunning emails at all, or what the timing of your follow-up messages should be after an unsuccessful charge. (Consider all your possibilities before you send transactional emails.)

Here at Customer.io, we use Stripe as our payment platform and it’s connected with our Customer.io account. Since Stripe automatically updates outdated cards, we don’t send pre-dunning emails. And the timing of post-dunning emails can vary depending on Stripe’s smart retry schedule. We created a workflow in which a customer may get up to 4 messages about their failed payment, with the last message providing a warning about account cancellation if the customer doesn’t take action.

Dunning timing sequence for Person A

Dunning timing sequence for Person B

Timing suggestion:
Create several emails, giving customers multiple chances to solve credit card issues. But keep those payment platform capabilities in mind so you’re not sending more emails than necessary. Here’s a basic schedule you can use as a starting point:

• Pre-dunning 1: Customer enters the delinquency segment with one month until expiry and triggers email.
• Pre-dunning 2: The next email is triggered a week before expiry.
• Dunning: The third email will arrive on the day of expiry or charge failure.
• Post-dunning: A final email is sent a few days after expiry or charge failure (with a warning that the customer’s account will be deactivated due to credit card failure).

Here’s a real-world example from my inbox. The credit card filed with my internet provider for automatic billing was going to expire at the end of February, and here’s when I received the dunning messages:

• Pre-dunning email 1: Feb. 2
• Pre-dunning email 2: Feb. 23
• Dunning email: Mar. 7

Here’s that last dunning email, which urges me to update the expiration date on my card so I keep getting internet service.

If nonpayment means that you’re going to delete or block access to an account, it’s helpful to provide a window for when that will happen. Take this example from Help Scout, which is sent seven days before an account is deleted for nonpayment, with directions on how to keep the account open.

When Do You Send Transactional Emails?

Your transactional email timing works best when you know the purpose of each message and how your emails get triggered from what data. Let us know what works for you in the comments!